Walking with Dinosaurs - A Retrospective Review

[dinosauria101]

Image by the BBC. All images unless stated otherwise are also from the BBC.

I'm not going to mince words: there is too much to say about Walking with Dinosaurs in the simple intro to do it any justice. So I'll keep it simple: this 1999 giant of a palaeodocumentary that has been viewed, reviewed, and providing inspiration infinite times very much deserves its place among our documentary review roster.

However my dear reader, this review isn't just going to be like any of the more 'standard' reviews, if that's what you were expecting. This review will be entirely based on the show's entertainment value - as much as I have talked about entertainment-reviewing it, I have NEVER seen a pure entertainment review, so this should bring something new to the table.

Furthermore, this review will be of a perhaps more different tone than expected. Having watched and reviewed more documentaries than ever before, and having substantial changes of opinion, I will reflect upon this in my review: for example, how my new opinions are reflected or how watching new documentaries makes me appreciate certain things about Walking with Dinosaurs.

Infinity Blade will be writing a more standard review as well, and of course, any other member is welcome to give their thoughts too.

The reviews for each episodes are as follows:

New Blood (this comment)
Time of the Titans (->)
Cruel Sea (->)
Giant of the Skies (->)
Spirits of the Ice Forest (->)

New Blood:



-We begin Walking with Dinosaurs with an intro that can only be described as a combo of opera and primordiality. Deep, somewhat opera-esque music booms as we see a montage of moments of WWD’s animals in various colors and against various backgrounds, beginning with a sunrise and ending with a T. rex roar+thunderstorm.

Although it has nothing on the Walking with Monsters intro in my opinion, I do quite like the variety we are shown, and the way it appropriately advertises WWD’s wide-reaching coverage and epic tone.

-Then, Kenneth Branagh (the narrator*, as well as one of my multiple all time favorite narrators) tells us to imagine traveling back in time. We watch as we speed-shift to clips from Death of a Dynasty, Time of the Titans, Giant of the Skies, Cruel Sea, and finally New Blood, as the stage is set for telling us what WWD is all about.

Way to go, WWD! This sort of intro is enthralling and hooking beyond words in my opinion, and the documentaries that have intros with this premise are markedly memorable for it.

-*A note on Kenneth Branagh as a narrator: watching some David Attenborough documentaries and learning that the initial plan was for David Attenborough to narrate WWD has made me very glad Branagh was the narrator. This comment from the Reddit user TheSalamanderKing21 sums up perfectly the reasons why I am so glad for Branagh's narration:

Now this is definitely a hot take, but I don't like David Attenborough's narration at all. It is difficult to understand what he is saying sometimes, especially his pronunciation of dino names. To me, he sounds like he has cotton balls in his mouth. Kenneth Branagh's narration, on the other hand, is clear and concise, and his voice has a great sense of grandiosity to it.

-That very first New Blood footage is in a 220 million year old harsh, red-soiled desert (filmed in New Caledonia), and it comes with a very ominous, deep, and foreboding yet alluding soundtrack - the first besides the intro of WWD’s awesome, spectacular, masterpiece soundtracks! Bravo Benjamin Bartlett!

We also get the very first of WWD’s infamously awesome practical effects: some dinosaur/reptile skull and a Placerias head animatronic that is foaming at the mouth (my favorite Placerias shot in the episode).

-As we see more Placerias march on, Branagh tells us about how the Triassic has seen many different varieties of ancient reptile come and go. Although this very obviously couldn’t have been a reference thanks to being 6 years before, it definitely reminds me of my favorite WWM episode Clash of Titans (which featured said reptiles) - I very much appreciate this reminder in hindsight of my WWM reviews.

-“But now out of this dry wilderness has appeared something revolutionary. A family of reptiles destined to shape the course of life on Earth for the next 160 million years. These are the first dinosaurs, and this is where our story begins”.

The first of many awe-inspiring quotes Branagh was given in his lines! We are told this as some Coelophysis appears on screen with a primordial yet delicate soundtrack - I looooooove this model with its red, green, yellow-white, etc stripes and patterns, as well as its very ‘small dinosaur-sounding’ sfx.

-More ahead-of-their-time WWM flashbacks! There is another very primordial-sounding piece playing as we get a Placerias grazing at sunrise, while Branagh tells us about how ancient reptiles previously ruling Pangaea for over 50 mya have had their day.

Come to think of it, now that WWM is my GOAT palaeodocumentary and having reviewed it, I take far more note of these flashbacks than ever before. And I can’t help but wonder what flashbacks there would be had WWD been made after WWM.

-Grim evolutionary battles, proving grounds, and supremacy over a strange world! Even more WWM flashbacks in what follows - with of course more primordial music still.

I guess this is pretty appropriate given how evolutionarily focused New Blood is on the progress of early dinosaurs, as well as its overlapping with WWM as far as being Triassic is concerned. Which is a pretty nice thought.

-The wet season has just ended, with the local river being full, but 9 months with no rain is right around the corner - something the Coelophysis are good at surviving thanks to needing very little water.

-Following this, we get a Coelophysis hunting a lungfish, with a slow, building-up, hunt-appropriate soundtrack. She is described by Branagh during the buildup as “light-boned, fast, and beautifully adapted for killing”, which in my opinion hits the bullseye sweet spot of providing a substantial description without dragging on.

2 things I like about the hunt are the fact that we get animatronic Coelophysis head closeups (although I am not a fan of the lungfish-eye-view one because I can’t quite see the patterning I like, we get a standard closeup which more than made up for it), and the fact that the gore of eating the lungfish is not shied away from whatsoever (unlike documentaries such as Prehistoric Planet that are remarkably egregious in this regard).

-As the Coelophysis eats the lungfish, Branagh tells us about the usefulness of special hips and ankles the dinosaurs had together with their lightning-fast reactions making them built to survive, which is a point the Coelophysis then demonstrates perfectly by fleeing nimbly from an oncoming bellow.

-Following that, a bellowing chorus of Placerias are in search of some water: their bellows are very appropriately deep for large, burly beasts and one of my favorite things about them.

As they drink, we get both WWM flashbacks (Branagh reminds us that these are of a rather ancient lineage, with formerly many species despite the endangered Placerias being the only ones) and an animatronic head closeup.

-When they finish their drink, we get an explanation as to their tusk function (mostly for digging up roots, but can be lethal weapons on 2 angry males), and presumably the same Coelophysis female from before targeting the old, weak animals in the herd (although failing in the end).

-Afterwards, we get an introduction to the cynodonts (rightfully described as one of the Triassic’s most bizarre animals). Branagh tells us different things the cynodont has in common between mammals (having fur, living down a burrow, feeding young with milk) and reptiles (having its backbone move side-to-side as it runs).

-For the around-the-burrow-shots, more fabulous animatronics are used, and some very ‘homey’ sound effects from both of the parent cynodonts as they care for their young and carry out domestic chores. Which is all solidified as being homey as Branagh tells us the bond between cynodonts is extraordinarily strong, being animals that pair for life.

-And to end our intro with the cynodonts, Branagh states “In the not-too-distant future, small, furry mammals will evolve from reptiles like these). I find this another WWM flashback considering we went that way with Edaphosaurus/Dimetrodon, the gorgonopsid, and Diictodon/Lystrosaurus.

-Back to the Placerias: they are grazing…..but things turn fearful as the largest land carnivore on Earth (and a distant cousin of the dinosaurs), Postosuchus, appears and attacks one with a bite to the leg.

I find the Postosuchus model, the roars, and the soundtracks all very fearsome (which Branagh’s narration is extremely appropriate to outline in my opinion). Plus I also love the reddish purple color on the model.

-The Placerias gets away initially, but the Postosuchus is easily able to keep pace, and Branagh states ‘Eventually a combination of shock and blood loss defeats the wounded Placerias’, which I found to be a scary thought- as did I find the scene where the Postosuchus digs in.

-We move back to the river: further into the dry season, it is the only place where vegetation remains lush, and animals such as the pterosaur Peteinosaurus are attracted to it. I adore both the CGI model and the animatronic head closeup.

There is also another WWM flashback (Meganeura) showing and telling us about how dragonflies are aerial predators that evolved long before the dinosaurs. Which is followed by the Peteinosaurus eating the dragonflies, and seeing the wings in both the animatronic’s mouth and floating down the river solidifies this scene.

-Also at the river: both the Placerias and the Postosuchus (for which we get more intimidating soundtrack) need to get a drink, although since the Postosuchus has recently eaten her fill, she is of no danger while she drinks.

-“The only creature on the planet she fears is another Postosuchus”.

Really solidifies Postosuchus’ apex predator status in my opinion!

-As the dry season drags on, it gets to the point where smaller rivers are drying out, and the animals do what they can about such hardship. A Peteinosaurus (with more animatronic closeups) risks a cooling bath in one river, while elsewhere the cynodonts (more animatronics!) remain in their burrow throughout the hottest part of the day.

“But no animal here is truly safe”. Indeed Branagh, indeed.

-As the soundtrack turns intimidating, the female Coelophysis (which we get an animatronic head for) and other individuals pick up the scent of the cynodont’s bedding and begin investigating their burrow.

Yet, as Branagh says, it is clear they have never met cynodonts before - a fact solidified by their fleeing when the male cynodont comes out of the burrow to investigate.

-Later on, the Postosuchus needs food once again, but sustained a tusk wound from her last hunt Branagh even forewarns may well prove to be fatal. And its seriousness is evident as she fails to make a kill.

-After the failed hunt, we see the cynodont young developing now: they can start to move about the nest, but they need to remain under their parent’s protection for the next 2 months.

The male prepares to hunt, and a youngster follows him to the end of the burrow…..where he is promptly taken and eaten by a Coelophysis! He has responded too late to his youngster, and although he drives the Coelophysis away once more, they do not go far.

-Throughout this scene we get animatronics of both animals.

-But trouble is brewing. A thirsty male Postosuchus has invaded the wounded female’s territory, and with her being too weak to fight, she must simply surrender her held-for-a-decade home as the male urinates to mark it as his - which is an emotional moment in my opinion.

-More trouble, of course, continues to brew for the cynodonts. The Coelophysis have started to dig them out, forcing them to eat their own young (more animatronics for here) so the dinosaurs are denied food and the adult cynodonts can escape at night.

An even more emotional scene in my opinion, especially considering Branagh describes eating their young as shattering a unique bond. And I like how the night scene is not dark to the point of being unwatchable, unlike documentaries such as Prehistoric Planet.

-Once they escape, the Coelophysis still return thanks to the cynodonts’ smell remaining. It will take time for them to realize their work is in vain.

After the wasted effort, our female finds another lungfish in a dried-up riverbed, but thanks to an increase in Coelophysis numbers, is not alone to eat it for long, She gets into a squabble as several others appear.

-This increase in Coelophysis numbers also causes changes in their behavior. A behavior change for which we get an initially ominous and intimidating soundtrack change to somber.

A flock of them have united to bring down the wounded female Postosuchus (for which some very appropriately gnarly animatronic closeups are given) - although her jaws obviously present a risk, her losing the use of her back legs makes her a viable target.

-However, eventually her strength fails, and the Coelophysis are able to eat her from the inside out because their long snouts can reach under her thick scales - Branagh’s description of them eating her from the inside out fits perfectly.

-After the kill, the drought drags on further than usual, and we get the same dinosaur skull/foaming Placerias animatronic as the intro. The Placerias are forced to migrate elsewhere in search of water, while the Coelophysis are thriving thanks to wasting very little water when they excrete and so being able to better handle the drought.

In the WWD universe, the success of the Coelophysis is eliminating most other reptiles, and with little other prey available they must turn cannibal. We get my favorite Coelophysis animatronic here: an adult with a half-eaten baby in its mouth.

-That night, we see that the cynodonts have survived, and dug another burrow hidden with ferns. The male catches a baby Coelophysis while hunting as it is the only common prey - I view this as a sort of ‘revenge’ for the Coelophysis eating the baby cynodont lol.

-Things only get better from here! Appropriately accompanied by orchestral music, we see that finally the rains are returning and the drought is over.

The female cynodont (animatronic) in her new burrow has laid a new clutch of eggs. This will pay off in their mammalian descendants, but for the next 160 million years, the mammals will be clinging on as small species in a dinosaur-ruled world - and outside that future is already arriving.

-Here we get the end scene for New Blood, which is also my favorite scene! The female Coelophysis and many of her kind have survived the drought, but they are also joined by a herd of huge 4 ton Plateosaurus - which come with extremely majestic opera music and a fabulous color pattern.

They rear up and splash in the river with their massive bulk, and it is very telling.

-"This is the shape of things to come. The age of the dinosaurs has dawned".

A truly phenomenal end statement right there.

Overall Verdict:

What an absolute banger of a beginner episode for entertainment value! The animals' struggle throughout the drought is made well clear throughout substantial storytelling, the narration is perfectly executed, the music is epic and somewhat WWM-esque, the animatronics+sfx give the animals much personality, and the substantial number of WWM flashbacks are incredibly pleasing, to name just a few.
Accompanying this is eye-candy visuals: when watched in 1999-esque low resolution the animals do look quite good, and as I mentioned, I adore so many of the colors. And at the end of the day, the overarching narrative of the days of the dinosaurs beginning couldn't have been driven home better.

So overall, an incredibly enthralling start. Can't wait to review more.

[Infinity Blade]

Walking with Dinosaurs – A Retrospective Review



So…Walking with Dinosaurs is going to be a quarter of a century old once October rolls around this year. The age of this documentary also puts into perspective how old I am at a given time. And I don’t just mean that in a “Oh if you remember this you’re old” kind of way, I mean it literally too. Seriously, I was born just six months before the first episode of Walking with Dinosaurs aired on television.

So…how does it hold up? I’m far from the first person to review this series, and even people from ten or maybe fifteen years ago would have come to the same general conclusion about it that I eventually will. Let’s just say for now that I still LOVE this series to death, but two and a half decades is a loooooonnnngggg time for additional research.

So…you up for a review of the series? Well, even if you’re not, too bad, because I’m doing it anyway! I’m going to be doing the same as I did for the Walking with Beasts review. Every episode I review will also be hyperlinked to this OP under the directory, with the first episode being part of this post.

Directory:

- New Blood (this post)
- Time of the Titans->
- Cruel Sea->
- Giant of the Skies->
- Spirits of the Ice Forest->
- Death of a Dynasty->


New Blood (Arizona, 220 million years ago):

• That rising sun with the orchestral music is iconic in my head. The whole title sequence is, actually, even if that of Walking with Beasts is by far my favorite in this entire trilogy.
• As the footage travels back in time, you can briefly see a windmill appear and disappear, indicating that the animators put in a bit of work into detail, showing human structures that would have come and gone throughout human history. Neat.
• If you pay attention to what Branagh is saying after you’re taken to different points in the Mesozoic (the end of the Cretaceous, the Late Jurassic, and then the Late Triassic, which is when this episode takes place), he says some pretty striking things about the Earth from this time that may very well shock you (especially if you’re not a paleontology-buff). When introducing the general audience into dinosaurs, I think this is a good move.
• I’m not sure how much of a fan I am of the “briefly preview the later episodes of this series” style of introduction in WWD, though. I’m perfectly cool with just starting right at the beginning of the Triassic, or maybe a bit before that during the time of the Permian extinction (the catalyst for the proliferation of reptiles in the Triassic, including dinosaurs).
• ”These are the first dinosaurs…”
  
  Later you’ll be told that dinosaurs actually appeared ten million years before (which they indeed did, maybe even earlier than that, actually).
• So this episode takes place 220 million years ago in Arizona. Throughout the episode, you’ll see this episode depicted as a dry, desert-like environment, albeit with a wet season that looks reasonably lush (like in the beginning and end of the episode). This is presumably based on the Chinle Formation, and looking at what others have said online, this indeed appears to be the case. But what was the Chinle Formation actually like at the time?
  
  I had to use a previous review of WWD to help me out for this one (which I spent some time looking for to no avail, only to find it in a casual search; link->). It actually had quite a lot of rivers and lakes. So much so that there were large fish, metoposaurs, and phytosaurs wandering in those bodies of water. It also had dense vegetation. It was only in the later Owl Rock member of the Chinle Formation (207 Ma) that the environment actually became arid.
• Branagh mentions a group of reptiles that once ruled Earth for 50 million years that, by this point, “…have had their day” while the camera is focused on a lone Placerias grazing. It’s clear that the program is referring to the non-mammalian synapsids that were the dominant large land animals during the Permian. It was common back in the day to refer to these creatures as “mammal-like reptiles” (in fact, this is exactly what I was taught and subsequently called them as a child). Nowadays, we recognize that this term is misleading (as synapsids, they share a more recent common ancestor with us mammals than they do with any true reptile such as lizards, crocodiles, or dinosaurs); terms like proto-mammals or stem-mammals are better. So for the time this isn’t anything egregious, but if we were making this now it would be more truthful to call them proto- or stem-mammals (which may actually add to their intrigue to general audiences).
• The build-up that comes from the music as Branagh narrates the context of the Triassic and dawn of the dinosaurs is pretty nice. We’re shown the star of the episode (and the whole program for that matter) walking through the fern prairies and to a river bank. The close up of the Coelophysis’ face (from an animatronic or puppet) and the shot underwater as its reflection looms over still look pretty good to me even after all these years.
  
  Granted I’m watching this on Internet Archive and it’s not in HD or anything of higher resolution, which masks any appearance of the CGI that betrays its true nature.
• The Coelophysis running at break neck speeds at an off-screen animal bellowing (I’m pretty sure Placerias) is really cool.
• Now, one thing I should mention here is something about the narration. It’s said that dinosaurs have special hips and ankles that allow them to walk perfectly balanced on two legs. While this is (obviously) true, bipedalism was experimented with by other Triassic reptiles. Some of the pseudosuchians of the Triassic were also bipedal (e.g. Effigia, Poposaurus, and another example we’ll meet later on), they just didn’t have the same ankle or hip anatomy with the dinosaurs (you can see this in the two images down below).
  
  
  
  
  Croc ankle on the left, dinosaur ankle on the right.
• So what are some things to note about the Placerias?
  
  The first is a dicynodont thing in general. At the time WWD was made, Placerias was one of the only dicynodonts known from the Late Triassic at all, and it was the only one known from outside of South America. It was also one of the youngest dicynodonts known. This led to the impression that these dicynodonts were on their way to extinction. Since then, we’ve since learned that the last dicynodonts (the stahleckeriids) were actually still widespread across Pangaea, were still diversifying, and they were certainly around until the very end of the Triassic. They even produced their largest form (Lisowicia).
  
  Secondly, although the dicynodonts are so-named for their two tusks, the Late Triassic dicynodonts didn’t always have them. The two prominent sharp things jutting out of Placerias’ face were actually horn-like protrusions from its beak (these are the caniniform processes). Some specimens of Placerias actually did have true tusks, but they were small and stubby, being completely hidden from external view by those same beak horns. Additionally, there are actually two morphs of Placerias, one with those beak horns, the other without. This variation is not correlated with size and appears to be evenly distributed, so it’s thought that this may reflect sexual dimorphism (the suggestion being that the “horned” individuals are males and the “hornless” individuals are females). This was actually known back in the 50s(?), but the publication reporting this was really obscure (and still is, I think), so this will get a pass from me too.
  
