Life After Dinosaurs – A Retrospective Review

[Infinity Blade]

Life After Dinosaurs – A Retrospective Review



NHK, known in English as the Japan Broadcasting Corporation, is a public broadcaster in Japan. It is to Japan what PBS is to U.S. or what BBC is to the UK. And like PBS and BBC, NHK has produced its own paleontology documentaries. In 2010, it aired “The World After Dinosaurs” (it is not NHK’s first paleontology documentary) and in America it aired on the National Geographic Channel as “Life After Dinosaurs”. And I'm now here to review it.

• The intro to this doc is actually pretty neat. The beginning of it is a pretty standard display of various creatures that have existed across deep time, with our own mammalian ancestors heralded as survivors. The last part, however, shows a small mammal running across what will be shown as the title text of this documentary, with a gauntlet of sauropsids (a Gastornis, a Diplocynodon, and lastly a T. rex) trying, but failing, to kill it. No points for guessing who the “protagonists” (read: main subjects) of this documentary are.
• If you’ve ever watched the little known Science Channel documentary “Mammals vs Dinos” (chances are you haven’t), you might notice the setting of the opening scene of this documentary seems…oddly familiar. That’s because it’s taken directly from it (although the narration is obviously different). Mammals vs Dinos is an NHK documentary just like Life After Dinosaurs, and it aired only three years before. As a result, some of the footage and what the talking heads say (in this case Dr. Adrian Hunt) are the same. It’s actually kind of jarring, considering how the CGI is noticeably different. If you think the CGI is mediocre in Life After Dinosaurs, you should see the stuff from Mammals vs Dinos.
• Anyway, Adelobasileus is stated to be the oldest known mammal. Some of you might be scratching your heads and wondering what exactly makes a mammal. Luckily for you, I read some more of “The Rise and Reign of the Mammals” (by Steve Brusatte) the day I started this review to answer this question.
  
  Mammals have been traditionally defined as those synapsids that possess a dentary-squamosal jaw joint. All mammals today have a mandible made of a single piece of bone (the dentary) with a jaw hinge that connects to the upper skull (particularly the squamosal bone). An no, this isn’t some random trait paleontologists picked to define all mammals, this is something all modern mammals today have in common. But most paleontologists today don’t actually use this definition of “mammal”, and instead have moved away from this to a simplified crown group definition. What do I mean by this? Take all ~6,000 mammal species living today (all of them are either within the clades Theria or Montremata), find their last common ancestor and all of the extinct descendants of that common ancestor, and boom, those are your mammals.
  
  The latter is a pretty simple and straightforward definition (an advantage it has), but it doesn’t account for the fact that a lot of the traits mammals today are known for evolved piecemeal over time from earlier synapsids, and must have been shared by their immediate non-crown mammal mammaliaform ancestors (an advantage the former definition has). Does Adelobasileus fit either of these definitions? Well, certainly not the crown mammal definition (so if you were writing a paper about it, you would probably refer to it instead as a non-mammaliaform cynodont). Does it at least clear the jaw joint definition? I don’t know for sure, because Adelobasileus is only known from a single partial skull.
• So we’re shown a few more Triassic animals, particularly Desmatosuchus (same model as in Mammals vs Dinos) and a dicynodont that I assume is Placerias. I don’t remember if this same CG footage or Placerias was shown in Mammals vs Dinos. However, their Placerias model bears a striking resemblance to the WWD version, right down to the color.
• This program also borrows some of the soundtrack from Mammals vs Dinos. The one that plays as we’re shown the Triassic inhabitants is a soft “magical-vibe” track (if that makes ANY sense to you at all) I really like and has been hammered into my brain since I was a child.
• The Coelophysis is, you guessed it, the same. But I also see some footage that I don’t quite remember seeing in Mammals vs Dinos. For instance, there’s a bit where one invades a rock crevice with a nesting couple of Adelobasileus. One escapes, while the other is snatched. In the original Mammals vs Dinos documentary, a Coelophysis snatches one Adelobasileus out in the open.
• One thing you will notice is that Adelobasileus is depicted as an egg-layer. I will give them credit for this; mammaliaforms this early should still have been oviparous.
• Okay, I’m just going to say it: the first five or so minutes of this documentary is just a highly, highly condensed version of Mammals vs Dinos. After the 5:50 mark, we finally get to see a couple models unique to this documentary (including some generic Mesozoic mammal and a newer T. rex model).
• Eomaia (for some reason the narrator pronounces it like “AY-oh-my-uh”) is introduced as an early mammal carrying its young internally instead of laying eggs. Focus is given on placentas. Eomaia seems to be generally considered a eutherian (Bi et al., 2018), so I suppose it fits in with the narrative here. What the doc doesn’t expand upon, however, is that Eomaia also possessed epipubic bones. The only mammals that don’t have these are placentals. Epipubic bones seem to stiffen the body during locomotion (Reilly & White, 2003), but would be disadvantageous for a placental, which need the abdomen to expand during pregnancy (Novacek et al., 1997). What that suggests is that non-placental eutherians like it would have had a short gestation period and accordingly given birth to small, altricial young (Novacek et al., 1997).
• One thing I do like about this part of the documentary is that it actually outlines some advantages and disadvantages in mammalian reproduction, especially when compared to dinosaurs (they focus a bit on feathered dinosaurs here, using Citipati as an example of a brooding dinosaur). A eutherian housed inside its mother’s body has some degree of protection from external factors like the elements and predators. At the same time the pregnant mother may also find it awkward to move around, which would just render it more vulnerable to threats like predation. This makes eutherian reproduction sound like a double-edged sword.
• Citipati is correctly shown as an egg-brooder, but its wing feathers look too simple. I’m not an expert in bird feathers, but the wings of birds are not just a single row of feathers sticking out from the arm like this doc depicts on Citipati.
• Then we get a segment I remembered well even after over a decade. A T. rex is depicted hunting a Kritosaurus at a river bank, only for a Deinosuchus to steal the kill and its buddies to join the feast. I was fascinated by this when I was a pre-teen or teenager, but what do I have to say about it now?
  
  For starters, all of these archosaurs did indeed live in Texas, but Deinosuchus was extinct by the time T. rex and Kritosaurus ever coexisted.
  
  Second, the T. rex is frustratingly incompetent when it hunts. It has the Kritosaurus cornered, but instead of lunging in for the kill it just…roars and stands around menacingly. Had the T. rex not decided to act like a stereotypical pop culture dinosaur, it might have gotten its kill before the giant gatoroid.
  
  However, I find myself oddly fond of this T. rex, at least for the time. The “roar” is kind of this growl-bellow(?) that I honestly don’t think sounds all that bad for an archosaur like this. The binocular vision that T. rex had in real life is pronounced, as is the laterally flared back of the skull and ridges over the eyes. The latter would probably be reconstructed as keratinous lumps, like in say PhP’s rex, but eh, for the time I don’t think this model is too bad. If the model were made today, this, coupled with lips covering the teeth and non-pronated hands would probably be the things corrected for most.
• Cal Orck’o amazes me. It gives me the heebie jeebies just imagining scaling that wall of rock, even if it’s to see dinosaur footprints. They also filmed an SUV parked right on top of it, a bit close to the edge of the cliff. I can imagine how the vehicle was driven there (i.e. via the terrain behind the rock wall), but it looks like it would have been rough terrain. And as someone who’s steadily losing his fear of driving, but is still not particularly fond of it (especially on highways, that still stresses me out quite a bit), I can’t imagine parking that close to the edge of a cliff.
• The track playing at the beginning of the Maastrichtian Cal Orck’o segment is one of the best original tracks from this documentary btw.
• So…Edmontonia. It’s not a South American genus, but this nodosaur is referred to that genus. Ankylosaur trackways have been found from Cal Orck’o as well as in the Puma Group, though (Meyer et al, 2021) (interestingly, Christian Meyer is one of the paleontologists interviewed in this documentary).
• The Saltasaurus’ head looks so ugly to me. I admittedly can’t find much on saltasaurid crania (it would help if most of them preserved parts of their skulls), so I will go off of Scott Hartman’s recent Saltasaurus skeletal (link->). Does it match the look of this program’s Saltasaurus, particularly the head? Mmm, I’d say not quite.
  