  (Interestingly, I think this may imply the same thing for other stahleckeriids. Ischigualastia and Lisowicia are commonly said to lack these elongated caniniform processes, and known specimens do. But maybe those are just “hornless” morphs of their genera.)
  
  (If you want more details about these two things, I suggest you read this nice blog post->)
  
  Third is that..man, these things are slow. With their extremely stocky builds, true, dicynodonts would not have been especially fast or long distance runners. But even massive, relatively slow-moving megaherbivores today are still capable of being surprisingly fast (by our standards). So WWD portraying the Placerias as unable to move beyond a snail’s pace irks me (we’ll see this same issue with another animal later).
• ”For the swift Coelophysis, Placerias are prey.”
  
  You ARE referring to very young Placerias, right?
  
  
  Hartman et al. (2023)
  
  ^E is Coelophysis, L is Placerias. Not sure what business the Coelophysis thinks it has with the Placerias. Just to be an @$$hole? Well, I guess that’s theoretically possible. But prey the Placerias is not to Coelophysis.
• The next animal we meet is an unidentified cynodont. This cynodont is portrayed as a “missing link” between reptiles and mammals (note that we don’t use the term “missing link” all that seriously anymore), weening undeveloped young that hatch out of eggs (seeing the puppets for their young always disgusted me as kid).
  
  The companion book reveals that the cynodont’s appearance is based on Thrinaxodon. The fossils that directly inspired the WWD cynodont were two large teeth attributed to large cynodonts found in the Petrified Forest of the Chinle Formation. However, these teeth were originally attributed to traversodont cynodonts, which were herbivorous animals. This means that at the time, WWD was taking some liberties basing their cynodonts on the predatory Thrinaxodon.
  
  Later in 2005, these teeth were dubbed Kraterokheirodon colberti. But, while WWD can be excused for not reflecting this, a surprising conclusion was reached about these teeth: we don’t know what kind of animal these teeth belonged to! The most we can tell about Kraterokheirodon is that it was an amniote…and that’s about it.
  
  The amniote affinity was suggested by the evidence pointing towards a thecodont tooth implantation (i.e. a tooth root sitting in a socket in the jaw bone). While the teeth do have some traversodont features, they are too different from them to be identified as belonging to the group (Irmis & Parker, 2005). So to this day, we have this mystery creature known only from teeth from the Triassic.
• The male does domestic chores during the day while the mother nurses the young. Cynodonts don’t care for your gender norms! ;p
• Hope you liked this tender scene with its calm, soothing music. Because now it’s time for something to die.
  
  A Placerias herd is attacked by an ambushing Postosuchus, which grabs the leg of one and pulls back. The Placerias actually seem to move a bit faster than usual, but still not especially quickly. And then Branagh properly introduces us to Postosuchus, the lower-pitched Howie scream-roaring* apex predator of the Late Triassic.
  
  *I’m serious, the Postosuchus’ roars in this documentary are the slowed down Howie scream (link->).
• Unlike what was known at the time (and thus depicted in this documentary), Postosuchus doesn’t actually seem to have been “too front heavy” to walk on two legs. It is now believed to have been a biped like the earliest dinosaurs, but unlike them it seems to have been plantigrade.
  
  
  (Skeletal by Scott Hartman)
  
  Of course, there were still quadrupedal “rauisuchians”, just not Postosuchus, which makes it even more interesting IMO.
• I want to take this moment to note an obscure fact about Postosuchus. Both known species (at the time WWD was made, only P. kirkpatricki was known) possessed a single relatively large, laterally compressed, recurved claw on the first digit. This clawed first digit was actually semi-opposable to the rest of the manual digits. The claw was proposed to have been used to hold prey while the jaws dismembered it or to tear open carcasses (Peyer et al., 2008; Weinbaum, 2013). This actually solidifies the comparison with carnivorous dinosaurs, which also used their forelimbs to hold prey.
  
  (Interestingly, the pedal claws were also mediolaterally compressed (Peyer et al., 2008). They also look pointed and recurved. I wouldn’t be surprised if Postosuchus could even rake prey or rivals with its feet.)
• You’re going to notice that the Postosuchus never really moves fast in this documentary. And while Postosuchus still didn’t exactly have cursorial limb proportions, it still would have needed some amount of speed (at least in bursts) to be able to ambush its prey. Its slow speed (along with that of the Placerias) plays into the narrative that these are sluggish creatures destined to be replaced by the swift, athletic dinosaurs one day.
• Peteinosaurus, an early pterosaur, is then featured as a supreme aerial hunter of insects. The previous aerial dominance of insects back in the Paleozoic is alluded to by Branagh, but now they have become the prey. This might actually be true (Bechly, 2004*).
  
  It’s worth noting that Peteinosaurus is actually from Italy. They try to pass off its inclusion here as a visitor from “far and wide”, which…okay, I guess (this is Pangaea, after all). But as TV Tropes notes, some potential alternatives (one “known” from the time, the other not) could include Eudimorphodon (based on tooth and jaw fragments from Texas that may or may not be referable to the genus) or Caelestiventus (only discovered in 2018, so this one’s more of a “if we made WWD today” option).
  
  *This was written by Günter Bechly, an anti-evolution paleontologist. It seems almost strange that he acknowledges evolution as a process in this article. Did he fall off afterwards?
• I’m also skeptical of the idea of these early pterosaurs hunting and catching dragonflies. Dragonflies are notorious for being exceptionally agile fliers.
• The Postosuchus drinks at a waterfall. Btw, it’s not completely true that it’s the largest carnivore on Earth, or that the only creature she has to fear is another Postosuchus. Smilosuchus (a phytosaur) was a thing in this ecosystem.
• …Did I just hear a Torosaurus
• Anyway, it’s months into the dry season. Peteinosaurus is depicted bathing in a drying up river like a bird. A couple Coelophysis (including “our” female) try but fail to raid a cynodont burrow. The female Postosuchus has been recently gored in the thigh by a Placerias, and fails to make a meal. Not that the wound slows her down from her usual snail pace speed, though.
• I just noticed from the cynodont puppet that the upper canine seems to be exposed when the mouth is closed. I think they’re sufficiently short enough to have concealed by lips.
• The male goes out to hunt. One of his pups follows him to the burrow’s edge with the tender cynodont music playing in the background, only for a big mean poopy pants Coelophysis to snatch it.
  
  Even in an episode centered on the underdog first dinosaurs, it’s the animals closest to us that are written to garner our sympathy the most. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, just an observation (a later documentary, Dinosaur Revolution, averts this completely).
• The wounded female Postosuchus loses her territory to an invading male (and it’s really interesting hearing it make that prolonged Howie scream roar).
  
  Now it’s time to address a criticism made of this scene. The male marks his new territory using water (in other words, he urinates). The criticism made was that archosaurs, including modern birds and crocodiles excrete their waste as solid uric acid. They don’t pee, and so an extinct archosaur shouldn’t either*.
  
  Except they do. They totally do.
  
  svpow.com/2016/01/28/yes-folks-birds-and-crocs-can-pee/
  
  In fact, we now have what appears to be a trace fossil made from the jet impact of dinosaur urine hitting the sediment and being preserved (these were associated with theropod and ornithopod footprints) (Souto & Fernandes, 2015).
  
  It is true that archosaurs produce much more of their nitrogenous waste in the form of solid uric acid than liquid urea, just as how we mammals do the reverse (much to my chagrin; some of the lab mice I work with piss A LOT in their cages, forcing me to change them damn near every day). But both compounds are indeed produced by both groups of animals, and so archosaurs can indeed still urinate.
  
  *Michael J. Benton noted even back in 2001 that this can’t be known for certain. Although his statement that birds and crocodiles don’t urinate is erroneous (as I explained above), copious urination is the primitive condition for tetrapods, and may have been retained by some basal archosaurs (Benton, 2001).
• The cynodont burrow situation becomes so bad that at nightfall, the parents are forced to eat their own young. This is the most fûcked up (from our perspective) thing the cynodonts will do in this episode, but it’s still made clear that it’s a necessary thing. After all, they can’t take their young with them. It’s either eat them and leave, or leave them to the dinosaurs. Again, the cynodonts, as our closest relatives in this episode, garner our sympathy (if through a sad moment this time around).
  
  The dinosaurs continue to dig out the burrow in the morning, not knowing at first that the cynodonts have already left. But it’s gonna be alright, because a few minutes from now they’re going to get a much, much bigger meal.
• ”The dinosaurs’ unique serrated teeth”
  
  Huh? Lots more things than dinosaurs had/have serrated teeth. The Postosuchus in this episode has serrated teeth, for one.
  
  Anyway, the female Coelophysis finds and tries to eat a lungfish in a cocoon in a dried up riverbed. The problem is other Coelophysis detect it too and leads to a skirmish. I’m especially a fan of the bird-like behavior they exhibit in this confrontation. They even have a deeper vocalization they make when angrier or under increased stress.
• What was that “much, much bigger meal” I was talking about earlier? Oh yeah, the female Postosuchus has lost the use of her hindlimbs, and is on death’s door. A massive flock of Coelophysis surrounds her as she dies. And let me just say, her drooling, scarred animatronic face with blank eyes used to creep me out as a kid.
  
  Although she just dies from the complications of her injury, the Postosuchus’ death is kind of sad to watch. This mighty huge apex predator being reduced to food to a bunch of scaly bird-like twinks is just…come on, that’s so unfair.
• The last you see of the dicynodonts is them walking away from the screen in search of moisture and better feeding grounds. We see a Postosuchus’ cranium lying in the parched ground. The dinosaurs, by contrast, are said to have an advantage over all these creatures, on the grounds that they excrete very little water when they rid themselves of waste. But like I illustrated above, this is something that should be true of literally any archosaur, including things like the Postosuchus in this episode.
  
  And IMO this is a perfect microcosm of the narrative of this episode: dinosaur supremacy. Even when the thing that supposedly makes dinosaurs “superior” is also shared with other animals. Turns out that pseudosuchians in the Triassic had more morphological disparity than did the dinosaurs of the time (Brusatte et al., 2008). Look at the kinds of forms they produced in the image below.
  
  
  (One of these is a phytosaur, which may or may not be pseudosuchians proper. They’re recovered as either the earliest diverging pseudosuchians or the sister group to archosaurs (Jones & Butler, 2018).)
  
  Even if a group of animals wasn’t doing the same kinds of things the dinosaurs (or archosaurs in general) were doing, that doesn’t make them “inferior”. The synapsids of the Triassic had virtually none of the neat stuff the archosaurs of the time are praised for having (bipedality, air sacs & pneumatic bones, wasting little water), but the dicynodonts lasted until the very end of the Triassic, even producing a form as massive as a large adult Plateosaurus. Mammals sensu lato had also evolved at around the same time as the dinosaurs; if hair, endothermy, parental care, milk, the neocortex, and the malleus-incus-stapes complex hadn’t evolved yet, you can bet that they were on their way.
  
  Only very, very recently (as in, this month) did we find out that Triassic dinosaurs had more than just dumb luck going for them. It turns out that avemetatarsalians experimented with more locomotor modes than any other group of archosauromorph. Dinosaurs in particular consistently occupy the largest area of morphospace in limb proportions compared to any other group (Shipley et al., 2024). So to give credit where it’s due, the story of how the dinosaurs came to dominate is indeed probably more complicated than just a simple narrative of luck.
  
  But imagine if someone made a documentary about how Mesozoic mammals had all these neat things going for them, and portrayed dinosaurs as evolutionary dead-ends destined to be replaced by the mammals*. That’s more or less what’s going on in this episode, only it’s the dinosaurs being put on a pedestal.
  
  *Actually, as you’re going to see much later, the last episode of WWD sort of does that.
• In the scene where a swarm of Coelophysis gather at a shrunken river, we see them resorting to cannibalism. This was based on fossil remains formerly thought to have been evidence of cannibalism in the genus, but it later turned out these Coelophysis specimens were eating pseudosuchians instead (Nesbitt et al., 2006). But honestly, I can hardly even consider this an “inaccuracy”. Cannibalism is by no means some extraordinary behavior limited to certain groups in nature (the paper I just cited “calls into question” the frequency of cannibalism in theropods; given all the evidence of theropod cannibalism that came out later, I can’t say I agree at all). Pretty much any carnivore that can process the flesh of its own kind will turn to cannibalism if necessary. Just look up “theropod cannibalism” on Google Scholar and look at all the results you get. The association of Coelophysis with cannibalism may have been based on examples that weren’t, but I’m not going to bat an eye at any depictions of it.
• The cynodonts have dug out a new burrow, and the male catches a baby Coelophysis. Years later people would make a big deal out of the discovery of a baby Psittacosaurus in the gut of a Repenomamus (which, as far as it being our first direct evidence of the behavior, the hype was justified). But in retrospect, stuff like that is something we should have expected from the get-go. The mammal lineage during the Mesozoic produced a lot of predators that would easily have been enough to prey on baby dinosaurs.
• The drought ends after 9 months, and the animals that we see have pulled through are the cynodonts and the dinosaurs. The female Coelophysis and many others survived, as have, wait for it…a herd of Plateosaurus.
  
  These last minute animals are used to signify the dawn of the age of dinosaurs. While we now know Plateosaurus wasn’t quadrupedal (I guess it was being debated more at the time), it was indeed huge. Adults weighed anywhere from ~600-4,000 kg (Mallison, 2010). The low sounds they make are great, and their dominance at the waterfall helps to highlight how impressive these beasts are. The track (appropriately titled “Time of the Titans”) playing in the background as Branagh tells us “…the age of the dinosaurs has dawned” still give me chills to this day.
  
  If nothing else, that’s a testament to how well WWD illustrates narratives. It will be another ~20 million years before many of the pseudosuchians, all of the phytosaurs, and all of the dicynodonts will be wiped out by the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event. And as I explained earlier, the dinosaurs weren’t inherently “better” than any of the other lifeforms living at this time. They wasted no time trying to get big and filling whatever niches they could (as exemplified by the Plateosaurus), but the “age of croc-thingies” still has some time.
• I find myself a fan of how the credits are used to transition from the current episode to the next. I quite like the panoramic view of the Triassic landscape at dusk. Here, Branagh alludes to the T-J event (the real point at which the “age of dinosaurs” began), and we get a glimpse into the sauropods of the next episode. WWB did things a bit differently: the premise of the following episode was narrated while we got some bits of footage of it. While that is kind of cool, I’m not sure if I prefer that to just saving next episode’s content for actual air time.
  
  I say all this as if two decades haven’t passed and that this doesn’t matter in the slightest anymore.

Final verdict:
This review already took up eight and a half pages on my Pages document (not counting the verdict). That’s more than my review for Sabre Tooth (which took up a little over five). I can see now that it’s a mix of being an “ackchyually” nerd and correcting inaccuracies, correcting people “correcting” “inaccuracies”, and, *checks notes*, other stuff.

New Blood certainly does its job at pushing a narrative: the Virgin dicynodonts and pseudosuchians vs the Chad dinosaurs. But we now know that this narrative isn’t really true. Yes, the dinosaurs actually did have some things going for them even during the Triassic. But they were just one part of a much larger radiation of reptiles that thrived in the Triassic, and they weren’t even the majority of it. The pseudosuchians alone were a “dynasty” (to borrow a word from Life on Our Planet) in their own right, and there was a lot more than just the likes of Postosuchus or Placerias roaming around Pangaea.

To be fair, this show is called “Walking with Dinosaurs”. And if you’re going to be portraying dinosaurs in the Triassic, it probably does behoove you to portray them for what they are: “underdogs” that have some things going for them trying to survive in a world that’s not completely theirs (though, this doesn’t mean doing the other Triassic denizens dirty in the ways I described above). But then this raises another point: maybe it’s time we start portraying the Triassic’s fauna just as they are, not as part of some narrative where they are replaced by the dinosaurs (or at least, save that for the very end). A documentary where the Postosuchus can just be a Postosuchus, not some big mean poopy pants boogeyman (boogeybeast?) to early dinosaurs.

Aside from that, it was still nice seeing the Triassic fauna. It was cool seeing early dinosaurs doing what they could in a world they didn’t yet dominate. It was cool to see Postosuchus hunt a Placerias (a formidable animal multiple times its size), even if both were slow as battles. Nice to see Placerias isn’t a total pushover (if off-screen). Nice to see the beginnings of mammals as we know them (even if we could still learn a thing or two on when some features evolved).

So overall, while I probably have rose-tinted glasses on my eyes, I can’t bring myself to hate this episode (or any episode of WWD). If we had to improve on this episode nowadays, though, there’s a lot we could do.

[dinosauria101]

Time of the Titans:



-We begin with a 25 ton Diplodocus laying her eggs at the edge of the forest. I would say the CGI model, the sound effects, and the eggs/egg tube (which look like practical effects) all look fabulous!

-”She is one of a great family of dinosaurs called the sauropods, that dominate this period in Earth’s history. They are the largest animals that will ever walk the planet”.

With Kenneth Branagh’s grandiose voice and the epic opera-esque Time of the Titans soundtrack, this is a very surreal introductory statement - and right after it we get a view of a Diplodocus from how we would see it if we stood underneath it and looked directly up, which drives it home perfectly.

-Continuing the intro, we are in 152-million-year-old-Colorado. It’s been 70 million years since the dinosaurs appeared, Pangaea is breaking up, and much more rain lets there be forests where there were once deserts - allowing the dinosaurs to diversify, exemplified by some Othnielia (for which I like the model and sfx).

-It is 3 months after the mother Diplodocus laid her eggs, and although hatching time…..they have been found by the bird-like egg thief Ornitholestes, who is stuffing his face with a baby Diplodocus. I think the blue crest on his snout looks awesome, inaccuracy be damned.

Also, the destroyed eggshells strewn around look like practical effects again. Most appreciative in my opinion.

-Right after this, our protagonist female Diplodocus (which Branagh appropriately describes as a sauropodlet) hatches from her buried egg along with her siblings* - straight under the gaze of the Ornitholestes, which is incredibly nerve-wracking until Branagh tells us the Ornitholestes is too busy eating to be chasing more sauropodlets (whew!)

*It looks like they buried sauropodlet animatronics and had them come up for this scene! Awesome!

-The sauropodlets (with great squeaking sfx) make a break for the thick forest once they are all hatched, in order to seek its shelter. Once they reach it, their attention turns to their next task.

-“Between the trunks of huge redwood trees, the forest floor is covered in a dense layer of ferns. Beneath these, the sauropodlets immediately start their lifelong obsession with eating. Newly hatched they only weigh a few kilograms, but they will have to grow by 1 ton a year until they are adults. That’s an astonishing 2 to 3 kilograms a day”.

There is no better word than obsession to describe the sauropod-food relationship, especially considering it gets to the point where few-kilogram animals have to grow 2 to 3 kilograms a day. Branagh nails his role as narrator again.

-They used sauropodlet animatronics again here, to have them ‘eat’ real ferns. It looks and feels very authentic.