  Most people will also tell you they shouldn’t have thumb claws on their front feet (and certainly not small nails like this model seems to have). I’ve given my thoughts on titanosaur thumb claws before (i.e. I don’t think we should dismiss them), but I’ll let you decide.
• The Carnotaurus’ hand isn’t quite right either. While it did have four basic digits (sort of) on each hand, they weren’t really all clawed fingers as the doc shows (this-> is what the hand really looks like). Other than that, though, it actually looks good.
• I’m less forgiving of the Carnotaurus’ approach to hunting here. The thing literally just charges at a nodosaur, and from quite a considerable distance. While even an ambush predator may need to cover some distance to catch its prey, the Carnotaurus doesn’t even stop or show any signs of changing its strategy or intentions once the nodosaur clearly notices it coming. The result is predictable: the attack is completely botched, the nodosaur’s shoulder spikes thwarting the abelisaur’s jaws. I’m surprised it doesn’t have any scratch or puncture marks on its face from that attack.
• The Carnotaurus just stares at the nodosaur for a bit before noticing a juvenile Saltasaurus and making the same mad dash for it. The Saltasaurus runs, but once the Carnotaurus catches up, the former trips, resulting in both animals falling down. Interestingly, the theropod’s strategy here seems to actually be to knock the sauropod over with a hip check. Maybe justified, given the sauropod’s osteoderms.
  
  Anyway, the Saltasaurus seems to get a broken leg from the fall and the Carnotaurus gets up first. It still seems a bit disoriented itself, though, so I’ll excuse the fact that it stalls a bit before killing the Saltasaurus. It’s also interrupted by the rest of the herd (adults) coming in, forcing the Carnotaurus to retreat.
  
  This whole sequence is meant to be a mini-story that gives the viewer an idea of dinosaur diversity and life just before the K-Pg event. It’s pretty simplified (with only three genera of megafaunal dinosaurs), somewhat mix-and-matched (for showing what they call an Edmontonia, with the model being consistent with this), but…I guess I give them credit for showing Maastrichtian South America? Not that it’s a super-duper great or comprehensive overview of that time and place (or that it had time to be).
• The Chicxulub asteroid is depicted hitting Earth. I think the speed with which the asteroid impacts tends to be underestimated in documentaries, including this one. This asteroid hit at a speed of 20 km/second (or 12.4 miles/second): that’s 20 times faster than a bullet.
• Then the dinosaurs die. A Saltasaurus yeeted by the impact shockwave, a nodosaur trudging through the fire, a Carnotaurus literally set on fire (probably the most brutal thing in this doc’s depiction of the extinction), and a few Tyrannosaurus and Kritosaurus drowned by a mega-tsunami they have no hope of outrunning. Then the impact winter, dinosaurs die, mammals survive and rummage through their bones, you know, pretty standard narrative of the K-Pg extinction.
  
  (What most people don’t tell you is that this event nearly killed off mammals too.)
• Brief but insignificant note that the Internet Archive cut of this doc I’m watching skips over a bit where the narrator goes on a bit more about mammalian success as well as an ominous glimpse of Gastornis (or “Diatryma” as this doc calls it).
• We finally cut to the Cenozoic (the doc pulls a WWB by skipping the Paleocene and cutting straight to the Eocene-aged Messel fauna). We are, *checks time stamp*, over halfway through the entire documentary?!?!
  
  Yes, really, a program called “Life After Dinosaurs” takes slightly over half of its run time to start talking about life after dinosaurs.
• The track playing during the Cal Orck’o segment plays again, much to my delight. Some CGI models of Messel mammals are juxtaposed onto the modern site; the Leptictidium looks oddly huge to me (I’m pretty sure it’s oversized; it literally comes up to the paleontologist’s thigh).
  
  Then a Propalaeotherium randomly comes to life, starts running across modern Germany, and magically turns the place back into what it was during the Eocene. That was…a decision.
• Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure Europolemur is just pronounced “Europe-oh-lemur”, not “Euro-POLE-eh-murr” like the narrator says. The genus name literally just means “European lemur”.
• Like so much paleomedia before it, this documentary depicts Gastornis as a predator. Even the model in this program makes it look more like one (particularly the somewhat hooked beak tip and long tarsometatarsi of a running bird). I’ve already explained how this is outdated in my WWB review, so I’m just going to copy-paste it here.
  
  

  And, as we all now realize is the most infamous outdated error in this episode (if not the whole program), it was not a carnivore. Carbon isotope ratios from bone collagen (and even more reliably, tooth enamel) can help us deduce whether or not an animal was carnivorous or herbivorous. Plants have high amounts of the heavy carbon-13 compared to the lighter carbon-12. Organisms prefer to use lighter carbon if possible. Thus, the higher the organism’s trophic niche, the greater the amount of the lighter carbon-12 it will have in its tissues, as the heavier carbon-13 will have been used by organisms lower down on the food chain. Carbon isotope ratios of Gastornis bone overlap greatly with those of contemporaneous herbivorous mammals and the local plants. Only in one studied locality does it overlap at least a bit with what we would expect if it were carnivorous (although, in another location the isotopes of herbivorous mammals overlaps with the expected carnivore isotope range, so I don’t know how much this means). Likewise, the jaw musculature is most similar to that of herbivorous than carnivorous birds (Angst et al., 2014).
  
  It should be noted that although previous arguments for herbivory in Gastornis have been made more on the basis of its anatomy (i.e. the apparent lack of a hooked bill tip, lack of sharp talons on the feet, and non-cursorial leg proportions), the isotope analysis is the most damning piece of evidence there is. A hooked beak, sharp talons, and legs built for speed certainly help a predatory bird. However, one could have made the argument that there are birds without hooked beaks that still eat flesh, that there are predatory birds that don’t make use of strong taloned feet for predation (and that a kick can still be very damaging even without sharp claws), and that Gastornis could have been an ambush predator. So these arguments, though not necessarily weak, would not have disproven carnivorous Gastornis in and of themselves.

• ”Dinosaurs are long gone, but their descendants are on top of the food chain”.
  
  Birds are dinosaurs. Moving on.
• I actually agree with Lawrence Witmer that Gastornis’ legs could deliver an extremely powerful kick. Even if it wasn’t a predator like shown here, it could still have used its legs to kick other animals (e.g. rivals in intraspecific disputes).
• A Diplocynodon snatches a Europolemur on a branch to further demonstrate the narrative that predatory archosaurs still prey on mammals even in the Eocene. Putting aside the Gastornis, Messel was home to Bergisuchus, a terrestrial ziphodont sebecosuchian. If we were making this today, we would (or at least we should) feature this as our sauropsid menace of mammals in the Eocene jungles.
• Without any further explanation than “mammals were continuing to evolve”, we cut to Gastornis’ extinction (one of them struggles to walk and literally just drops dead for unclear reasons as mammalian carnivores come to scavenge its carcass).
  
  I have heard of predation by large carnivorous mammals as a possible reason for the extinction of Gastornis (as well as competition with herbivorous mammals). I’m not 100% sure if I buy this, as Gastornis did live in places where large mammals, both herbivorous potential competitors and carnivorous potential predators, existed, namely North America. Pantodonts were a thing. Mammalian carnivores as large as wolves, like Eoconodon, appeared not even a million years after the end of the Cretaceous.
• Which brings me to another point: this isn’t the first documentary to depict this narrative of mammals still being small and oppressed (i.e. preyed upon) by big mean reptiles (avian or otherwise). Walking with Beasts did it, as did this other obscure documentary that I’m forgetting the name of right now (which also depicted Gastornis as a predator, outcompeted by Hyaenodon). But the truth is more complicated than that.
  
  While it is true that many large-bodied reptiles existed in the Paleocene and Eocene, some even larger than any of today’s (e.g. Titanoboa, Carbonemys, Gastornis, Dentaneosuchus), mammals did not take that long to take Earth’s large-bodied niches. Like I said above, wolf-sized mammals evolved not even a million years after the K-Pg event, and they only ever got bigger from there. Hell, they later even show us some examples of big Eocene mammals, like Asiocoryphodon and Embolotherium. The fact that there happened to be some large sauropsids in some parts of the world doesn’t necessarily mean mammals were still being “suppressed” or anything.
  