But all is not quite so rosy: the Ornitholestes is back! To evade him, the sauropodlets must remain motionless and rely on their camouflage.

-“It may have worked this time, but all too often the sharp eyed predator gets his meal”. Pretty ominous statement in the context of the sauropodlets.

-After that we head out onto the prairie, to get glimpses of Stegosaurus (love both the sfx and CGI model here), Othnielia, and adult Diplodocus (which have incredibly majestic sfx), whose grazing keeps it as a prairie. Branagh states sauropods have the largest impact on their environment of all dinosaurs, and of all the different types, Diplodocus are the longest of them all.

There is one hell of an epic soundtrack accompanying these scenes too!

-More about Diplodocus in particular: Branagh tells us that they move in groups for protection (which as you will find out proves to be an important part of the plot later on in the episode), some of the older adults in said groups are over 40m long (which is breathtaking!), and that their tails have elegant whiplike ends for communication - which I would say are decidedly dance ribbon-esque in their elegance.

We also learn about the various small animals that accompany so many giant animals. Insects stirred up by the Diplodocus attract hunting damselflies, which themselves are prey to pterosaur Anurognathus specialized to live on and around the sauropods (a most entertaining lifestyle if I do say so myself!)

-To take it a step further, each Diplodocus drops over 1 ton of dung a day (which I used to think was a huge figure, but after some discussions on SpinoInWonderland’s Discord server it turns out Diplodocus dung has nothing on that of a certain group of animals LOL). Any member here and in that server should get the reference.

Anyway, so much dung attracts dung beetles (looks like some live acted ones!), the descendants of which will be rolling the dung of the certain animal in question (double LOL). I appreciate that they showed us these dung beetles for context, as well as the reference to that certain group of funny animals.

-One year later, the sauropodlets have grown substantially to over 3 meters long: our female feeds in a creche for safety and seeks moss growing on a moisture-dripping canyon wall (I adore the look of whatever real-world location this canyon was filmed in!).

-What follows, in my opinion, is one of the most dramatic and impactful scenes in the whole episode. As the canyon runs down to the prairie, larger dinosaurs are also attracted - in this particular case, a 7 ton male Stegosaurus with both sfx and a soundtrack (The Smell of Prey) that are decidedly intimidating.

-“He too is a herbivore, but very dangerous. The large plates on his back are primarily there for display. It is the meter-long spikes on his tail that make him so lethal. These he can wield with devastating effect, despite having a very small brain for his body size.”

With Branagh’s tone of voice, the aforementioned sfx+soundtrack, and the Stegosaurus looking directly at the camera when Branagh starts to describe the spikes, this is where the intimidation really begins to ramp up.

-The creche moves further down the canyon to get away from the Stegosaurus, but 2 Allosaurus (which I adore the coloring of!) are also drawn here by the smell of prey - and as they get closer to the creche, the decidedly ominous part of The Smell of Prey begins.

-Once the creche notices, they amble away in fear (for which a panicky part of the soundtrack begins).....but not fast enough, one is taken down by an Allosaurus. (A minor complaint here is that I think there ought to be some visible wounds and bleeding at the area of the killing bite, but I can easily let it slide because it’s pretty one-off).

They must amble past the Stegosaurus, who at first gets out of the way but then strikes one sauropodlet with its tail spikes, probably unintentionally as a result of being startled. Still, poor sauropodlets - although I do appreciate how the animators took the time to add convolutions to the struck sauropodlet.

-With the soundtrack turning more dramatic and high-stakes, the second Allosaurus rushes past the first to get at the struck sauropodlet, only to be stopped by the defensive Stegosaurus who angrily bellows and color-flushes his plates with blood to make a frightening display.

Confused and intimidated by the display (with a defiant roar), the Allosaurus is forced to back down - with appropriate ‘defeat’ music.

-”Sauropodlets are small prey for the Allosaurus. These are the lions of the Jurassic, the top predators of their age”.

So THAT’s where Allosaurus being the ‘lion of the Jurassic’ came from!

-Back to the sauropodlets, they have now reached over half a ton, so are no longer as well hidden among the ferns as they used to be. And since they have grown, so have their teeth: as is demonstrated to us with real ferns and sauropodlet animatronics, they have become peg-shaped to efficiently strip ferns of their leaves.

Then they encounter the skeleton of an adult that lies where it fell - its bones being too large for any forest animal to remove. Branagh’s statement that “The female sauropodlet can have little idea that in 10 years, she will be almost as large as this” is quite telling.

-The Diplodocus skeleton in question looks like some very good practical effects. Amazing!

However, at this point the creche have gotten too close to the edge of the forest and must move in deeper if they are to be safe.

-Elsewhere, adult Diplodocus are pushing down trees to get at the ferns between them: this is how their grazing keeps the open prairie that way like alluded to earlier.

It even looks like a real tree is being pushed down! Amazing.

-This also ties into one reason they are so big: they can have long guts to digest the toughest Jurassic vegetation, aided by swallowed stones. And unsurprisingly, digesting so much vegetation means plenty of excess gas.

-4 years later, an Anurognathus is seeking a Diplodocus to live on and around, and finds it in our female, who along with multiple creche members is well on her way to adulthood. She is over 12 meters long, weighs over 5 tons, and has begun to develop the spines and long whip-tail of an adult.

Growing so large means that old predators in the forest are no longer a threat (a statement for which we see a hilariously futile aggression display from the Ornitholestes), but it also means that the forest is no longer appropriate habitat because there is neither sufficient food nor space between the trees. It is time for the creche to move out onto the plains and join a herd of adults.

-”There is more room down by the banks of a river, but nature is about to take charge of these dinosaurs’ future”.

Yep, Branagh said it. In this case it’s a huge forest fire to the south that reveals itself through the smell of smoke, and which the Diplodocus are perilously slow to flee from because their massive size and need to always have 3 legs on the ground prohibits them from doing more than ambling away.

-I do like the manner in which the Diplodocus drink from the river, though.

-That night the fire catches up to create a huge firestorm, for which it looks like real forest fires were filmed! One of the more epic practical effects of WWD, for sure.

All this is aptly described by Branagh with a perfectly morose tone of voice and ‘scaredy’ soundtrack as “Above the sound of the blaze come the panicked cries of trapped dinosaurs. These Jurassic fires are rare but can be devastating”.

–In the morning, we are shown an example of a dinosaur that perished in the fire with a singed Othnielia animatronic, which I would say does look quite authentic.

Kenneth Branagh morosely tells us that there have only been 3 surviving members of the creche, now driven out onto the open plains and being exposed because they are not yet large enough to repel Allosaurus attacks (for this we see some Allosaurus that are watching them).

-”To the young Diplodocus, the other dinosaurs here are unfamiliar. And huge”.

Cue the appearance of everyone’s favorite Brachiosaurus, for which the music swells to incredible grandiosity. It completely dwarfs these Diplodocus!

-We get a thorough description of these Brachiosaurus too: 13 meters high, able to effortlessly harvest leaves no other dinosaur can reach, and growing to over 70 tons on it, which in the WWD universe makes them the largest land animals that have ever existed.

-All 3 of these are things I have come to appreciate about Time of the Titans after having viewed new documentaries for comparison. Prehistoric Planet and Life on our Planet were not, in my opinion, able to make clear the majestic giant size of their sauropods to this extent: they did not show the sauropods dwarfing everything else quite as obviously as the Brachiosaurus did to the Diplodocus, they did not give as much size context for their sauropods, their narrators were not as grandiose as Branagh, and nor was their sauropod music.

This is also true of the older documentaries Dinosaur Revolution, Clash of the Dinosaurs (ick), and Dinosaur Planet (although they may be an inappropriate comparison because their saltasaurs look tiny even next to Diplodocus). In my opinion (which is an opinion you will hear more about when I review it, so stay tuned!), only Planet Dinosaur might have been able to match WWD in terms of giving their sauropods so much majesty.

-Back to the young Diplodocus, they are in urgent need of the protection of an adult herd. We cut to the next morning where only 2 youngsters remain, and they are making calls for help adult Diplodocus are programmed to react to.

And react they do! A herd of gigantic adults (for which we get a very majestic front view) have picked up the youngsters’ calls, and accepts them, at which point they are safe at last.

-Five years later (which we start with more epic music), it is the mating season, and our female is old enough and large enough to finally reproduce. We see the male Diplodocus rocking back on their tails to impress potential mates, although occasionally fights - that is, rib-shattering, ground-shaking fights - do break out.

The fight reminds me of Prehistoric Planet’s Dreadnoughtus fight, which likewise reminds me of another thing I appreciate about Time of the Titans: as you probably figured out from what I wrote a few points ago, Time of the Titans is very theme-adherent in making clear that this really is time of the TITANS. Meanwhile, Prehistoric Planet’s Dreadnoughtus segment was intended to be a total 180 to the classic ‘sauropod=gentle giant’ school of thought, and in my opinion their theme adherence to that was substantially poorer than here - even running into the ‘unreasonable suspension of disbelief’ category - because of the near-total lack of visible damage on the 2 Dreadnoughtus despite the fact that they were explicitly shown and stated to be stabbing and gouging one another with their hand spikes.

-Anyway, a young male approaches our female, and they communicate with stamping+infrasound followed by body-rubbing. The mating itself is dangerous for the female since she must carry at least an extra 10 tons on her back - but as she has gotten older, her hip vertebrae have become fused to help her cope with the extra 10 tons.

I think the sfx of the female and the shot of the mating pair are amazingly well done here!

-Now for the ending. The mating season is over, the Diplodocus have calmed, and our female feeds on the edge of the herd - however, she is still not large enough to be immune from attack, and is unaware that 2 Allosaurus are watching her.

To narrate this scene, Branagh’s voice turns more foreboding, which is a nice touch.

-Once she has become distanced, the Allosaurus attack, and the music becomes appropriately fast and dramatic. One attacks her torso with a vicious snarl, although it is shaken off, while the other winds up attacking her head-on, for which she rears up and the music becomes more slow and tense.

They engage in a standoff for some time until the huge tail of an adult Diplodocus knocks down the second Allosaurus, forces it to retreat, and saves the female. All throughout the Allosaurus are making those same vicious/fearsome snarls and growls I alluded to, which are actually slowed down chimpanzee screams(!) and in my opinion work quite well except for a single roar I think is a little too chimp-ish.

–The female rejoins the herd with some visible deep wounds on her side, but Branagh thankfully states she will recover.

This scene has 2 more things Time of the Titans makes me appreciate even more from having seen new documentaries: in this case it’s Prehistoric Planet. As those who read my reviews for it know, I found its lack of gore during hunting scenes to be very egregious, as did I find their excessive shying away from large-prey hunting (especially the skipped Tarbosaurus and sauropod hunt), hence I can appreciate this large-prey (sauropod) hunt with the appropriate gore even more.

-”Diplodocus can live for a hundred years, and above a certain size they have no natural predators. Sauropods dominate the Late Jurassic, and it will be millions of years before new dinosaur herbivores evolve to replace them. With their passing, life will never again be this large”.

With this closing statement we get views of the entire Diplodocus herd, and more epic opera-esque Time of the Titans theme.

Overall Verdict:

I think this episode may be either my favorite or second favorite in all of WWD. Not only is there a substantial amount I can appreciate from having seen new documentaries for comparison, but out of all the episodes I think this one is best described as truly WALKING with dinosaurs, since we follow the female Diplodocus from the moment she hatches until the moment she is on the verge of growing up - as substantial and immersive as the storytelling of other WWD episodes is, Time of the Titans shines out.

Additionally, the music is very much Walking with Dinosaurs-esque. It has often been described as being a Dinosaur Opera, and of all the episodes, I feel this one has the greatest percentage of opera-esque music - so in my opinion, if someone was unclear on what Dinosaur Opera meant, watching Time of the Titans would greatly enlighten them.

So overall a most substantial and entertaining watch that is appreciative in hindsight for the things that make it special. And in fact such an entertaining depiction is what got me hooked onto sauropods when I was in the palaeocommunity: even now that I know better to be in it, the entertainment’s appeal hasn’t gone away any.

[Infinity Blade]

Time of the Titans (Colorado, 152 million years ago):

• This episode takes place 68 million years after the previous one. Think about it: that’s literally an entire Cenozoic’s worth of time plus a couple more million years. Lots of time that could have been explored.
  
  In a way, it actually feels nice to cut right through the chase and show the dinosaurs all big and mighty after a whole episode showing them as mostly small underdogs. However, they could have done what WWB did and had an intermediate episode between small, big, and bigger. Dinosaurs from the early or middle Jurassic would have been perfect.
• This mother Diplodocus is stated to weigh 25 tonnes. This is closer to the weight of D. hallorum than to D. carnegii. She also gives birth using a (disgusting) long fleshy ovipositor. This isn’t actually supported by any fossil evidence, and was based on turtles, which use a short ovipositor. The main concern here would be how an animal could lay eggs from such a great height without breaking them. Presently I don’t see a problem with them just squatting/crouching down.
  
  
  Art by Mohamad Haghani.
• This intro…rocks!!! It is my favorite out of any in the entire program, and probably my favorite in the entire Walking with series. The music, the narration, the vocalizations of the Diplodocus, and how their sheer size is conveyed (particularly in the ventral view of the wandering sauropods). Few, if any other sequences capture the size and majesty of the giant sauropods as well as the intro to "Time of the Titans". And these Diplodocus aren’t even close to the biggest sauropods ever! Also a nice way to start off from the ending of the previous episode with the giant Plateosaurus, showing how far the dinosaurs have come. *chef’s kisses
• After a nice brief intro to this green Jurassic ecosystem, we revisit the forested nesting grounds that the Diplodocus in the opening scene laid her eggs in. Some of them have been eaten by an Ornitholestes, a theropod said to be related to the ones that will evolve into birds (a process that, at this point, is already well under way).
  
  The one biggest thing I can poke holes into with the Ornitholestes is the nasal crest. In his 1988 book Predatory Dinosaurs of the World, Greg Paul interpreted some broken part of bone near the external naris to have been part of a crest in life. It is now thought that this was simply due to crushing of the skull after death. The Ornitholestes also bears quills on its neck. If we were making this today, we’d probably go several steps further and give it a coat of feathers all over its body (similar to the reconstruction down below by Wikipedia user PaleoNeolitic). As a coelurosaur closer to maniraptoriforms than to tyrannosauroids, feathers are highly likely for this genus, even if they weren’t the pennaceous feathers we see in modern birds.
  
  
• I love how they made up the word “sauropodlet” for this documentary.
• The track playing in the background matches well with the sauropodlets waddling further into the forest as the Ornitholestes helplessly watches all these snacks on legs run free (because he’s too full; I get that feeling bro). It makes for a rather adorable, dare I say almost comical scene. I get that the tone is supposed to be one of urgency, but a part of me can’t take it too seriously (and I mean this in a good way).
• One of the important things to include in a sauropod coming-of-age story is their rapid growth. At least in terms of narration WWD illustrates it well.
• I’m pretty sure the 40 meter figure is exaggerated. I mean, true, we almost certainly don’t have the largest individuals of Diplodocus ever in our fossil collections, but none of the fossil remains we currently have belong to 40 meter long animals.
• Notice how Branagh calls the Diplodocus necks “stiff”. Notice, too, how the Diplodocus hold their necks horizontally and straight. The making of the Diplodocus models was influenced by computer models created by Kent Stevens and Michael Parrish, and subsequently published in a 1999 study. Supposedly, the “osteological neutral pose” (ONP) was a horizontal, straight neck posture, and the animal could not move its neck very high up (link->).
  
  But there were two fundamental problems with this. First, they assumed that the zygapophyses (facets of bone that slide past each other when the neck moves) must overlap by at least 50% at any given time. Looking at modern animals, this doesn’t appear to be true. There are animals, like giraffes and ostriches, that can bend their necks such that there is almost no zygapophyseal overlap at all.
  
  Second, modern animals don’t really habitually hold their necks in ONP. If anything, it appears that they tend to hold them in an anterodorsal position. In other words, on a sauropod it would look rather erect (Taylor et al., 2009).
  
  
• Diplodocus is said to use its tail for communication. This is a hypothesis for the whip-like end of diplodocid tails, and the idea is that they would have been able to move fast enough to make a loud cracking noise. However, WWD doesn’t specify exactly *how* the tail would be used for communication, so maybe they could also mean visual communication? I don’t know if that idea makes sense.
  
  Recent biomechanical studies suggest the tail whip would not have been able to withstand nearly the amount of stress to survive supersonic speeds (Conti et al., 2022). By no means does this rule out certain functions (esp. use as a weapon), although I don’t know how fast the tail needs to move to make the sounds necessary for communication.
• I just love the way the Diplodocus call echoes across the distance.
• Anurognathus is depicted as a specialist in living off the backs (literally!) of Diplodocus. It feeds (on insects), fights, breeds, and even poops (as one individual does on-screen much to our delight) on Diplodocus for its whole life.
  
  It wasn’t until nearly a decade later that we finally started to understand what Anurognathus actually looked like (Bennett, 2007). It had a short skull with a broad, blunt snout, ENORMOUS eyes*, and thumbtack-like teeth for feeding on insects (so WWD at least got that right). There’s a reason we call it “frog jaw”.
  
  
  Reconstruction by Jaime A. Headden.
  
  *(In fact, look at this Anurognathus puppet-> used for WWD. You see where the eye is placed? That’s actually where the jaw muscles ran through. You see that big-ass hole in front of where the eye is? That’s where the eye ACTUALLY was. Yes, its eyes were THAT FÛCKING ENORMOUS.)
  
  Suffice to say, the WWD model doesn’t look anything like this. And with its enormous eyes, plus skull and dental morphology matching those of nocturnal or crepuscular insectivores (that hunt on the wing) (Clark & Hone, 2023), the idea that it was living off of the backs of Diplodocus seems unlikely. This is a pretty stark case of Science Marches On.
• The reviewer I linked to in my previous review made time to critique the inclusion of dung beetles feasting on Diplodocus poo. His point was that while Scarabaeinae did indeed first appear in the Mesozoic (something further supported by a subsequent study; Philips & Pretorious, 2006), their diversification is tied more to Cenozoic mammal radiation (Davis et al., 2002). He pointed out that dung beetles were actually rare during the Mesozoic, and that there’s evidence that instead, an extinct family of cockroaches (Blattulidae) were cleaning up after dinosaurs instead. From the little I found, this indeed seems to be true (Vršanský et al., 2013).
  
  But then again, rare doesn’t mean nonexistent. As such, there’s technically nothing wrong with depicting dung beetles feeding on dinosaur feces, it just probably wasn’t the most common thing (not compared to these blattulids doing it, at least). Furthermore, WWD only says that the dung beetles started out in the age of dinosaurs, which is true. So to be quite honest, I don’t have a problem with this.
• Timeskip to a year later. Briefly we’re treated to “a dinosaurs’ dawn chorus” filling the air. This just made me wish to hear such a thing. What I wouldn’t give to hear dinosaurs bellowing and crying over a steamy redwood forest in the morning…
• Although we see a pair of Stegosaurus before this, we’re only truly introduced to the animal in the lush wet canyon (btw its vocalizations are one of my favorites out of any Stegosaurus depiction, along with the ones from When Dinosaurs Roamed America). Although it’s a herbivore, its introduction isn’t exactly a comforting one. Not with the background music and Branagh’s explanation of how dangerous it is. In my opinion, this sets a perfect tone for “herbivore=/=friendly”. You almost feel like something bad is going to happen with it soon…
• It gets worse when the lion of the Jurassic shows up: two Allosaurus. The music ups in intensity, and now the sauropodlets are stuck between a rock (or rather, two) and a hard place. One sauropodlet is taken by an Allosaurus, while another is cut down by the not-so-jolly Stegosaurus (what’d I tell you?). It’s almost a miracle more don’t die.
• Actually, it really is now that I think about it. Where was that second Allosaurus as the sauropodlets were fleeing the canyon? There’s no discernible reason it couldn’t keep up with its partner. Was it wearing invisible shoes that it needed to tie or something?
  
  Whatever the reason, there seem to be no sauropodlets left for it to make a meal out of and it’s forced to try its hand with the Stegosaurus. It (rather understandably) only takes an intimidating display on the Stegosaurus’ part for the Allosaurus to give up and mooch off of its partner’s kill.
  
  “What, is a Stegosaurus too tough for you?”
  
  “I’m pretty sure it’s too tough for anyone.”
  
  “Skill issue. I saw Frank take one down last week.”
• We need to discuss the plates of the Stegosaurus. Here it’s depicted flushing blood into its plates, making them appear red in order to appear more imposing. The problem is that stegosaur dorsal plates were covered in keratin in life (Christiansen & Tschopp, 2010), and there’s no keratin structure known where it changes color from blood flow.
• God, I love the phrase “lion of the Jurassic”.
• Wait, the ‘podlets are half a ton now? Is that how big they are during the canyon attack? I…did not get that impression. They didn’t look half a ton.
• It is true that Diplodocus reached sexual maturity by a decade. That doesn’t mean full size, though.
• One thing WWD does a really good job with is conveying the sheer power and weight of the sauropods. When a Diplodocus fells a tree, the deep thud of the tree slamming the ground, followed immediately by the equally impressive boom of the sauropod falling back on its front feet, are real ear candy to me. Fitting, too, that this scene is supposed to explain to the viewer how sauropods are these gigantic ecosystem engineers that clear the forest. They’re clearly inspired by elephants, only they’re bigger.
• Branagh mentions that the sauropods swallow stones to help digest food. Back then it was thought that sauropods used gastroliths to help break down food in their gut, based on stones that seem to have been found inside the guts of sauropod skeletons.
  
  After WWD aired, though, paleontologists took a closer look at this idea and the evidence behind it. In 2011, a field test gave domestic ostriches (living dinosaurs that largely eat plants) three different rock types of different hardness to swallow (quartz was the hardest, followed by granite and limestone, respectively). It was found that, depending on how hard they were, the rocks became considerably abraded from their time spent in the stomach acid of the ostriches. The experimental gastroliths (nor those from any other extant birds) had the highly polished, asymmetrical shape of supposed sauropod gastroliths either. Based on the volume of gastroliths in the ostriches, it was estimated that a 50 tonne sauropod would need 500 kg of gastroliths. This is a lot more than what is actually seen in sauropods that supposedly preserve gastroliths.
  
  So from the looks of it, it seems sauropods didn’t actually use gastroliths to digest food. So what did sauropods do? Well…it looks like they just swallowed and let their GI tracts break food down. The stomach and later the hindgut would break it down, and then bacteria in the hindgut and caecum would ferment it. As long as there’s enough food in the gut at any given time, the sauropod will have something breaking down and releasing nutrients inside of it. In effect, you could think of a sauropod’s GI tract like a compost bin (Hallett & Wedel, 2016).
• WWD featured farting dinosaurs and I did not pay attention to that in my childhood…
• Four years later, the female sauropodlet we’ve been sorta, kinda following (I mean, we HAVE been following her, but she just barely qualifies as a main character) is now as long as a T. rex and as heavy as a bull elephant. The small predators that she and her creche once had to hide from, like Ornitholestes, are now perturbed by their presence. That said, the sauropods are getting too big for the forest and will soon have to move out into the plains. Eventually they do…
  
  …but not before a forest fire breaks out by night. The cries of the dinosaurs trapped in the flames sell the terror of the scene, especially the ghost-like calls of sauropods and the alarm-like call of another creature. We even get the charred corpse of a small ornithopod: imagine how much more crushing it would have been had they shown us one of the sauropods from the creche. Speaking of them, only three survive the forest fire.
• Although, does Diplodocus really need at least three legs on the ground at all times? I believe elephants can get away with having two on the ground while ambling. Why should a 5 tonne immature Diplodocus do any worse? And how big would the forest need to be that some ambling Diplodocus can’t get out before the fire consumes the forest by night?
• It’s interesting how Branagh notes that the young Diplodocus still aren’t large enough to be immune from Allosaurus predation. Adult Allosaurus fragility typically weighed from ~1.7-2.3 tonnes, making them considerably smaller than a 5 tonne Diplodocus. This suggests the WWD team believed an Allosaurus could take prey much larger than itself, something corroborated by the end of this episode. That is something I’m glad to see reflected.
• The Brachiosaurus has this dramatic, epic theme, fitting for an unfamiliar dinosaur that towers over these Diplodocus. But “largest animal that ever existed”? 70 tons? No.
• Later the creche is down to two. No explanation given as to what happened to the third one. It just up and disappeared. While that can be seen as hilarious, it’s also genius for the purposes of WWD. It helps create the illusion that someone went back in time and filmed all of this. A film crew isn’t going to be able to capture or observe everything with an animal or group thereof that they follow, so they’re completely in the dark on what happens in between their shot footage. This then translates over into a limited narrator. Who knows what happened to that third Diplodocus? Maybe it fell down and broke a leg. Maybe it got picked off by an Allosaurus. Maybe it wandered off, got lost, and ended up finding a different herd.
• But eventually, the calls the youngsters make pay off and an adult herd finds and accepts them. “Safe, at last”…
  
  *deeply breathes in Allosaurus*
• Five more years pass, meaning a decade has passed since the female and that one other surviving creche member (assuming the latter is still alive) hatched. She becomes mature enough to mate which, as I said earlier, is indeed accurate.
  
  We get to see a brief fight between two males, which I think is neat. They shoulder each other, and Branagh notes that the forces at work here can shatter ribs. Sauropods are often seen as “weaponless” animals. Aside from the fact that their clawed column-like limbs and tails (maybe even their necks) could have served as weapons, here’s the thing: when you weigh multiple tons, you don’t need specialized weapons to severely injure another animal. Just shoulder/body slamming something in the ribs can break them and possibly splinter them (this can drive them through internal organs, and that can be fatal). The fact that these animals are so massive makes this a very likely scenario. Elephants today sometimes bear broken ribs that they received from fighting other elephants. Imagine sauropods double their size or much, much more.
• It’s interesting how the mating doesn’t take long. I remember reading how some modern reptiles will mate and it only lasts a few seconds or so.
• Ah yes, the origin of this meme.
  
  
• Btw no, I don’t think an adult Allosaurus could/would leap like that.
• The Allosaurus is defeated by a tail swat from a larger Diplodocus that catches it off guard. Afterwards, Branagh tells us how Diplodocus can live for a century (pretty sure this is outdated), how it will be millions of years before the sauropods will be replaced by other herbivorous dinosaurs (not really true), and how life will never again be this large (which remains true as long as you’re talking about land animals). This idea that the sauropods will go into decline at around/following the Late Jurassic is further alluded to during the end credits of this episode. According to Branagh, the lowland prairies the sauropods inhabited became flooded due to rising sea levels.
  
  I get that this idea that sauropods faded away after the Late Jurassic was a somewhat prominent idea at the time (even though we’re all now fully aware that not only did sauropods live until the end of the Cretaceous, but they were on literally every continent until then), but…where did this idea that their habitat was inundated by sea levels come from?
• One more small thing: just before the show cuts to the credits, we hear one last Diplodocus call, sounding kind of like it came from the distance. I love that little detail.

Final verdict:
Although it’s by no means perfect, I think this is one of the better episodes of WWD 25 years on from a scientific accuracy perspective. The overall message of what a sauropod’s life was like still holds up overall. Birth into a massive clutch, high juvenile mortality, rapid growth, maybe even finding a herd of adults to find protection in. And then, of course, the usual animal objectives of finding a mate while avoiding gigantic predators. Compare this life with how a mega-mammal grows up (link->). True, Brachiosaurus wasn’t 70 tonnes, Stegosaurus probably couldn’t turn its plates red by flushing blood into them, the Allosaurus could be…shaped better, there’s no evidence Ornitholestes had a crest on its nose, and the Diplodocus having stiff necks constantly held horizontally could at the very least be debated. But unlike “New Blood”, these mistakes don’t impact the overall narrative/theme of the episode much, if at all.

(Also, it’s a pity we don’t get to see the Morrison’s other denizens, like Ceratosaurus, Camarasaurus, Camptosaurus, or Torvosaurus. The Ballad of Big Al slightly fixes this by featuring Dryosaurus and Apatosaurus, although even these two are just reskins of existing models, with a bit of modification for the latter.)

One other positive about this episode is that I can’t think of many other things in media that will make you love sauropods as well as this. Look at all the times that this episode capitalized on the sheer size, majesty, and dare I say beauty of these animals. There’s the beginning, a few times in between, and the end. I’m going to be honest, the only other time I felt so humbled by the giant sauropods was that scene in the original Jurassic Park where the Brachiosaurus first appears. The runner-up would be the introduction of the Dreadnoughtus in Prehistoric Planet (the subsequent fight helps too).

However…have you noticed how this is the only episode of the main six that features sauropods? This is, in my opinion, somewhat of an issue with the greater scope of the series. Like I said above, the ending of the episode and Branagh’s narration during the end credits give the viewer the impression that as a whole, sauropods declined after the Late Jurassic. The last thing stated was even “…life will never again be this large” after the sauropods are supposedly replaced by other herbivorous dinosaurs. Anyone nowadays can tell you that not only did sauropods survive (on every continent!) until the very end of the Cretaceous, but also that they produced what were easily some of their largest forms during the Cretaceous. You know what was discovered six years before WWD premiered? Argentinosaurus. The largest dinosaur known from reasonable remains* (and which later had a whole episode dedicated to it in the Chased by Dinosaurs special). Bottom line is this: the “time of the titans” didn’t just stop at the Late Jurassic. It only stopped when the marine reptiles, the pterosaurs, and the age of dinosaurs as a whole did.

*(Even if you go down the rabbit hole that is comprised of the more fragmentary, possibly larger species (as in, those potentially reaching triple digit tonnage mass), this still doesn’t mean the Jurassic was the peak of sauropod size. True, the Late Jurassic had Maraapunisaurus. But the Maastrichtian had Bruhathkayosaurus. God, the fact that I can rather confidently mention both of these unironically in 2024 feels surreal.)

Overall, “Time of the Titans” carries this very strange distinction of capturing the awesome might and splendor of the giant sauropods – quite possibly better than any piece of media – while also, at the very end, making their glory days feel like a one-off that didn’t last. All of that is perhaps thanks to the very era WWD was produced in. If this dissonance ruins the experience of “Time of the Titans” for you 25 years on and forever more, just…ignore the narration and remember that the great sauropods conclusively, without a shadow of a doubt, made it to the very end.

[dinosauria101]

Cruel Sea



-“The most fearsome predator of the Jurassic is watching his prey. Peering through the water, the carnivore fixes on his unwary victim, waiting for the perfect moment to strike”.

And here we begin the episode with what I find to be both the biggest expectation subversion and jump scare in all of WWD! A Eustreptospondylus is shown to be peering into the water, with some animatronic closeups of its head, and it does look pretty fearsome…..until it becomes the prey when it gets grabbed by a lunging Liopleurodon, screams in terror, and disappears as the music gets ‘death-announcing’.

-Having viewed Prehistoric Planet ‘Coasts’ for comparison, I think I appreciate the opening scene of Cruel Sea even more. In Coasts, it is made very clear from the beginning that the baby T. rex is consistently in danger from the mosasaur (eliminating any jump scare), their fear music playing basically the entire buildup is comparatively ‘dragged out’ for my taste, there is no ‘finalizing’ soundtrack like Cruel Sea has, the baby T. rex is pulled under with far less fear-inducing struggle/noise, the mosasaur isn’t even visible to do the pulling down like the Liopleurodon is here (eliminating yet another fear factor), there is no finalizing, morose music, and in my opinion David Attenborough’s cotton ball-y narration sounds straight up inappropriate for scenes of this sort compared to Branagh’s clear, morose narration for the Cruel Sea beginning.

-We then transfer to a moving panorama of 149 million year old Oxfordshire in England, as the music gets slightly more upbeat and light-hearted. What we see are scattered islands in beautiful azul blue waters (I love their New Caledonia/Bahamas filming choice here) as Branagh explains that rising sea levels caused by continents breaking up have created them via lowland flooding.

And here, dinosaurs do not rule. Rather, marine reptiles like Cryptoclidus (which we see beaching: inaccuracy be damned, I think it’s very entertaining to watch amphibious plesiosaurs on TV) are the dominant type of animal.

-Sidenote: I think Kenneth Branagh’s voice pronouncing Cryptoclidus sounds a HELL of a lot better than David Attenborough’s voice pronouncing Tuarangisaurus, even more than my usual disparity of opinion about each of them as narrators.

-More about Cryptoclidus: As the music picks up to be more graceful, and they enter the water, Branagh tells us that despite being cumbersome hulks on land (and I can see why they are so: these ones weigh 8 tons!), they are transformed in water, continuing to tell us about the land-water transition that sea reptiles made with turning their legs into flippers in the Triassic.

Some animals they share these seas with are ammonites, as well as (live filmed!) jellyfish and schools of fish.

-Other animals they share the seas with make annual natural drama: in this case hundreds of pregnant female Opthalmosaurus (adore the pattern on the CGI model) from deeper water. Being the oldest and most adapted to aquatic life of all marine reptiles, they look and swim like fish - in contrast to the 4 flippered Cryptoclidus.

We also get some footage of one majestically leaping out of the water, dolphin-style. Breathtaking.

-Back to the Cryptoclidus: as they chase the fish schools, Branagh tells us about the usefulness of 4 flippers. Separately they can be used for mobility, and together they can create a sudden burst of speed - a locomotion method that will sadly go extinct with the dinosaurs.

-Now we see some sea pterosaurs on a rocky shoreline: Rhamphorhynchus. They have evolved long beaks and sharp teeth to skim for fish in the water without getting their wings wet, and we even get an animatronic head closeup of one eating an actual fish which I find to be especially appreciable for taking the next step and including actual fish with the animatronic.

Not to mention the CGI model (red head, green body) and the squawking sfx are both to my taste.

-Some brief shots of both a beaching Cryptoclidus (with nice deep bellows) and swimming Opthalmosaurus lead us into the pregnant Opthalmosaurus beginning to give birth: in the WW universe, while other sea reptiles must go on land to lay eggs, Opthalmosaurus give birth to live young and so can evolve to be more fishlike.

For this we get some amazing animatronics of both the mother and the baby, with appropriate afterbirth fluid in the water. The mother Opthalmosaurus animatronic does have some minor flaking-off skin, but I am more than happy to let it slide: for that particular animatronic it was kind of unavoidable anyway, everything else I find easily good enough to be worthwhile, and the flaking skin is easy to overlook anyway.

-The babies are born tail-first so they do not drown while being born: as soon as they are born, they must swim up to get some air.

And they are vulnerable to all sorts of predators: even adult Opthalmosaurus are a danger since they will eat others’ pups to increase the odds for their own. Only coral crags provide safety.

-Even for the adults, birthing can be dangerous. One female (for which we have animatronics both above and below water, yay!) is having trouble expelling her offspring, and her struggles to breathe at the surface are attracting sharks, which Branagh tells us have been in the ocean much longer than marine reptiles.

Together with the ominous music, I think his tone of voice is about as good as it gets for this scene.

-But something lurking in the gloom scatters the sharks. After a brief cut back to the Opthalmosaurus animatronic, we see what was lurking in the gloom, and as the music picks up it attacks!

For the attack, we see several views of the Opthalmosaurus animatronic getting maimed and killed, ending with half of it sinking to the bottom and trailing blood. This is another scene I appreciate after seeing Prehistoric Planet ‘Oceans’ for comparison: unlike the IMO extremely underwhelming Mosasaurus kill with no blood, visible damage, or ANYTHING, WWD goes all out here and it makes for a phenomenal result.

-Explicitly identified in the narration for the first time, and with some more ominous-yet-morose music, the attacker is Liopleurodon (love the CGI model’s blue and black with mottled white spots!). This particular individual at 150 tons is the largest carnivore ever to live on the planet: at 25 meters he is big even for his kind, and is probably over 100 years old.

This Liopleurodon is the best example of why I think WWD is far, far, far more timelessly entertaining than it is inaccurate. I used to be very annoyed by Cruel Sea back in the nostalgia days because of how ridiculous the size is, but from a pure entertainment perspective I’d consider a 25 meter pliosaur to be worth every single one of its 150 tons in fun, so - unlike a number of viewers - my overall opinion on this episode is substantially more positive than it would be with nostalgia (plus, you could argue the inaccuracy isn’t as big as it might seem because they get the basic idea right by showing Liopleurodon as a large and fearsome apex predator, whereas I don’t find any analogous taking-away qualities in the entertainment value).

-Branagh describes his sense of smell as a ‘sophisticated tracking device steering the largest carnivorous jaws ever known’, and this together with his flippers alone each being stated to be over 3m really puts his giant (and mildly horrifying) size into perspective.

After this, the music gets more relaxing, and we get a glimpse into the coral reef sanctuary for the baby Opthalmosaurus. They can begin to learn about their world, with one little male having yet to learn that ammonite shells are too hard for him.

-Then, we get a proper introduction to Eustreptospondylus: as a lonely dinosaur forced to make dangerous swims between the islands to find enough food. The animatronic head closeups in the water look amazing!

Sorry Prehistoric Planet, I like this far, far, far more than swimming T. rex. The narration, animatronics, bluer water, and association of Eustreptospondylus with the shores seals the deal.

-Once it reaches the island, Branagh elaborates on how dinosaurs do not rule: Eustreptospondylus is the biggest at 5m, and gets much of its food from washed-up carrion. However even that carrion can be disputable, as 2 fight over a dead turtle by having a contest of the loudest roar.

The animatronic heads here look even better, as if they have been carrion-seeking. Fabulous.

-Speaking of the islands, they have the only food source that does not come from the sea: insects. Bark beetles tempt a young Rhamphorhynchus (for which we have yet another animatronic head), but his beak isn’t suited to get them under the bark.

-Back to the baby Opthalmosaurus, they are growing fast but are still at risk from shark attack, especially because they have to go up to breathe while sharks do not.

At this point the soundtrack and Branagh’s voice turn appropriately ominous, and a shark makes a lunge at a baby…..but the baby Opthalmosaurus has speed on its side, and is able to speed up for air and back in time. We also get some animatronic baby Opthalmosaurus shots at the surface.