  At the same time, however, big sauropsids continued to exist long after the Eocene as well. South America was home to sebecosuchians, giant crocodilians (bigger than any living today), and terror birds, the last of which even migrated to North America and held on as apex predators until a little less than two million years ago. Australia was home to large monitor lizards and crocodiles until the late Pleistocene. New Zealand was a straight up bird world in the Pleistocene until the late Holocene. Crocodilians still achieve respectably large sizes today and prey on large mammals. Ratites can also reach large sizes and coexist comfortably with mammals (our largest bird today literally lives with panthers (Panthera), cheetahs, hyenas, zebras, buffalo, giraffes, and elephants).
  
  In short, big mammals and big sauropsids are not mutually exclusive. Mammals aren’t necessarily being “oppressed” by them like they were back in the Mesozoic, but at the same time birds, crocs, and squamates can clearly hold their own against mammals.
• As the narrator explains Cenozoic mammal radiation in Asia, some examples of large, powerful mammals are shown on screen over the ancient Asian continent. One of them is a f*cking glyptodont. What!?
• Another fossil site with relevant extinct animals walking around it as if it were still their home. I’m…kind of fond of that, actually.
• I am 100% certain this is the only time Asiocoryphodon has ever been shown in any paleomedia ever, and as a CGI model, no less.
• So the Asian mammalian fauna shown here would be most consistent with a late Eocene setting. Embolotherium, Entelodon, and Hyaenodon all existed in Asia during the late Eocene. The only animal shown here that didn’t is Paraceratherium (which they call Indricotherium for some reason), an Oligocene genus. Arguably, you could quickly fix this by making the paracerathere an Urtinotherium instead.
• The Embolotherium surprisingly seems to move more like an elephant than a rhinoceros, like it’s usually depicted. This is a good move made by the program.
• The Hyaenodon model is…mediocre. It really just looks like some generic warg thing. I’ll give them this, though, they’re remarkably durable. Both survive getting butted by the mother Embolotherium as they try to make a meal out of her calf.
• The Paraceratherium’s them is befitting a gigantic, majestic mammal on par with certain giant dinosaurs in size. The scene where it knocks down a tree by pressing on it with its foot is pretty cool too. I still don’t know why they call it Indricotherium, though. The two genera were well known to be synonymous at this point.
• Ah, yes, the “magical vibe” soft track playing again at the wallaby breeding colony, nice.
  
  We’re at a part where it’s now about marsupials vs placentals. Or should I say, metatherians vs eutherians. Thylacosmilus is introduced as a “marsupial” apex predator. Sparassodonts like it were not actually true marsupials, but a sister clade to them.
• Promacrauchenia is portrayed looking like a Macrauchenia clone, which I think is fair as a macraucheniine. A proboscis in Macrauchenia (and I suppose by extension, its relatives), as popularly depicted, has been recently called into question, however (Moyano & Giannini, 2018).
• ”The marsupial doesn’t stand a chance against the claws and razor sharp fangs of Thylacosmilus.”
  
  The “marsupial”? Funny thing is they even correctly identified the Promacrauchenia as placentals earlier.
• That Smilodon model…oof. My god, just about everything is wrong with it. The build is too skinny, the tail is too long (Smilodon had a short tail, more like a bobcat’s), the claws are externally visible and not in their natural protracted position (ironically, that’s one of the things that distinguished it from its supposed metatherian vicar Thylacosmilus), the hind feet even have what appear to be the hallux (a dew claw), and the face looks maybe too much like a modern big cat’s (this image-> by HJ_arts02-> illustrates the differences in head morphology and facial appearance between a machariodont like Smilodon and a modern pantherine like a lion).
• But surely the Thylacosmilus being outcompeted by Smilodon (and just the general South American animals being outcompeted by North American animals) narrative must be true, right? Well, it’s certainly what paleontologists thought for the longest time, and this scene was influential to me as a kid.
  
  But as it turns out, it’s not that simple. As it turns out, a lot of the native South American fauna was already going extinct before the Great American Biotic Interchange. I made a brief post focusing on the native South American predators (primarily phorusrhacids, but I do cover sparassodonts too) about their extinction before the arrival of their placental vicars (link->).
  
  

  On competition with other predators and extinction:
  
  In South America, where phorusrhacids appear to have been most prominent in (there is one species known from Europe, but that's about it, I think), they coexisted with predatory sparassodonts (metatherians that were sister taxa to the marsupials) and terrestrial predatory sebecosuchians. Supposedly, phorusrhacids seem to have outcompeted wolf-like metatherian predators at some point in open environments.[1] Any further information on this would be appreciated. I do not know what happened to the sebecosuchians, which went extinct in the Middle Miocene.
  
  Just in general, the idea that the endemic South American apex predators were all outcompeted by North American arrivals during the Great American Biotic Interchange is not well supported today. As mentioned above, the sebecosuchians were obviously long extinct by this point. Sparassodonts also seem to have become extinct before ever getting the chance to meet their placental ecological counterparts. The last thylacosmilids disappeared >1.5 million years before the appearance of machairodontines (believed to be their placental ecological vicars) in South America; the last hathliacynids went extinct a million years before mustelids and canids show up in South America's fossil record; borhyaenines went extinct no less than 4 million years before canids show up in South America's fossil record, and 5 million years before felids do; and the last decidedly omnivorous "prothylacinines" disappeared 5 million years before ursids show up in South America's fossil record. Only procyonids had a chance of competing with and possibly displacing them.[2][3] A supposed mustelid in the Huayquerian of Argentina (3-4 million years before their previously-thought point of arrival in SA) was later shown to be a didelphimorphian marsupial.[4] The only native terrestrial South American apex predators that indeed definitively lived through the peak of the GABI are, as you've probably guessed given the focus of this thread, the phorusrhacids.
  
  Titanis walleri seems to be the only phorusrhacid known to have migrated to North America. Its earliest record dates to ~5 million years ago in Texas, so phorusrhacids were already settled in North America by that time (they likely island-hopped through Central America and the Caribbean sometime before this).[5] There seem to have been other phorusrhacid species still residing in South America at around this time (e.g. Devincenzia is known from the early Pliocene, and at least a couple mesembriornithines[6]), but there doesn't seem to be any evidence for them migrating to North America, or any later records of them. Titanis' first record in Florida dates to ~2.2 million years ago, but its last record in Florida (and seemingly its last record ever) dates to ~1.8 million years ago. For some reason, the authors of the paper I just now cite postulate that Titanis succumbed to competition with carnivorans, despite the implication from their own evidence that T. walleri coexisted and competed with carnivorans for ~3.2 million years (the book I cited above simply piggybacks off of MacFadden et al.).[5] The latest source I have cited ([6]) seems to at least take this into account. It also mentions a proposal that competition with condors played a role in their extinction (a hypothesis I've never heard of until now), which it also criticizes for the same reasons as with competition with predatory mammals[6]. I'll also bring this up again: terrestrial predatory scavengers are unlikely (as we should all know by now). And if the Late Miocene Argentavis magnificens is any indication, phorusrhacids have already weathered out large soaring scavenging birds.
  
  Currently, T. walleri's fossil record is only known from North America. Taking the currently known fossil record at face value, this would suggest that Titanis didn't just simply meet predatory mammals, it never knew a world without them. If Titanis was living with carnivorans for literally its entire existence, it should be self-evident that carnivorans were not the reason behind its extinction.
  
  Evidence suggests psilopterine phorusrhacids (particularly Psilopterus itself) persisted into the Late Pleistocene (96,040 ± 6,300 years ago).[7] Psilopterus was small, and certainly would have been no apex predator, but whatever competition it might have endured from other small predators that migrated from North America, it seems to have endured it for quite a while.
  
  References:
  
  [1] Antón, M. (2013). Sabertooth. Indiana University Press. p. 61.
  [2] Forasiepi, A. M., Martinelli, A. G., & Goin, F. J. (2007). Revisión taxonómica de Parahyaenodonargentinus Ameghino y sus implicancias en el conocimiento de los grandes mamíferos carnívoros del Mio-Plioceno de América de Sur. Ameghiniana, 44(1), 143-159.
  [3] Forasiepi, A. M. (2009). Osteology of Arctodictis sinclairi (Mammalia, Metatheria, Sparassodonta) and phylogeny of Cenozoic metatherian carnivores from South America. Monografías del Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales, 6, 1-174.
  [4] Prevosti, F. J., & Pardiñas, U. F. (2009). Comment on “The oldest South American Cricetidae (Rodentia) and Mustelidae (Carnivora): Late Miocene faunal turnover in central Argentina and the Great American Biotic Interchange” by DH Verzi and CI Montalvo [Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 267 (2008) 284–291]. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 280(3-4), 543-547.
  [5] MacFadden, B. J., Labs-Hochstein, J., Hulbert Jr, R. C., & Baskin, J. A. (2007). Revised age of the late Neogene terror bird (Titanis) in North America during the Great American Interchange. Geology, 35(2), 123-126.
  [6] Mayr, G. (2016). Avian evolution: the fossil record of birds and its paleobiological significance. John Wiley & Sons. pp 192-193.
  [7] Jones, W., Rinderknecht, A., Alvarenga, H., Montenegro, F., & Ubilla, M. (2018). The last terror birds (Aves, Phorusrhacidae): New evidence from the late Pleistocene of Uruguay. PalZ, 92(2), 365-372.