-And now over to Cryptoclidus, for my favorite scene of it in the whole episode! As the music gets more ‘casual swimmy’, Branagh tells us that having a lung full of air presents all marine reptiles with a buoyancy problem, and we see Cryptoclidus’ solution to said problem: searching for pebbles and grit in the sand, sieving off the fine grains, and retaining the larger pieces in his stomach for ballast.

They use an animatronic head for this and it looks incredibly believable stirring up and sieving through the sand, especially with the silt clouds. Overall 100x more entertaining than Prehistoric Planet’s stone-swallowing Tuarangisaurus and Morturneria in my opinion.

-Afterwards, we see them coming onto the rock ledges with the high tide, so they can rest and be out of Liopleurodon’s reach. Both entertaining and a testament to the danger of WWD’s Liopleurodon!

-When night falls, some adult Opthalmosaurus remain in shallow waters to take advantage of the plenty here. With appropriate ‘night’ music, we see them hunting squid in the gloom: the Opthalmosaurus animatronics make a return to eat real squid and make it look phenomenally believable!

Furthermore, another advantage is that we get moonlight rays to clearly see the animals even in the dark. Sorry once again Prehistoric Planet, but I’d say your Phosphorosaurus and unwatchably dark scenes in general don’t even begin to measure up to the clearly visible and very authentic-looking hunt we see here.

-Following that, horseshoe crabs come to breed with the full moon and high tide: Branagh tells us that they are 150 million years older than the dinosaurs and will continue this way for at least another 150 million years.

Real horseshoe crabs were filmed for this! Love it.

-The next morning, some Rhamphorhynchus appear to eat the eggs as the last few crabs struggle back to the water, an annual event for them. We get some animatronic heads probing in the sand (which are some of the most authentic-looking of Cruel Sea’s animatronic shots in my opinion).....but Branagh warns nature seldom offers anything free of risk, as we cut to a stalking Eustreptospondylus. Nice touch!

During the attack, we get several Eustreptospondylus head animatronic closeups (even one holding a whole Rhamphorhynchus animatronic in its mouth), and it’s shown bringing down multiple Rhamphorhynchus in several ways: nabbing them from the air, stepping on them, and leaping at them, for which all the Rhamphorhynchus are squawking in terror.

-A month later, the horseshoe crab eggs hatch, live filmed again. Likewise, with more ‘swimmy’ music, the Opthalmosaurus babies are almost ready to leave the reef: one sign of this is that, like the adults, they begin chasing schools of fish.

But it’s not without risk: the sharks are still a threat, causing one baby to continue hiding in coral.

-Likewise, the sharks aren’t exactly living a risk-free lifestyle either. Although, as Branagh tells us, a time will come when they are the most feared predators in the ocean, nowadays they themselves are also prey.

Prey for whom, you might ask? None other than Liopleurodon of course: after we see him take a big gulp of air (which he can hold for over an hour) to carry out his ambush hunting, Branagh ominously tells us that Liopleurodon is a shark-eater.

-This is yet another thing I appreciate about WWD after having seen Prehistoric Planet and Life on our Planet for comparison. It may simply have to do with the fact that I was far less invested in paleontology on first seeing them than I was when first seeing WWD, but I never found their pliosaurs/mosasaurs very scary at all - whereas as theropod has rightfully pointed out before, the WWD Liopleurodon is an endearing mild horror element, so much so that I used to actually be afraid for quite some time of Liopleurodons in the deep end of pools (lol).

-A shark swims scaredly out of the way…..of an unexpected female Liopleurodon. As Liopleurodon are so territorial, the bull will not tolerate her presence, and snaps one of her flippers with his tusk-like teeth - I think their interaction is shot spectacularly!

This forces her to leave the area, and perhaps ironically, her blood trail attracts sharks.

-Nearing the end, we go back to the baby Opthalmosaurus, now 4 months old and ready to leave. It’s not so rosy this time however: they are to face a coral-smashing, sea life-killing, violent tropical storm from the east - one of the greatest dangers of this cruel Jurassic sea.

When the storm is over, we see some of its victims, as the music turns sad. Many delicate-boned Rhamphorhynchus were broken in the 100 mile-an-hour winds (for which we get very telling full-body animatronic shots).

-But they are not the only victims. The bull Liopleurodon is beached, having been disoriented in the murky waters, and the Eustreptospondylus start to gather knowing it is only a matter of time.

Eventually, his life ebbs away as his 150 ton weight suffocates him, for which we get a dying animatronic view, and even this mighty carnivore ends up as no more than a banquet for some lucky scavengers. This is a remarkably emotional scene, especially with the continued sad music and Branagh’s more morose tone of voice.

-To end the episode on a happier note, we check back on the Opthalmosaurus babies as they head for deeper water. Most have survived the storm, and when the females return back to these waters, they will have the next generation.

Overall Verdict:

I would consider this episode to be solidly in my tier for second favorite contenders. The color designs are fabulous looking as usual, there is some of the most comparative appreciation from seeing other documentaries, the music, animals, and ending evoke notable emotion, some of the giant inaccuracies that used to annoy me so much have become big positives for their entertainment value, the title is well-adhered to with many examples of why this is a cruel sea, and in my opinion the animatronics give the animals more personality than any other episode because they get to the point of live birth in the Opthalmosaurus.

If you are a WWD-hater for the inaccuracy of Cruel Sea, or at least were annoyed by the inaccuracies even if you did not hate the show, I recommend giving it a pure entertainment watch. Who knows, you might find it as fun as I did!

[Infinity Blade]

Cruel Sea (Oxfordshire, 149 million years ago):

• ”The most fearsome predator of the Jurassic is watching his prey. Peering through the water, the carnivore fixes on his unwary victim, waiting for the perfect moment to strike”, you hear while looking expectantly at the theropod.
  
  
  
  Sike…
• 10/10 intro, in case I wasn’t clear.
• So one thing I should note before I say anything else is that this episode takes place during the Tithonian. This is a time when the Kimmeridge Clay was forming, but the episode largely uses fauna from the Oxford Clay, which is older.
• Looking back, the part where the orchestral track is playing while we get a panoramic shot of the setting is pretty neat. I wish I appreciated it more when I was a kid.
• ”Here, dinosaurs do not rule.”
  
  Aww, but I thought this was Walking with Dinosaurs?
  
  (Not serious, but as a kid it used to bug me how long I had to wait for an actual dinosaur to show up, just to be sure that they are, in fact, able to survive in this ecosystem.)
• So we see Cryptoclidus beached on the rocky seashores. Why is this wrong, you may ask (have a look at Mark Witton’s blogpost-> on the matter for full details; I use this as my reference)?
  
  Let’s ignore the fact that we now know that plesiosaurs gave birth to live young (even this in and of itself wouldn’t necessarily *prove* they spent all their time underwater; pinnipeds are viviparous but still surface onto land). First, plesiosaur flippers were inflexible, preventing them from being useful as land-dwelling limbs like in sea lions or even sea turtles. But what about bouncing like a seal? Seals have backbones that are sufficiently flexible to let them bounce on land. Plesiosaur torsos were rigid with their robust ribs and gastralia. Their flippers didn’t even have the claws that seal flippers have to create traction on land. All this meant that plesiosaurs were really, really unsuited to life on land.
  
  And it doesn’t end there. While plesiosaurs had pectoral girdles that promoted very powerful downstrokes to push themselves through the water, the upper regions were weakly developed. The ilium and sacral vertebrae also had a weak, ligamentous connection, making it unstable for weight-bearing on land.
  
  So there’s really no reason to think plesiosaurs were moving up on land to chill like we see in the documentary. Even if Cryptoclidus was nowhere near the 8 tonnes claimed in WWD, it would still be wholly unsuited for moving on land.
• The ammonites are just floating props, most of which are only visible by their shells. The exception is one ammonite in the background with CGI arms wriggling out (they’re shaped differently from true tentacles, as the narration calls them). Supposedly they’re Perisphinctes, which seems to check out based on the shell shape.
  
  Although the ammonites are depicted with opercula (lids that close their shells for them to hide in), it looks like even back then this would have been a controversial depiction among ammonite experts. The aptychi being part of the jaws of ammonites has been proposed as far back as 1981, and these authors from 1998 (a year before WWD premiered) asserted confidently that ammonites lacked an operculum (Monks & Young, 1998).
• The brief scene of the Ophthalmosaurus breaching out of the water and diving back in is really cool conceptually, but I can definitely see the age of the effects (the quality of the audio definitely helps make it sound older). For some odd reason this is where it seems most obvious that this was from 1999.
• Although Rhamphorhynchus is depicted skim-feeding here, a 2007 paper later found that there is no evidence that the likes of it were adapted for the behavior (Humphries et al., 2007). Hell, this paper found that no known pterosaur >2 kg would have been able to do it at all.
  
  The thing about skim-feeding is that not just any animal can do it. So much so that only two modern species, both of which are in the genus Rynchops (appropriately called skimmers), do it, and they have a wide array of adaptations to skim-feed. When you drag your lower jaw through water at relatively high speed, it undergoes a lot of stress (along with the neck), even more so if you happen to impact something in the water, such as shallow mud or vegetation. If you want further details on what those adaptations are, have a look at Mark Witton’s blog post here->).
  
  Oh, and just for fun, here’s a silly comic someone hade of a Rhamphorhynchus trying (and failing) to skim feed (link->).
  
• One detail I like about the Rhamphorhynchus animatronic/puppet is that it has a single snaggle tooth above/lateral to another, normally positioned tooth. It almost looks like it could pass for a genetic deformity or something.
• Also, the sound effects for the Rhamphorhynchus are still the ones I’d imagine if you asked me to think of a vocalizing Rhamphorhynchus.
• A Cryptoclidus is briefly shown making these low, reverberating calls while it’s on land.
  
  Has anyone given much thought to plesiosaur vocalizations? Or if they could even make any at all? Assuming that they could/did, however, I think the WWD Cryptoclidus noises sound quite nice.
• The animators didn’t pull back any punches giving the ichthyosaurs dolphin vibes, what with a couple seen arching their dorsal fins above the surface of the water for a moment. I like that.
• Branagh explains that the Ophthalmosaurus are outliers among marine reptiles for giving birth to live young underwater. As I mentioned earlier, plesiosaurs did this too (in fact, I’m not sure how the people behind this episode thought a certain humongously oversized creature that will appear soon gave birth).
• Ichthyosaurs being born tail first out of the birth canal checks out. We do indeed have fossils of ichthyosaur mothers with the tails of their embryos exiting the birth canal first. Surprisingly, though, we later learned that this wasn’t always the case. A Chaohusaurus skeleton from the Early Triassic was found with associated embryos, with one of them emerging from the mother’s birth canal. The kicker? It was being born head first (Motani et al., 2014).
  
  A later study found that in known fossils of Stenopterygius, tail-first birth predominates by a factor of 3.6:1. However, this study also notes that while modern cetaceans have a significant preference towards tail-first birth, both head- and tail-first birth have been recorded, and neither has been observed to result in significant complications during birth. Tail-first birth in ichthyosaurs seems to have become a thing in later, more derived ichthyosaurs (i.e. after the Triassic). The authors concluded that the idea that tail-first birth eliminates the embryo’s risk of suffocation underwater during birth is not actually true (Miedema et al., 2023). I can’t blame WWD for thinking it to be the case in 1999, but the fact that head-first birth in secondarily aquatic, air-breathing tetrapods complicates our understanding of their reproduction.
• There’s a brief shot (from the 7:01 to 7:06 mark) showing the mother’s full body as she gives birth. Look carefully in the background and try not to sh!t bricks.
• The animatronics used to simulate the birth of the ichthyosaur pup always looked convincing to me, and it still does.
• Branagh mentions that adult Ophthalmosaurus will eat the pups of others to increase chances of survival for their own pups. Even though it’s not shown, it’s interesting how even back then macrophagous behavior was thought of in ichthyosaurs traditionally seen as largely piscivorous or teuthivorous.
• I’m not a fossil shark expert like I know a couple folks on the paleontology-sphere of Twitter to be, so I had to look this up for myself. I think the hybodontiform depicted here should be Asteracanthus (here's-> a good representation of what it would have looked like). Hybodonts are/were often called sharks (superficially resembling them), but they’re actually their own group of elasmobranchs. It’s true that elasmobranchs were oceanic predators long before any reptile took to the sea, but sharks proper (Selacimorpha) first appeared during the Early Jurassic.
• Annnnndddd…here it comes.
  
  The way the attack is implemented here was done well IMO. First you see this gigantic monster you saw briefly at the beginning of the episode slowly emerging from the deep, then pick up some speed for its attack. There’s no dramatic music until after the struggling mother Ophthalmosaurus is bitten. It’s hard to see what happens in the chaos, but the rear half of the ichthyosaur’s body sinking to the ocean floor for the hybodonts to pick up is all that’s needed to convey the devastation of the attack. The track is superb (it is the second half of the track titled “Torosaurus Lock Horns”).
• Let’s just get the entire Walking with series’ most infamous blunder out of the way. Liopleurodon wasn’t anywhere close to 150 tonnes and 25 meters long. A smaller individual such as NHM R2680 was estimated to have been anywhere between ~4.8-5.7 meters long and ~988-1,736 kg in mass (comparable to a great white) (McHenry, 2009). Another (recent) study I found claims the largest known individual to be around ~8 meters long and ~7.8 tonnes* (Zhao, 2023). Greg Paul’s Princeton Field Guide to Mesozoic Sea Reptiles puts Liopleurodon at 6.6 meters long and 3.3 tonnes.
  
  But I’m more interested in talking about *how* the WWD figure came to be. What sort of math (or sorcery, take your pick) resulted in a 25 meter long Liopleurodon as heavy as a blue whale? This is what David Martill (a consultant for WWD) and Darren Naish back in 2000 (I really gotta thank Mark Witton for having all these blog posts that sum up the science on certain topics; link->).
  
  

  This size created much debate in palaeontolgoical circles following the first airing of the programme, as no palaeontologist thinks Liopleurodon really got this big.
  
  Although several complete [Liopleurodon] skeletons have been discovered, these are of individuals of between five and ten metres in length. It is less complete remains discovered in the Oxford Clay that indicate lengths greater than this, though here we move into an area of rough estimates and guesswork. A vertebra at the Peterborough Museum, brought to light in 1996, would seem to indicate a pliosaur of between seventeen and 20 metres in length, and various fragments of snout and lower jaw in other museum collections suggest specimens of similar size. Whether these fragments are actually from Liopleurodon is uncertain, and the animal to which they belonged has been nicknamed 'Megapleurodon'. Given that it is unlikely that these bones really represent the very biggest pliosaur specimens that ever lived, some experts cautiously suggest that Liopleurodon and related forms may have achieved total lengths of around 25 metres.

  
  
  So in short, the 20+ meter Liopleurodon was based on the Peterborough vertebra and some snout and lower jaw fragments. How did these turn out?
  
  Well, various cranial and mandibular fragments from giant pliosaurs from Britain and Mexico later turned out to scale to animals no longer than ~15 meters long or less, based on well-known pliosaur remains. The Peterborough vertebra likely belonged to a sauropod (which would explain its immense size).
  
  Make no mistake, Liopleurodon was the biggest, most powerful predator of its ecosystem. But to be clear, it was an animal more comparable in size to a great white shark, a cow orca, or at best a bull orca. It was nowhere close to being the largest and most powerful carnivore that ever lived on Earth, and it wasn’t even the largest pliosaur.
  
  *This body mass figure doesn’t seem to check out if I were to actually isometrically scale from McHenry’s estimates. Doing that results in an animal closer to ~4.7 tonnes.
• Also, Liopleurodon itself (not counting fragmentary material that was once tentatively thought to be from the genus) is actually known from earlier strata.
• As I said earlier, my little kid self always waited for an actual dinosaur to show up in this episode whenever I watched WWD. Watching it now and it turns out Eustreptospondylus first shows up not even halfway into the episode…
  
  Man I was impatient as a kid.
• I can’t look at the Eustreptospondylus animatronic in this show without thinking about what happened to it anymore.
  
  So in 2021, the Eustreptospondylus head used and filmed for WWD was discovered to be for sale on eBay. 22 years proved to be pretty unkind to it, and it was in very poor condition.
  
  
  
  Given how the eBay link redirects to a missing page, I presume it’s been sold at this point (it still boggles my mind that Trey the Explainer has the Andrewsarchus and Basilosaurus heads from WWB).
  
  I’d pay an arm and leg for any original WW series props. Okay, not really, but you get the point.
• That large dinosaurs were rare on the then-islands of Europe is outdated. Part of it is based on the relatively small size of the Eustreptospondylus holotype, but it was a subadult (this was apparently even known as early as 2000; source->). The Kimmeridge Clay was home to dinosaurs like Dacentrurus, Duriatitan, and Torvosaurus, and these were not small dinosaurs even relatively speaking.
• The Eustreptospondylus are stated to be primarily scavengers. There are some terrestrial carnivores today that are primarily scavengers, and I don’t doubt a theropod this size could perhaps get the majority of its food from scavenging if the circumstances are right, but there’s no doubt it would still have to hunt at any rate.
  
  If food is scarce on these islands, however, maybe relying primarily on scavenging isn’t the best way to live life if you eat nothing but meat.
• I love the hissing and growling vocalizations the bickering Eustreptospondylus make. Sort of crocodile-like, which I think most people these days have no problem imagining theropods vocalizing like.
• Branagh acknowledges that probing for insect larvae in trees isn’t really something Rhamphorhynchus is equipped to do, but eh, animals will sometimes try things they’re not really adapted to. Still better than skim-feeding, which can straight up damage it.
• When we cut back to the ocean, the Ophthalmosaurus pups are two weeks old. We see how they and the Cryptoclidus deal with issues their need to breathe air and predators present to them. The ichthyosaurs have to hide within coral reefs from predators like hybodonts, and use great speed to escape if necessary, just so they can take in a gulp of air. Meanwhile, Cryptoclidus manages its buoyancy using gastroliths to counteract the air in its lungs and goes up to land to escape predators.
  
  To my knowledge plesiosaur gastroliths seem to indeed be a thing (unlike sauropod gastroliths). At least one cryptoclidid plesiosaur, Tatanectes, also exhibited pachyostotic bones (i.e. the bones were made thicker to be more massive and act as ballast) (Street & O’Keefe, 2010), so that would help too.
• Ophthalmosaurus did have teeth, by the way. It was originally thought to be an edentulous animal (Science Marches On…for the umpteenth time), but this was based on jaw bones whose teeth actually slipped out after death and were lost (Ophthalmosaurus teeth were not firmly attached to the jaw bones). These teeth were small, conical, and pointed, with fine longitudinal ridges, suggesting a prey preference for small, fleshy prey that might have contained some hard internal parts (Zammit, 2012). As a whole, Ophthalmosaurus can be considered a generalist (Fischer et al., 2016).
• I was curious to see if the horseshoe crabs of the Jurassic really did look like their modern day descendants, as the ones depicted in this episode are just live-acted by modern horseshoe crabs. Turns out the answer is…yeah, they did (or at least the ones I found did). ‘Limulus’ darwini (later reassigned to Crenatolimulus darwini; Bicknell et al. (2021)) from the Late Jurassic of Poland looked reasonably similar to modern horseshoe crabs (Kin & Błażejowski, 2014; Błażejowski, 2015).
• The horseshoe crabs have their eggs raided and fed on by a large gathering of Rhamphorhynchus early in the morning. This prompts at least a couple Eustreptospondylus to hunt the little pterosaurs. Looking more closely at the scene, it looks like more Rhamphorhynchus are caught than I thought in my childhood. Also, the shot of the Eustreptospondylus leaping in the air to catch a pterosaur on the wing, epic enough to be used in the opening credits, gives me vibes of cats leaping after birds. It’d be cool if we depicted theropods of this size leaping more. They didn’t have the flexible spines of cats, but they did have powerful hip, thigh, and calf muscles, as well as very powerful M. caudofemoralis muscles retracting their femora.
• The Rhamphorhynchus perched on a rock making those honking noises knows what’s up. The Eustreptospondylus sneaking up on it doesn’t even come close to catching it (although its roar after failing to catch the pterosaur sounds nice).
• The horseshoe crab eggs hatch, the Ophthalmosaurus pups are about to outgrow the coral reefs, yay everyone’s growing up.
• ”One day [the sharks] will be the most feared predators in the sea.”
  
  You mean like…after the K-Pg extinction but before the emergence of marine mammal predators that could potentially rival them?
  
  (Of course, sharks were formidable predators in their own right throughout all this time, sometimes preying on marine tetrapods themselves)
• After a while we finally get to see some more Liopleurodon screen time. The bull finds a female invading his territory. Guess it’s not mating season because he doesn’t tolerate her presence and wounds one of her hind flippers (the description of “tusk-like teeth” puts some perspective into how nasty the dentition of Liopleurodon-> was). The “character” of Liopleurodon as a genus is fully rounded out here, as the wounded female is followed by hybodonts hoping to get a meal later. Now we’re seeing that Liopleurodon isn’t invincible (yes, even despite the massively exaggerated size).
• Near the end of the episode, the *real* most dangerous thing of the titular cruel sea arrives. A tropical storm ravages the area four months after the Ophthalmosaurus pups are born. You don’t grasp how bad it is until you see the bull Liopleurodon beached. Its death and the feast a bunch of Eustreptospondylus have on its colossal body allow the episode to come full circle from the intro.
  
  Oh and the Ophthalmosaurus pups swim away into the deep ocean at the very end.

Final verdict:
In my opinion, the overall framework of this episode’s story still works, despite all the outdated/sketchy science in/behind it. If you were to remake this episode today, you’d need to either A) set the story back >10 million years (the time of the Oxford Clay) so more or less all the animals actually fit into the time or B) switch the animals out with Kimmeridge Clay ones while keeping the setting at 149 Ma. This isn’t a hard fix at all, and you’d still have all your major players either way. If you go with option A, Liopleurodon is still the dreaded apex predator (just like…100 times less massive), you can still have Eustreptospondylus doing its land-dwelling dinosaur thing (although you’d need to rewrite the insular dwarfism aspect), you can still have Cryptoclidus doing its plesiosaur thing (just not lumbering on land like a seal), and you can certainly still have the Ophthalmosaurus pups growing up. If you go with option B, you’d simply replace Liopleurodon with the much bigger Pliosaurus, replace Eustreptospondylus with Torvosaurus (and again, depict it doing its terrestrial dinosaur thing), replace Cryptoclidus with Kimmerosaurus or something, and, if Wikipedia’s article on the Kimmeridge Clay is anything to go by, you can even keep Ophthalmosaurus (and you can certainly include Rhamphorhynchus). A lot of the basic story elements will still work, even if your plesiosaurs don’t lubber on land, your big bad pliosaur is just 11 tonnes instead of 150 tonnes, etc., etc. It’s for this reason that I can still enjoy this episode. Just...don’t take everything in it at face value lmao.

[dinosauria101]

Giant of the Skies:



-”In life he was the most magnificent beast ever to take to the wing. He ruled the skies supreme, flying far and wide over the lands of the dinosaurs. This is the story of the last journey this giant ever made”.

We begin what I would say is WWD’s most emotional episode. With very sad music and a full-body Ornithocheirus animatronic lying dead, Branagh (whose tone of voice for this strikes an ideal moroseness here) tells us this about him - overall a phenomenal hook.

-This episode starts off in the Cretaceous, in 127-million-year-old Brazil. Branagh tells us that in the Cretaceous, besides just the continents continuing to break up, rising sea levels make new waterways and coastlines.

These create ragged cliffs where there were once landmasses, and these cliffs are buzzing with colorful pterosaurs. To demonstrate this, although not yet explicitly identified as such, we get some CGI and animatronic head shots of some red and purple Tapejara that are my all-time favorite documentary pterosaurs for their color pattern, and also have moderately deep squawks that sound very appropriate to me.

-A little note on the posture of the pterosaurs here: no matter how inaccurate it might be, from an entertainment perspective I prefer the way it looks to the actual pterosaur posture. In my opinion it makes the animals somehow look more ‘complete’ and ‘whole’.

-At this point in time, there are many bigger pterosaurs: 6 meter plus wingspans are common. But there is one species that dwarfs them all…..

…..and that is Ornithocheirus*, for which we have dramatic introductory music as he flies onto the scene. Being 12 meters from wingtip to wingtip with a body bigger than a man’s**, he is the undisputed king of the skies.

-*Like in Cruel Sea, here is another specific-word narration discrepancy between WWD and new documentaries I have seen for comparison.

In my opinion, Kenneth Branagh pronouncing these pterosaur names in WWD - especially Ornithocheirus - sounds very majestic and nice, exactly the opposite to what I thought of David Attenborough’s pronunciation of them in PP - especially Hatzegopteryx, Quetzalcoatlus, and Phosphatodraco. And like in Cruel Sea, it is to the point where it is a much bigger discrepancy than my usual already-large discrepancy of opinion between them - although I will admit the fact that Ornithocheirus is my all-time favorite pterosaur name whereas I am not a fan of names like Hatzegopteryx and Barbaridactylus may be coming into play here.

-**For a second Cruel Sea parallel, my opinion on a pure entertainment watch is substantially more positive than with nostalgia, because just like with the Cruel Sea Liopleurodon I used to be very annoyed by the fact that they oversized Tropeognathus and wrongly called it Ornithocheirus. Whereas with the entertainment I like both the Ornithocheirus name more than Tropeognathus, as well as the thought of a 12 meter wingspan Ornithocheirus.

-When he lands, we get an animatronic head and neck closeup. There are so many good things I have to say about this animatronic: it gives me a great sense of scale to know I am looking at something big, the orange snout/blue eyes/black and gray neck color scheme are my second favorite for a pterosaur behind only Tapejara, and as authentic-looking as all of WWD’s animatronics are this is one I find to be even more notably so.

What’s more, having seen Prehistoric Planet for comparison which had a nonbreeding Hatzegopteryx model I straight up didn’t like the color of, I appreciate the color scheme of the WWD Ornithocheirus even more.

-Branagh tells us that he is over 40 years old, and while most of this time has been spent wandering the globe to find food, there is an annual interruption to this nomadic lifestyle. That would be the time to mate, which is coming up.

All around him the breeding season is well underway for Tapejara, finally identified and appropriately described as bizarre-looking. We also get another one of those fabulous Tapejara animatronic head shots!

-Branagh tells us about how pterosaurs can fly: their wings are thin skin membranes stretching from elongated forelimb bones to the ends of their hindlimbs, and their bones are hollow, which make them masters of the air.

Then we see male Tapejara competing: they squat, screech, and display their crests until one competitor backs down, at which point the females may approach the winner.

-Of course, like in any competition, there are losers. One unfortunate male Tapejara is perilously close to a blowhole, where there isn’t much chance he will attract a mate.

-Back to our Ornithocheirus (which has my favorite pterosaur sfx in any documentary, they are a nice balance between high and low pitches), instinct tells him it’s time to head to his breeding site in Europe - the other side of the world. And as Branagh tells us this we get a well-timed shot of the animatronic head gazing into the distance.

-”For this giant of the skies, it will be the last great flight he ever makes. What he is about to undertake is the most astounding journey in the animal kingdom. From the shores of the great southern continent, he will travel to North America, cross the Atlantic Seaway, and fly onto the islands which mark where Europe will one day be formed. Spread out below him will be the majesty and spectacle of a world ruled by dinosaurs”.

As Branagh tells us this, our Ornithocheirus flies off, the music (Flight of the Ornithocheirus) gets upbeat and orchestral, and we see small shots of the places he shall go. What an incredibly dramatic and enthralling way to describe and introduce his journey!

-In just a few days he reaches southern North America, and the music continues as we see a huge herd of Iguanodon grazing beach vegetation, aptly described by Branagh as being ‘a thousand tons of dinosaur on the move’.

As usual, the color pattern (kind of zebra-esque brown/black with white stripes) and the deep bellow sfx are a yes in my book.

-These Iguanodon are capable of running on just 2 legs, which gives them a substantial nimbleness advantage over the lumbering armored hunk Polacanthus (another great CGI model!) that accompanies the herd.

-A setback is ahead: in the tropical climate of these dinosaurs, there are violent tropical storms in the wet season. These provide welcome dry season relief for thirsty plants and lean river (that we get some excellent real-life shots of).....

…..but for the Ornithocheirus it is a disaster. Grounded and forced to shelter underneath a ridge of rock, his urge to get to the breeding site is very frustrated.

-We even get some rain-soaked Ornithocheirus animatronic closeups! I very much like how the producers went through the trouble to go the extra step.

-By contrast the Iguanodon herd is not at all hindered by the rain: they are very successful dinosaurs found on every continent and eating a variety of vegetation. Their North American habitat is ideal with a combination of river estuaries and thick podocarp scrub/tree ferns to eat.

To illustrate their success, we get Iguanodon animatronic head closeup eating vegetation (which are fabulously authentic in my opinion) as Branagh tells us their ability to chew with their back teeth is superior to the crude slicing teeth of most herbivorous dinosaurs for breaking down Cretaceous plants.

-There is also some very nicely shot insight into how the plants are doing: the first (live-acted) flowering plants have appeared, and we see a wasp eating their pollen. Branagh tells us this wasp will spread the flower’s pollen to other flowers when it goes to eat more, thereby pollinating them and doing its part in the relationship between plants and insects.

-The next morning, the weather starts to improve: while it does, our Ornithocheirus busies himself with grooming to stay in prime condition. It looks like some live lice were shot for this scene up close!

Smaller pterosaurs are able to fly, but Ornithocheirus is so big that he must wait on warm updrafts of air sufficiently strong to give him lift. To illustrate his impatience, we get a sunrise-bathed animatronic review showing his snout crests have already begun to turn red for the breeding site - kudos to the producers for this nice touch.

-Finally he is able to get going on his epic journey again, and Flight of the Ornithocheirus resumes. We see him continuing along the coast of North America, and his flying past a rock cliff surrounded by smaller pterosaurs really puts his size into perspective.

Branagh tells us the reason he is such an efficient glider is because he is so light (weighing under 100 kilograms).....and as both his voice and the music pick up in intensity, our Ornithocheirus gets to the point where he must face open water. The young Atlantic is only 300 kilometers wide, but to cross it he will need all the efficient gliding skills he can get.

-On the way he must feed (which we are shown with the Ornithocheirus animatronic head dipping into the water and holding an actual fish), but flying low brings its dangers: a hungry pliosaur watches him from below the waves.

-As the music peaks, he reaches the most western of Europe’s islands having spent a whole day on the wing. Whatever real-life location was shot to represent these islands has some fabulous-looking terrain and vegetation in my opinion.

Once again huge Iguanodon herds dominate the landscape, although they are a larger 3 ton European species. They have the same appropriate bellows as before, and I’d say nicer colors than the North Americans (yellow and green with brown tail stripes).

-And just like before, a spiky Polacanthus accompanies them - these dinosaurs are often found around Iguanodon herds, presumably for some mutual protection.

Such protection is most definitely called for! As the music picks up to Torosaurus Lock Horns, we see some carnivorous Utahraptors watching and biding their time - for which we get appropriately spooky animatronic head closeups.

-A note on the Utahraptors: as much as they need feathers (and not just from an accuracy perspective, I very strongly prefer the way appropriately feathered dinosaurs look to the way inappropriately featherless dinosaurs look), their beige-with-black-spots pattern is good-looking enough for me to overlook that, as are the animatronic head closeups.

-In the meantime, another conflict looms. A small pterosaur fishes in a lake, and catches a fish…..but its success has been noticed by our Ornithocheirus, who turns bully and steals it.

-Back to the Utahraptors: a female has been stalking the Iguanodons, for which we get animatronic closeups of both her head and her claws!

With the return of Torosaurus Lock Horns, the animatronics, and Branagh’s tone of voice as he tells us about her pack and her claws, there is a decidedly appropriate spook factor like before.

-The female rushes out as the music peaks…..and fails because she is unable to get a good grip on the fleeing Iguanodon when she leaps onto them. She appropriately pants in exhaustion, and as we get another animatronic head closeup Branagh tells us about how these short-legged sprinter dinosaurs do not pursue prey for long: this one saves her energy for later.

-Eventually, the herbivores calm back down: while the Iguanodon herd heads to the lake, a Polacanthus lags behind to gorge on conifers.

The Utahraptors reappear, but are deterred by the Polacanthus’ display of spiky armor: easier meals are to be found nearby.

-Did I mention how much I like the piebald color of the CGI Polacanthus?

-We get some incredible lakeside shots of the Iguanodon herd with very well-shot reflections and drinking, as our Ornithocheirus sits safe on a lake rock in the background

-Now the Utahraptors begin closing in, with Torosaurus Lock Horns returning a third time. After the unsuccessful attack earlier, they are being more cautious, and it has paid off because they are now within striking distance of the nervous herd.

When they strike and cause the herd to flee, the music peaks, which is incredibly epic!

-Two Utahraptors manage to get a good grip on one Iguanodon and bring it down with neck bites: its bellows of agony are quite appropriate here in my opinion.

It is the first kill the pack have made for over a week: they may eat as much as 100 kilograms at once.

-While they are eating, we get both a pack conflict (a juvenile well down the pecking order tries his luck to eat sooner but is put in place) and very authentic animatronic Utahraptor heads/claws eating an animatronic Iguanodon corpse. Branagh’s narration is particularly good for the conflict.

-Our Ornithocheirus must leave these killing fields for a safer place to spend the night, with Flight of the Ornithocheirus picking back up as he does so. He finds what initially appears to be a safe island…..

…..but it’s not. Small flying feathered dinosaurs related to the Utahraptors (AKA birds) were here first, and their breeding season is right now (a point illustrated with some bird nest practical effects), which means that despite looking like insects next to the Ornithocheirus they mob him to make him go away.

-Branagh tells us that their feathered arms are more resistant to damage than the pterosaur’s skin membranes (which always had me cringe at the thought of said damage), and as the soundtrack turns morose he continues with far-future foreshadowing that the pterosaurs will surrender the skies to the birds in the WW universe - although I personally think this is rather early for this foreshadowing and would have skipped it entirely.

Nonetheless, I do quite like the bright blue CGI models of the birds!

-Anyway, he continues on his journey (for which Flight of the Ornithocheirus picks back up), and reaches the island of Cantabria, which will one day be Spain’s bedrock. His 14000 kilometer journey has proved exhausting, but there lies the mating ground at last!

To illustrate it, we get some views of the huge numbers of Ornithocheirus it has, which never fails to amaze me.

-Our Ornithocheirus has returned here every year of his life to breed, and experience has taught him that the closer he is to the center of the mob, the more attractive he will be to the females. He heads right for that position (with it in fact being the dominant position he has previously occupied).....

-…..but today he faces a challenge to his supremacy. Try as he might to land, he repeatedly gets fended off by the males already on the ground (one of which we see as a very appreciable animatronic head!)

-Eventually his weariness dictates he must land elsewhere, for which Giant of the Skies switches to more morose music that does tug at one’s heartstrings a bit. I’d say this is a nice parallel to the mother Dimetrodon in WWM Reptile’s Beginnings, as this is a pretty obvious beginning point for remainder-of-the-episode-suffering just like she had.

-His previous position at the breeding site has been usurped by younger males, which eagerly advertise their vigor and size to the females. To illustrate this, there is yet another appreciable animatronic head.

In my opinion this both shows the competence of said younger males and creates a bit more pathos for our Ornithocheirus. Two birds with one stone, if you will.

-Our Ornithocheirus, as he lands in the outskirts to which he has been banished, is morosely stated by Branagh to have had his world turned upside down. Despite his instinct telling him to keep on going through the heat of the day, he will be lucky to attract a female at all - this is where the episode’s most emotional part begins in my opinion.

-However, we do get closeups of him calling for a mate via an animatronic head, which are so well-shot that they may be my favorite of the Ornithocheirus animatronic head shots in the whole episode!

-At the center of the mating site, we see a female has just landed, and a male begins to mate with her. In my opinion, this furthers the most emotional part of the episode mentioned above because we are watching one of the usurpers of our Ornithocheirus successfully attracting a mate in his usurped center spot.

-As they mate, the male flushes his red snout crests at the female to impress her, and when they are done, the female leaves while the male keeps calling to attract yet more females.

We are shown the mating with some very professionally-placed full-body animatronics, and they also went out of their way to make the female Ornithocheirus animatronic with no crests. This is really a scene where the authenticity of WWD’s animatronics shines in my opinion.

-We move forward 3 days, and finally the breeding ground has begun to empty of male Ornithocheirus.

-”Our Ornithocheirus has yet to mate. Worse still, his fruitless exertions under the blazing sun have taken a heavy toll. Heat stress and lack of food have all but killed him. The king of the skies has lost his majesty”.

We are told this by Branagh as the music turns morose and we see our Ornithocheirus struggling to stay upright, complete with an animatronic head closeup that certainly looks befitting of a dying individual. In my opinion, this is the peak of the most emotional part of the episode.

-No, seriously, this is by far the peak protagonist emotion in any palaeodocumentary I have ever watched. I’ve lost count of the number of times I watched this with an incredibly heavy heart, wanting to travel back in time and nurse the poor Ornithocheirus back to health - no other palaeodocumentary, as good as many others are, EVER had me wanting to do something on that level.

The next morning he has died, and the music turns finalizing. To illustrate this, we get more shots of the same full-body dead animatronic we begin the episode with - this very much furthers the emotion.

-”His life has run full circle. In his time he traveled the globe, but death finds him here, in the very same place where he first mated some 40 years ago”.

This is how Branagh describes the death scene, and with his tone of voice it is a very poignant statement. Rounds off so much emotion perfectly, in my opinion.

-To end the episode, we see many other full-body animatronics representing other Ornithocheirus that lost out in the struggle to reproduce. Given how difficult it was for the BBC to deal with the full-body Ornithocheirus animatronics, I really appreciate that they took this step!