  
  
  What this means is that, as cool as the idea seems, Thylacosmilus never actually met Smilodon. Also, the GABI is not true proof of the supposed “superiority” of placentals compared to marsupials. I don’t doubt that marsupials are smaller-brained than placentals or that they are more constrained in what they can evolve (e.g. primate level intelligence), but that doesn’t necessarily make them inferior competitors).
• Ending is just a summary of the origin, rise, and diversification of mammals we’ve seen in this doc, then the evolution and reign of humans (which the doc caps off with a “But for how long?” and a shot of the Chicxulub asteroid, implying we humans may go extinct in the future). Not much to say about that.

Final verdict:

This documentary is nostalgic for me. It was one of the pieces of paleomedia I watched soon after my love for paleontology reignited. However, while I wouldn’t say it’s the worst, it’s not anything particularly amazing as a documentary.

My biggest issue is related to the title of the program: Life After Dinosaurs. A large portion of the documentary actually focuses on mammalian evolution alongside dinosaurs during the Mesozoic. While this is a fascinating topic, it takes up slightly over *half of the documentary’s run time*. Only the remainder is actually set in the Cenozoic. If you’re going to advertise your program being about “life after dinosaurs”, you should spend most of your time talking about it. Mammalian evolution during the Mesozoic (as much as it deserves attention) and dinosaurs should not be taking up anywhere near half of its duration. Hell, some of the content about Mesozoic mammals was taken straight from NHK’s earlier documentary Mammals vs Dinos. NHK, you already made a two-part program dedicated to Mesozoic mammal and dinosaur evolution (and only three years before), why do you need to make half of a supposedly Cenozoic-centered documentary a redux of it? Did you just want to take another shot at it? Well, I suppose it was nice seeing your new takes on Mesozoic dinosaurs (e.g. the MvD T. rex vs the LAD T. rex).

Some outdated concepts/narratives about the Cenozoic exist (particularly reptiles generally dominating mammals into the Eocene, as well as native South American fauna being outcompeted by North American invaders), but I suppose for the time it was okay to have? But if you’re watching this doc today, it’s easy to be misled by them. There are also other errors that shouldn’t have been made at the time, like misplaced wildlife (Edmontonia living in South America) or naming (using the name Indricotherium, which has long been known to be a synonym of Paraceratherium). It does some things right, to its credit.

The CGI models that are original to this documentary are a step-up from Mammals vs Dinos, although the CGI is still not anything to write home about. How faithful they are to the true anatomy of the animals they’re supposed to represent depends on the model. Some (like the Carnotaurus and the Edmontonia) look pretty nice, at least for the most part. Others are just bad (like the Hyaenodon and Smilodon).

So overall, I personally mostly watch this for nostalgia and to see what people back then thought of life during and after dinosaurs (and because the inclusion of a few tracks, whether recycled from Mammals vs Dinos or original to this program, is pleasant). Like most paleontology documentaries, especially if they’ve been made a decade prior, I don’t recommend you take everything it says and presents at face value.

[Exalt]

So I just watched it in preparation for finally reading this. I thought it was decent and all. My favorite parts were mainly seeing some of the animals I've not seen, or rarely seen, though perhaps you've been around the block more.

When they said Diatryma I knew I needed to verify things and it turns out that only North American remains were assigned to that genus, so in a sense, it's actually more inaccurate than WWB...

I didn't see the glyptodont, so I was surprised to read it here. Your disapproval of the Hyaenodon and Smilodon models actually surprised me. The former looked fine to me but I'm hardly an expert on what it looks like. do you have anything to show me there?