But on a more happy note, nature is seldom wasteful. Therefore, as is illustrated by a youngster eating the eye of either our male or another male, they have become food for the next generation.

Overall Verdict:

I’d consider Giant of the Skies serious competition with Time of the Titans for being my all-time favorite episode of WWD! It comes down to a combination of having a lot of things going for it and having a lot of those things be very strong points even on their own.

An upside much bigger than I thought it would be is my comparative appreciation from seeing other, newer documentaries being greater than in any other episode of WWD. Specifically, I am referring to the pterosaur segments in Prehistoric Planet.

Besides simply the comparative appreciation I outlined in the review, as readers who also read my Prehistoric Planet reviews know, I found Prehistoric Planet’s pterosaur segments to generally be consistently unimmersive and disappointing (with the only definite exception of the T. rex/Quetzalcoatlus scene) due to the Planet Earth format being used instead of a narrative storytelling format. A compounding factor in the letdown is that there is so much they could have done with their pterosaurs of choice had they gone with the latter (eg: Alpha’s Egg-style multiple character storytelling for the Alcione hatching scene and the Hatzegopteryx/Tethyshadros, WWD episode-style stories for the Hatzegopteryx/Barbaridactylus/unnamed baby azhdarchids/Quetzalcoatlus family, etc) that I would have so enjoyed.

This is in quite the contrast to the many storytelling aspects Giant of the Skies had that I found to have given it truly spectacular immersion. The full body death foreshadowing, the variety of locations in 1 story, the epic migration, the mating ground emotional scene making me want to head back in time and save our Ornithocheirus, etc, are all more appreciable to me in light of comparison to the above.

Even leaving aside my problems with the Planet Earth format, there are a number of other ways in which I found Giant of the Skies to be far superior to Prehistoric Planet's pterosaur segments. Most of the music wasn't for me (some of it I straight up did not like in fact), nor were the sfx, and a lot of them would have substantially benefitted from very easy arc-specific improvements that somehow slipped the producers' minds.

All 3 of these are true of what is arguably Prehistoric Planet's direct counterpart to Giant of the Skies: the Hatzegopteryx mating scene. As readers who read my review for it know, I would have found it to be a much better scene with a number of easy arc-specific improvements, and since writing that review I have the additional problems with it of David Attenborough's cotton ball-y narration and the very romanticized soundtrack both being especially inappropriate for the subject matter at hand for my taste, particularly with regard to how high the stakes were. These are, like above, in very stark contrast to how much I especially adore Branagh's narration for this episode, Giant of the Skies' music, the Ornithocheirus' sfx and found subject matters/contexts to be well-covered as opposed to needing improvement suggestions.

Finally, I think I simply prefer Ornithocheirus to any of the pterosaur species in Prehistoric Planet. It's not simply being my favorite pterosaur name, I prefer the way the teeth and snout crests look to any of Prehistoric Planet's headcrested, toothless pterosaurs.

This certainly isn't to downplay the very large number of things this episode has going for it even on its own, however! Its strengths shine even as WWD commonalities: some of my favorite animatronic shots ever, endless color designs I supremely adore, one of the more epic narratives, appropriate and well-filmed real-life backgrounds, a good mix of animals, inaccuracies that used to be annoying in the nostalgia days turning into significant upsides from an entertainment perspective, and of course all that emotion I've been going over above.
Several of these of these shine over its main competitor of Time of the Titans, with the main evening factor being that Time of the Titans is most adherent to WALKING with dinosaurs - had it not been, there wouldn't have been much of a competition.

So congratulations, WWD Ornithocheirus! Even at the very end of your life you have managed to give me a watch of an episode that isn't just giant leaps and bounds above all the competition, it's serious competition for being top-tier even among WWD.

[Infinity Blade]

Giant of the Skies (Brazil, North America, & Europe, 127 million years ago):

• So I just noticed that in the opening sequence, the animal vocalization that plays in the background after you see the sun rise alternates with each episode. Because…I don’t know why, nor do I know why that was important to note.
• I have no shame using a picture of the Tropeognathus’ corpse (called Ornithocheirus in this doc, because that’s what this species was classified as at the time) as the header image in this post, because the episode literally starts out with it. This is the only episode to have a “yep, that’s me, you’re probably wondering how I got here” beginning. I still don’t know if I prefer the fact that the episode’s outcome is a foregone conclusion or not, but either way it still works narratively.
• So the story begins in Brazil, but because this is the story of a transoceanic traveler of a pterosaur, this is not intended to be set-in-stone unlike the other episode blurbs.
• Branagh calls this the beginning of the Cretaceous. While this is certainly the Early Cretaceous, the Cretaceous actually began 18 million years earlier, just 4 million years after the previous episode.
• Was Tropeognathus 12 meters in wingspan? Mmm, probably not. The Walking with Dinosaurs companion book (p. 158) reveals that their basis for the 12 m wingspan were fragmentary fossils from the Santana Group (link->). The remains that were used to justify the 12 m Tropeognathus were still under study at the time WWD was being made. It’s worth noting that these were complete and utter top-end estimates for the remains (link->). A study describing the remains was finally published in 2013 and the final result was *drum roll*…a maximum wingspan of 8.7 meters (Kellner et al., 2013). On the figure the program used, Dave Unwin said “I really doubt the individual we have
  actually reached this size, but give programme makers a choice and, understandably, they will opt for the most spectacular measure on offer.”
  
  Now of course, pterosaurs with 12 meter wingspans *did*, in fact, exist. But these were exceptionally large azhdarchids that lived during the Maastrichtian (which is way later) and were as massive as grizzly bears. That said, I’m actually glad, in retrospect, that WWD used Tropeognathus anyway, even if not for the same reasons I am. At 8.7 meters wide, Tropeognathus already had a wider wingspan than any flying bird. If you ignore the documentary’s claims of it having a 12 meter wingspan, you’ll see that it doesn’t need to use the biggest pterosaur ever to earn your awe.
• The pterosaurs on the rock cliffs making those memorable and nostalgic vocalizations are called Tapejara. But they are in fact, based on a species now reassigned to the genus Tupandactylus. There are two species of Tupandactylus: T. imperator and T. navigans. And that head crest is actually even *bigger* than WWD portrays for both species (here’s T. imperator->, T. cf. imperator->, and T. navigans->). These crests were made from soft tissue and were supported by bone.
  
  Now, there *is* a possibility that T. navigans actually represents the other sex of T. imperator, but this is by no means conclusive (Beccari et al., 2021).
• The Tropeognathus leaves the Brazilian coast and eventually makes it to the southern tip of North America. The massive (somewhat mixed) herd of dinosaurs we see walking along the shoreline are called ‘Iguanodon’ and ‘Polacanthus’. The reason they are called this is because WWD was made during a time when Iguanodon (and to some extent Polacanthus) was a wastebasket taxon for a bunch of different species. Many have since been reclassified as belonging to their own genera. These creatures, then, are supposed to be Dakotadon and Hoplitosaurus.
• The Dakotadon also appears to have some relatively small, gracile forelimbs for its size, as opposed to the massive, thick ones more akin to actual Iguanodon. TV Tropes claims this is due to basing it off of Mantellisaurus, which is by no means surprising (as Mantellisaurus was formerly regarded as part of the genus Iguanodon; again, wastebasket).
• The noises the iguanodonts of this episode make, however, will never leave my mind. It’s hard to think of an Iguanodon and imagine it *not* making that noise (that I can’t even describe properly lol). But the sound I REALLY love is that braying noise the young ones make when they’re play-running. That’s the kind of noise the kid inside of me wishes at least one dinosaur made in the Mesozoic.
• A tropical storm brings heavy rain to the area, and this is apparently a setback for the old Tropeognathus. Why? Because “The fine downy fur that covers his body needs to be kept dry”. There’s a bit to unpack here.
  
  First, so “fur” is almost certainly referring to pycnofibers. I didn’t know this until I was doing research for the episode, but pycnofibers have been uncovered in pterosaur fossils as early as the 1830s. Of course, it was widely doubted back then, but then their presence became incontrovertible during the 1990s, explaining their presence here (although I’m gonna be honest, I don’t see them at all on the model; they’re only obvious when you see the close-up of a parasite on the Tropeognathus’ wing membrane).
  
  Second, the idea that the pterosaur would need to take cover during heavy rain is reminiscent of bats. Bats use up twice as much energy while flying when wet, but rain makes no difference in this regard (so just being wet, not rain in and of itself, is an issue to them) (Voigt et al., 2011). With hair-like pycnofibers, membranous wings, and an objective to traverse over a wide swath of ocean, would a Tropeognathus also avoid flying under heavy rain? I think that’s likely, although A) it wouldn’t be impossible to fly when wet, just more energetically costly and B) the pterosaur would likely temporarily stop from heavy rain *because* the trip is long and exhausting, not in spite of it.
  
  And before you start thinking that this is some handicap unique to pterosaurs or bats, birds also avoid flying in rain (link->), although apparently for different reasons. Many flying insects will as well (link->).
• The idea of Iguanodon being among the most successful dinosaurs living on every continent is, again, the result of Iguanodon being used as a wastebasket taxon for years.
• The chewing abilities of iguanodonts are explained, and yes, that can indeed be a useful adaptation.
• One thing you’ll notice about this second half of WWD – the Cretaceous episodes – is that the evolution of a couple modern organism groups recurs. Here the evolution of angiosperms is covered (as well as their symbiotic relationship with pollinators, namely insects), and so will the evolution of birds. Both will pop up again in the final episode. These aren’t major points by any means, but although this is called "Walking with Dinosaurs", our modern world is in the making here.
• After the rain clears and warm air currents build up, the Tropeognathus continues his journey. He eventually reaches the early Atlantic Ocean, still a considerable flight for him. He has to feed (on fish) along the way, as well as avoid marine predators underneath the surface of the ocean.
  
  The craniodental anatomy of Tropeognathus is indeed consistent with piscivory (Pêgas et al., 2021), but it should be noted that terrestrial prey was also sometimes included in the diets of ornithocheiroids (Myers, 2017), so this Tropeognathus should be able to prey on small creatures on land as well (whenever he reaches it).
  
  The predator shown watching the old Tropeognathus underneath the waves is a Plesiopleurodon, making a cameo in the form of a recycled Liopleurodon model. While it’s a nice nod to the previous episode, we now know that Plesiopleurodon wasn’t actually a pliosaur like Liopleurodon, but a polycotylid. The real animal seems to have had a less bulky-looking head than the WWD Liopleurodon model. Not an issue. What does shock me, however, is that this model looks like it wasn’t even rendered for this scene (compare the two here->). I always thought it was a palette swap, but when someone pointed out that it doesn’t even look fully rendered, it made a lot more sense to me. I just…wow.
• Iguanodon and Polacanthus appear in Europe again (this time the former are green in color). The two genera are indeed native to Europe (namely England). But then Utahraptor shows up (and I forgot that their first appearance is in the form of their puppets, not their CGI models). Why are they in Europe? Well, according to the companion book, the reasoning for this was that North America and Europe were supposedly connected at the time (as supposedly indicated by creatures like Iguanodon and Polacanthus being found in both continents). However, because these North American fossils are now assigned to different genera, this is not an idea that holds water in the present day.
  
  The time placement for Utahraptor is okay for the time, as most workers at the time believed the Yellow Cat Member which Utahraptor hails from dated to around the Barremian to the Aptian. Much later, though, the Yellow Cat Member turned out to be much older than thought, dating instead to ~139-134 Ma (Joeckel et al., 2019).
• Now that I think about it, the Tropeognathus was probably big enough to not only bully that smaller pterosaur from its fish, but just eat it outright.
• The way it’s framed, the Utahraptor pack seems like a potential threat to the Tropeognathus. Later on, Branagh says he needs to leave the “killing fields”, indicating that the raptors are indeed a danger to it. However, other than that they don’t really do anything to convey how the pterosaur is a potential target. The third episode of WWB executes this “uncertain target” trope better (between a Hyaenodon, the indricothere calf, and some chalicotheres).
• I could write something relatively in-depth about the Utahraptor models that have aged so graciously well (please tell me you’re smart enough to see the sarcasm dripping through my tone)…but I’ll just sum it up as follows. If we were to make this model today we would:
  
  1. Add feathers (duh)
  2. Make its body bulkier overall
  3. Give its skull a more anatomically correct shape (more rectangular and proportionately larger)
  4. Get rid of the pronated hands
• One thing WWD *does* get right about dromaeosaurids, however, is that they were short distance runners. With their relatively short, stocky lower legs (and this was especially true of Utahraptor), these were not animals that would chase their prey for long distances, instead sprinting after them. However, these words imply that dromaeosaurids were still fast runners, and when you see the chase scene later on, you’ll see that this is true. WWD understood what so many paleonerds in the 2010s (and maybe even now) didn’t.
• Looking at how the Utahraptor approaches its prey has made me think how it would do so with the knowledge we now have of it. Imagine this 300+ kg bear of a dromaeosaur charging at its prey. Even if it’s not a very high jump, the sheer force with which it could attack prey with must have been immense. I’ve seen a brief old clip of a cougar pouncing on a cow elk and making it stagger upon contact, quickly bringing it to the ground despite the elk clearly being the larger animal. Imagine what a Utahraptor could do.
• I feel like these Utahraptor have an ambush problem. Like, they clearly try to ambush the herd, but they keep on getting detected before they even attack.
• Aside from that, the track “Torosaurus Lock Horns” is used once more in the series, but this time the more suspenseful half of it is implemented. Paired with the Utahraptor chasing their prey, it’s an absolute peak scene. When I think of how amazing the WWD soundtrack is, THIS is my go-to example.
• The interesting thing is that despite the Utahraptor having their sickle claws (and them being acknowledged as serious weapons), it seems to be their jaws that actually kill the Iguanodon. One of them clamps onto its throat and the helpless cries the Iguanodon make as it’s caught in their grasp sell the brutality of the kill. I actually do believe that it was the jaws of dromaeosaurids that were their primary killing weapon (although their sickle claws can certainly be used in a lethal manner as well, as the Fighting Dinosaurs Velociraptor specimen attests to).
  
  The only thing (and this may or may not be true) is that it seems like the dromaeosaurs are trying to kill the Iguanodon via asphyxiation sheerly by holding onto the neck, similar to a big cat. Dromaeosaurids were not built for asphyxiation bites like big conical-toothed cats are. Instead their jaws were better suited to pull out a chunk of flesh. Given how the actual kill is off-screen, you could potentially still imagine that happening in this scene, though I doubt that’s what the writers were going for.
  
  Interestingly, in The Making of Walking with Dinosaurs, Peter Dodson imagines a killing method combining both things mentioned above. He mentions raptors grabbing with their front claws, slashing with their sickle talons, “biting, biting, biting” the back and working up to the neck (which would weaken the prey with blood loss), and then finishing with an asphyxiating bite to the throat.
• So surely the Utahraptors hunting in packs is inaccurate too, right? Well…hold your horses there, bud. Sure, there’s no conclusive proof Utahraptor (or any dromaeosaurid, or any fossil theropod for that matter) hunted in packs, but there is one site (formerly a natural mud trap) that preserved the remains of multiple Utahraptor individuals of different growth stages together. It’s not impossible that these were all unrelated individuals that were preserved together by chance, but it is considered more probable (at least by a few authors) that this represents a social group of likely related individuals (Frederickson et al., 2020). Group hunting can already arise from completely unrelated individuals opportunistically banding together, and so if this Utahraptor congregation represents a social group, it’s not out there that they also hunted together. Of course, more work is needed, but the raptors (especially for Utahraptor) hunting in a group isn’t something I’d kill the doc makers for at all. Especially not when it’s shown that the group members depicted here can get aggressive with one another anyway.
• ”They will eat as much as 100 kg each in one sitting.”
  
  Uhhh…doesn’t that sound a bit off? Even if you went with 500 kg for Utahraptor, that’s still a fifth of their entire body mass. Modern lions don’t need anywhere near that much meat in one day. A Utahraptor, which is considerably bigger than the average adult lion, would need even less meat relative to its body mass (though it would eat an absolutely larger quantity of it).
• That bluish-green-tinted Iguanodon carcass prop always lowkey disgusted me for some reason. It still kind of does.
• I feel like the Utahraptors are the one animal in this program that get as much screen time as puppets as they do as CGI models. But no, I’m not going to check like a mad man.
• We finally get back to the Tropeognathus, who lands on one final spot before he reaches the mating grounds for good. Unfortunately he’s chased off by a flock of nesting Iberomesornis, the first bird shown in the series (and rightfully called flying dinosaurs). Now, I don't have a problem with the concept of a flock of flying animals mobbing and chasing off a much larger one that they can’t actually hurt. It’s what the narration says as this happens that grates me.
• “…their tiny feathered wings are more resistant to damage than the skin membrane of the pterosaur, especially among the branches and twigs of dense forests. In the far future, the pterosaurs will surrender the skies to the birds.”
  
  
  (Art by Karolina Twardosz)
• Okay so what’s actually wrong with this? Well, it’s yet more outdated info. From personal experience I haven’t seen anyone recently espouse this idea, but it’s still irritating to hear the idea of our beloved modern group outcompeting this highly successful group of other animals from the past with no living descendants.
  
  With regards to wings, we now know that pterosaur wings were not just simple skin membranes. In addition to skin, the pterosaur patagium was also composed of muscle, connective tissue, blood vessels, and strengthening actinofibrils (have a look at this image->) for a visualization). If having membranous skin for wings was so bad in comparison to feathers, how come bats were able to evolve right in the face of birds after the Mesozoic, and thrive for 55 million years to come?
  
  As for outcompetition by birds, we…don’t have any evidence that birds were outcompeting pterosaurs. Even back in 2009, it was found that a lot of the observed patterns in pterosaur diversity may simply be a result of sampling biases, and that there was no evidence of a long term decline of pterosaurs during the Cretaceous (Butler et al., 2009). Based on differences in limb and jaw morphology, pterosaurs and birds also would have been ecologically separated from each other, minimizing competition and weakening the outcompetition hypothesis (Chan, 2017).
  
  And no, it wasn’t like birds were outcompeting small pterosaurs either. In the Cretaceous, there is evidence that juveniles of large, giant pterosaurs were being used to fill in small-bodied niches previously occupied by small adult pterosaurs in the Triassic and Jurassic (Smith et al., 2021). And even then there were still small adult pterosaurs even during the Late Cretaceous (Martin-Silverstone, 2016).
  
  Lastly, although for the longest time azhdarchids were the only definitively known Maastrichtian pterosaur family, in 2018 this was shot dead in its tracks. A pterosaur assemblage from the Maastrichtian of Morocco preserved the remains of not just azhdarchids, but also nyctosaurids and (at least what appeared to be) pteranodontids. Not only that, but these late Maastrichtian pterosaurs were occupying more niches compared to their Santonian-Campanian predecessors, suggesting that before the K-Pg event, pterosaurs actually *reclaimed* some niches previously held by birds (Longrich et al., 2018; problematic author).
  