For Smilodon you somehow managed to get a bunch of criticisms that don't have the ones that I had. The tiger colors on the face grinds my gears, which may have blinded me to the other facial issues, and it seemed to me like the legs were too close to the same length, when the species had taller forelegs than hindlegs, with many depictions giving it a slightly sloped look.

Smilodon and Thylacosmilus meeting was the only anachronism that I caught, i feel like they kind of nailed the sort of bizarreness to the latter, but I'd need to look more at how people actually reconstruct it. Honestly, Smilodon intelligence discussions have gotten weird. Some say that it wasn't intelligent enough to live in social groups, but documentary makers seem to find it to be intelligent enough to wipe out other predators. At least this one uses fossils to show the differences in brain size. Also, I can't view the tweet that was linked.

It felt like the Saltasaurus herd kind of came out of nowhere. It's like they teleported suddenly.

You kind of took the words out of my mouth(or fingers) with the two different ways the resurrected fossils interacted with the modern world. I didn't even notice the car, but yeah, kudos to those individuals who were up for scaling that cliff...

Another note: I liked the diversity of of the scientists shown. Where else have we seen contributions from Mongolia or Bolivia?

I more or less agree with you on the Carnotaurus hunting strategies.

Also, weird that they kind of erased the sebeccids, and any other Cenozoic pseudosuchian lineages that I may have forgotten.

[Infinity Blade]

Nov 4, 2023 23:29:16 GMT 5 Exalt said:

Your disapproval of the Hyaenodon and Smilodon models actually surprised me. The former looked fine to me but I'm hardly an expert on what it looks like. do you have anything to show me there?

Let me give you what I think is a useful tip (might be good for future reference too): when you see a model, look at the body shape and judge for yourself if you think it matches with the real animal. How do you do that? Look at its skeleton, or at least, a reliable reconstruction of its entire skeleton.


So now we know how a Hyaenodon should be shaped. Fairly long tail, big head for its size (bigger than a carnivoran's of equivalent size), fairly short neck, and what I guess you could say is a moderate build.

This is the Hyaenodon from this documentary.


The feet look too small for its size, the head looks too big and fat (as big-headed as Hyaenodon was), there's like, no neck, and the body is maybe too chunky (although, admittedly it has fur).

This is the Hyaenodon from Miracle Planet.


The soft tissue around the belly is way too slim (where does its GI tract go?), the neck doesn't look like it's short enough, the head shape doesn't match with that of the actual skull, the front feet (especially the part touching the ground) look too long (in fact, it looks like its resting its whole front foot on the ground; Hyaenodon was, in fact, digitigrade, so the palms of its front paws were held up, just like a dog's).

Now let's look at the Hyaenodon from Prehistoric Kingdom.


The anatomy of this model is a lot more consistent with the true shape of the animal as we can infer from its skeleton. Short neck? Check. Moderate body build? Check. Head that conforms to the shape and proportional size of the skull? Check. Digitigrade feet and leg proportions that look about right? Check.

Now, I will say this. If this sounds a lot like a "use your best judgement" kind of thing, it's because that's exactly what this is. This is why not everyone will necessarily agree on whether a model "looks" about right. Look at the people arguing over whether or not the LOOP Triceratops or T. rex looked right to see what I mean. However, some models for the same animal are clearly different from each other; the three I showed here most definitely are. So when you have a reasonable idea of how an animal should have looked (or at least probably looked), it gets easier to judge.

When they said Diatryma I knew I needed to verify things and it turns out that only North American remains were assigned to that genus, so in a sense, it's actually more inaccurate than WWB...

Lol you got a point there.

Another note: I liked the diversity of of the scientists shown. Where else have we seen contributions from Mongolia or Bolivia?

Yeah, I guess that's true too. I think that's good because not only are certain time periods represented more than others in documentaries, but so are different people involved in the field. There was an abstract I saw from the most recent SVP that basically found that white men are disproportionately represented in paleontology documentaries (and maybe other media? I don't remember), which isn't really surprising. In this doc, we got to see people from multiple different places working and talking, sometimes from their own part of the world.

[Exalt]

I see, thanks.

Tbh, part of me was surprised that this one connected birds and dinosaurs at all.