  The evidence against pterosaur outcompetition by birds is so strong at this point that I don’t think anyone recently has seriously advocated for it. Good on us for killing it from the paleo-sphere’s collective consciousness.
• Narratively, the dramatic and tragic version of “Flight of the Ornithocheirus/Giant of the Skies” playing as the Tropeognathus is fleeing lets you know that the seeds of pterosaur doom in this alternative real life/CGI universe have already been sowed. We’ll check back and see how the pterosaurs turn out two episodes later.
• At last, the old male reaches what is now Cantabria. He attempts to land on the coveted sweet spot that’s best for attracting females (around the center). Unfortunately, by the time he arrives there are already a bunch of younger males occupying the space, and his exhaustion and weariness don’t help him against the grounded males fending him off with their toothy maws. It’s mentioned that this was the spot he dominated for years, so clearly the old male was a long-time champion. Until today.
• The first time we actually see a female, we see it doesn’t have the crest known in Tropeognathus, showing clear sexual dimorphism. That’s an interesting take.
• Three days later, the old male is dying as a result of heat stress and starvation as “Giant of the Skies” plays in the background. He has failed to mate at all, and it’s clear from the fact that he’s struggling to move that he never will. Some fluid discharge was added streaming down his nostrils and eyes on the animatronic; the latter makes it look as if he’s crying. The moment he drops dead is even shown to us before we cut back to his carcass from the beginning of the episode. His only companions are the other males who lost the mating game, probably dying from the same things that killed him. They are also reduced to food for hungry young Tropeognathus still left over, the last thing they can offer their species.
  
  That said, the companion book has this final word on him. His life goal of producing the strong next generation was a success.
  
  “Despite this ignominious end, the old male was a success – in his 40 years of life he probably sired several thousand offspring and it is highly likely that some of them were on this very beach, competing and succeeding where he finally failed.”
• And hey, he died on a shoreline with plenty of wet sediment to go around. One day he’ll amaze the creatures of the future with his enormous fossils! They’ll write a story about how they think his life went! They’ll write reviews on the story about how they think his life went! But most importantly, his legacy will live o-
  
  
  
  
  …God…god-fücking damn it.

Final verdict:
I’m not really sure how to feel about this episode. The mix and match fauna is kind of hard to ignore. For Cruel Sea all you had to do was either make the time period different (to match that of the Oxford Clay) or switch out the animals (to match that of the Kimmeridge Clay, and they all have suitable substitutes that wouldn’t change the narrative of the episode or storyline). What about this episode? Ornithocheirus really being Tropeognathus and Tapejara really being Tupandactylus are minor. Heck, so are the North American dinosaurs being identified as Iguanodon and Polacanthus. But combine that with the Iguanodon model appearing to combine features from Mantellisaurus and the actual Iguanodon, and Utahraptor being in Europe, it all gets confusing. I’m not even going to get into the datedness of the dinosaur models, namely the Utahraptor.

However, aside from that the story was solid. Although the story is primarily about the old male Tropeognathus just…flying to the breeding grounds, plenty of stuff happens in between that still conveys not only its struggles as an animal, but also that of the dinosaurs down below him. The Utahraptor hunt is easily one of the most memorable moments from WWD. And then comes the absolute banger, but depressing ending. Soundtrack, the writers’ decision to have the main protagonist “lose” instead of win out (because needless to say, not every organism “wins”), and relegate his final use to his species as food all make the ending peak Walking with Dinosaurs.

So uhhh…mixed feelings I guess? Definitely one of those “enjoy the story more than the scientific accuracy” episodes (they all are to some extent, but this one is one of the more pronounced examples IMO).

[Infinity Blade]

Spirits of the Ice Forest (Antarctica, 106 million years ago):

• The kind of weird thing about this episode is that you’d expect the bulk of the episode to take place during the winter when life is at its most challenging. It doesn’t. It starts with a winter about to end and only gets back into it much later in the episode. So…alright, let’s see what they’ve cooked up.
• I tell you, that Koolasuchus sounds like it looks. The belching noise it makes as it gobbles up the frozen Leaellynasaura carcass by the pond is on point.
• Can I just say that “Spirits of the Ice Forest” is such a cool episode name? It has this otherworldly, mystical ring to it. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think it’s the subtitle of some medieval high fantasy novel*. Nope. The spirits in question are motherfücking dinosaurs, and tell me, how many times have you seen anyone refer to dinosaurs as spirits? Just by living their elusive, extraordinary lives these dinosaurs can be seen as such. Retroactively, the fact that these dinosaurs are long dead at this point could also solidify the episode title.
  
  *Okay, I just googled the title after I finished writing this review, and I was pretty much correct lol. There’s literally a book called “Spirits of the Ice Forest”, and it’s a historical fiction about Vikings invading North America.
• All of the animals featured in this episode were actually found in Australia, not Antarctica. However, at the time Australia was in the Antarctic circle, and I’m pretty sure the reason why the setting is in Antarctica was to solidify the narrative that dinosaurs colonized *every* part of the globe, even the harsh wintery lands. Still would’ve worked if you kept Australia as the setting (and explained that it’s in the Antarctic circle), but dinosaurs certainly lived in Antarctica at the time so…okay I guess?
• If you’ve been a part of online armchair paleontology circles since say, the 2010s, you might have heard some rumors going around that Leaellynasaura actually had a really long tail. Nowadays it’s often reconstructed with a feathery coat (although the feathers look more like hair), with a bushy long tail. For an idea of what this would look like, have a look at Liam Elward’s wonderful reconstruction (link->). But how true is this?
  
  Well, it’s really a matter of whether or not these remains can actually be referred to Leaellynasaura or not. And if they can be, when a study can be expected to be fully published on them. There does seem to be a graphical abstract from 2017 giving the positive on the long tail being a thing, though, so take that for what you will (Sharp, 2017).
• I can’t look at the puppets for the Leaellynasaura and not notice where the cheeks fold outward anymore. Obviously this was a constraint in making the puppets, but nowadays it definitely helps break the realism illusion (as if it weren’t obvious enough otherwise to any adult).
• Koolasuchus actually seems to date to the Aptian (~120 Ma), so it might be too old for this episode. The idea that it is a relic from the Paleozoic is true (150 million years before, as Branagh puts it; that would be 257 million years ago for us), but the idea that its kind were outcompeted by crocodiles – only holding out in places where it was too cold for the reptiles – is something that needs more testing. It was indeed a proposed hypothesis at the time (Warren et al., 1997), so I’m not surprised the writers for WWD went with it. But like I said, we need more data to truly confirm or deny this hypothesis. For now I will not assume that competition with eusuchians was the cause of their extinction.
• This episode has some impressive sped-up footage (for the time, at least) of plants budding. I’m not sure if this was just stock footage they recycled or if it was filmed specifically for WWD.
• The Leaellynasaura build decoy nests that don’t hold eggs to fool nest predators. Does anything do that today?
• What predators do these forests hide? The “polar allosaur”, a smaller (though still 1 tonne) reskin of the Allosaurus all the way back from episode 2. It takes after its Jurassic ancestors in its model and its sound effects.
  
  You’re almost certainly wondering what the hell the polar allosaur is based on, as searching for it leads back to WWD. The truth is it’s based on an old astragalus described back in 1980, assigned to the genus Allosaurus on the basis of its morphology (Molnar et al., 1980). Its identity has been contentious for the longest time, even around the time WWD first aired on television (such that the companion book from 2000 acknowledges the then-latest development of the astragalus *not* being from Allosaurus). It is now believed to belong to a megaraptoran (e.g. Benson et al., 2012). The allosaurids were long extinct by this point, although allosauroids as a whole were still around.
• The polar allosaur steps on a branch loudly enough to alert the whole clan, and the little ornithopods prove way too fast for him. Bro thought these things were going to be easy prey.
• Unknown pterosaurs make a cameo in this episode, though they’re so far off in the distance that you can’t tell what species they are. So oddly enough, WWD actually features pterosaurs in every single one of its episodes. Branagh makes no mention of their current state in this episode, but we the viewer know what’s coming to them in-universe, assuming it hasn’t already (*cough* birds *cough*). We’ll see how they turn out in the next episode.
• Muttaburrasaurus is introduced with the same track the Brachiosaurus was back in episode 2, even though it’s nowhere near as large. It is supposed to be a large herd of these nearly 3 tonne animals, though, so…I guess it still works?
  
  The model, if we were to fashion it today, would have a smaller head. We’d also make it completely bipedal as opposed to the facultative quadruped the species is depicted here as. Although originally classified as some kind of iguanodont, more recent studies (e.g. Poole, 2022) recover Muttaburrasaurus as a rhabodont (although, I’m also aware of studies recovering it as an elasmarian; Broxson, 2023). Also due to this, it would also not have possessed an Iguanodon-like thumb spike like shown here.
  
  However, the noises they make are *the* Muttaburrasaurus sfx ever. THIS is the kind of noise I pray at least one real non-avian dinosaur made.
• A mammal live-acted by a coati comes to try and raid the Leaellynasaura nests, only for one to chuck enough dirt and debris at it to drive it off. Someone had to have been throwing leaf litter at an actual coati for this to be filmed. That wasn’t very nice…
  
  But also, this was supposedly meant to be Steropodon. Having read the companion book, a Steropodon is indeed mentioned, but it’s mentioned as being “black-haired”*. The coati used to live-act a Mesozoic mammal here has brown hair. If the coati was indeed meant to be a Steropodon in the original documentary, then it is WAY off. From its very discovery Steropodon was known to be a monotreme (Archer et al., 1985). Now sure, even today we don’t have many remains from it (just jaw fragments and teeth), but even Once Upon Australia-> from 1995 made its Steropodon look a lot more like actual modern day monotremes (particularly the platypus) than WWD did. That there was a mandibular canal indicating the presence of a bill like in the modern platypus was later confirmed in 2003 (Woodburne, 2003).
  
  Overall, this was a pretty careless depiction of a Mesozoic mammal even for the time. We’re lucky it plays a pretty insignificant role in this episode.
• I absolutely love that the Muttaburrasaurus are portrayed as using their sheer size and numbers to aggressively fend off the polar allosaur, which weighs about a third of an adult. No “ornithopods are defenseless” trope here. The standoff between the predator and its prey is neat to watch as well.
  
  This has made me wonder how a Muttaburrasaurus would physically defend itself. Best bets are its tail and its hindlegs for delivering powerful blows IMO, as well as just body-slamming (and from an animal weighing about 3 tonnes, these would be very, very powerful blows). It could potentially even bite with its beak. Muttaburrasaurus possessed some surprisingly enlarged jaw adductor muscles for its size like ceratopsians, so a nip from that shearing/cropping beak must have been painful at the least.
  
  Nabavizadeh (2020)
  

  Molnar (1995) suggested convergences between some iguanodontian ornithopods, like Muttaburrasaurus, and ceratopsids in enlarged adductor muscle body size for increased bite force, referencing the relative breadth of the adductor chambers in these taxa.

• There’s this one certain recurring background noise (I can’t tell if it’s an animal or wind) whenever the ambience of this ecosystem is displayed that I jibe with. Really evocative of the so-called “spirits” of this ice forest.
• The dominant female eating her unhatched eggs to minimize nest predation and to recycle nutrients is a behavior you might not expect for a herbivorous little ornithopod, but I think it is very well possible. Aside from the whole “herbivores sometimes eat meat” thing (we should always remember that these still aren’t regular or significant parts of their diet), I think it would be even more likely for a recently pregnant mother dinosaur to replenish herself by eating eggs of hers that failed to hatch.
• Later it becomes full summer, where the sun won’t set for five months. Man, polar sunlight sure is a wild thing…
• The wētā and the tuatara are portrayed living in ancient Gondwana like they do now, as a predator-prey relationship. While it is certainly true that their larger groups were around at the time (and the Rhynchocephalia have been around since the Middle Triassic), this gives the impression of the two being “living fossils”, especially the tuatara. In reality, the rhynchocephalians produced a number of different forms that were significantly different from the modern tuatara in biology. In fact, the whole concept of “living fossils” is quite misleading and unhelpful overall.
• They had to make a prop just for the Muttaburrasaurus’ ear to show insects biting inside…
• I love how right after the scene of the Leaellynasaura peacefully sleeping under the warm sun and forest canopy while their hatchlings play we get a dead Muttaburrasaurus being eaten.
• An old Muttaburrasaurus that was brought down, I assume by the polar allosaur that now feeds off of its carcass. The companion book is more explicit that the polar allosaur actually killed it, so I think it’s a safe assumption. It would be consistent with Branagh’s earlier word – that the allosaur is no match for a healthy bull, but this one was old – but it’s still an impressive kill (but again, keep in mind that in real life it would be a megaraptoran doing this). 46 million years later and these (fictional) allosaurs still got it.
• ”…enough meat at this kill for twenty allosaurs…”
  
  That…feels like a stretch, though.
• A polar allosaur apparently needs 100 kg of meat a week. Somehow this 1 tonne carnivore needs only as much food in one week as a Utahraptor in this universe does in one sitting.
• After a close call with a Koolasuchus, we get a flood from a summer storm. I only just realized that whoever was writing WWD was perfect at contriving environmental events and weaving them into the story involving animals.
  
  In this case it causes a rival Leaellynasaura clan to invade the space of “our” clan, which they fend off with a whole load of chirping noises and running.
• Two-thirds into the episode we finally see the start of the polar winter that is the main obstacle for the dinosaurs living here. Well, actually it’s fall (autumn), and it’s accompanied by the track aptly named “Departure of the Muttaburrasaurus” (to be fair, this is the only time in the series this track is used, outside of “The Making of” episode). This number is easily, EASILY one of the best, most memorable, and most beautiful in the entire soundtrack. Some have said that it captures the very essence and majesty of the dinosaurs themselves, and somehow I agree. It’s a regal, dramatic track that also has something of a somber undertone to it. It fits with the large herds of Muttaburrasaurus leaving the forest as they sense the change and migrate to better lands.
• …Unfortunately this leads to the saddest and most brutal scene in the entire episode. A few Muttaburrasaurus get lost in the forest, and their loud noises make it hard for the Leaellynasaura to hear stalking predators.
  
  A polar allosaur is able to successfully ambush the clan, and while most escape, it manages to capture the dominant female. She makes some distressful sounds as she’s being crushed to death in the allosaur’s jaws, and it gets worse as the allosaur proceeds to shake her, ending in a crushing noise followed by silence. The other Leaellynasaura can only watch and chirp in response as the allosaur then proceeds to forcefully decapitate her carcass and consume her head, as if to rub salt in the wound.
  
  For me, this easily takes the cake as one of, if not the most brutal depiction of dinosaur predation I’ve seen in media, and even for WWD, which has a few others. What really sells it as such in my personal opinion is that the Leaellynasaura is so obviously helpless against the predator once it’s caught, yet it STILL isn’t an instantaneous kill. Pop culture dinosaur-on-dinosaur dominance doesn’t come in a greater form than some big vicious carnivore squeezing the life out of a far smaller, seemingly weaponless herbivore that has zero chance of physically fighting back, then cementing its obvious, foregone victory by beheading the corpse. It’s as if one of the writers came in and decided to be really sadistic that one day.
  
  Of course, the operative words here are “as if”. This is not a judgement on the writers, let alone the CGI dinosaurs on screen. That’s because this scene is entirely consistent with the real-life brutality and “cruelty” of nature.
• We start to see how life in Mesozoic Antarctica (and by logical extension, Australia) prepares for winter. The Koolasuchus goes through the pains of lugging his bulk across land again to a place where he can camp out all winter. Plants stop photosynthesizing. And when winter proper comes, the wētā allows itself to become frozen. The hardest hit are our Leaellynasaura, though. They have no lead female, only one of the young has survived the summer, and it’s hard to find food.
• That sound I love that I can’t tell if it’s an animal or wind is heard again as the aurora australis runs through the sky. Now it really is “spirits of the ice forest”.
• The use of special imaging to see under darkness adds to the illusion of this being a filmed nature documentary (i.e. someone went back in time to film this), and it makes me glad later documentaries (like Prehistoric Planet) used this to their advantage too.
• Okay, what mf’er keeps making that yowling (for lack of a better word) call in the background? It’s winter fool, go back to sleep or something.
• But just as quickly as it comes around, the winter ends for the viewer. The next we see of the Leaellynasaura clan is that they survived, but now it’s the mating season. Two males fight, and the winner mates with one of the females in the clan, which is said will result in a new dominant pair.
  
  And that’s the end of the episode. Branagh tells us that life at the poles was an extraordinary feat for the dinosaurs, but that they will eventually go extinct as they get colder. Except that’s not really true, as we know that the area eventually became warm enough for crocodylomorphs to colonize the place (after Koolasuchus disappears). And that’s not even getting into the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum that happens as a result of the Cenomanian-Turonian boundary event.
• In the end credits Branagh’s final note about the in-between evolutionary history of dinosaurs is that outside of the poles, the dinosaurs just continued to exist for another 40 million years before the K-Pg event. Just to put this into perspective, all of Dinosaur Planet, a lot of Planet Dinosaur (e.g. the Kem Kem episode), hell the 2013 WWD movie, and even the Chased by Dinosaurs specials all happen within this 40 million-year time gap. Remember that this isn’t some unremarkable period of time where the dinosaurs just did whatever, because the next episode depicts them in a sorry-ass state.

Final verdict:
Looking back at this episode, the actual ice forest part takes up a relatively small portion of the episode. The organisms only start to respond to dropping temperatures about two-thirds of the way into the episode, and the polar winter proper only starts some time after that. I understand that the real substance of the episode is the dinosaurs preparing for winter, but if the goal is to showcase how the dinosaurs conquered even the snowy poles, shouldn’t a more substantial percentage of the story take place in the winter, when the biggest challenge is taking place? Don’t get me wrong, the hardship of winter is already made clear in this episode, especially after the circumstances surrounding the Leaellynasaura clan beforehand, but surely they could have shown more of what they do in the winter?

But maybe I’m wrong. I can’t really complain too much because while most of the episode is not set in winter, the storyline leading up to it is indeed intriguing. We see some summer residents like the Koolasuchus (although, maybe it would’ve been cool to see it actually catch a dinosaur), Muttaburrasaurus, and a late-surviving polar dwarf allosaur (in fact, the concept is actually really cool, it’s too bad it’s not real) and the challenges they face or even present to the Leaellynasaura. Certainly the build-up to the winter is an adequate storyline. You could perhaps see it as akin to a student nervously preparing for a test, which itself only takes up a minority of the actual storyline later on.

In terms of scientific accuracy, I think for one you really could have just set this in Australia and it would have made no relevant difference on the environmental conditions since, like I said, Australia was in the Antarctic circle at the time. The one creature that holds up the best is, ironically, arguably the non-dinosaur (Koolasuchus). The one that really sticks out like a sore thumb nowadays is the allosaur, but since they clearly based it on an interpretation of one fragmentary bone as an allosaur, I fully understand why they included it.

So overall I still like the episode. No question that it shows its age with the scientific research behind it (some excusable, some not, some iffy at the time). Likewise, the spirits are shown preparing for the ice forest a lot more than actually coping with it, but it’s still a wonderful story of survival.

[Infinity Blade]

Death of a Dynasty (Montana, 65.5 million years ago):

• When I was a little kid, this was my favorite episode. The one episode I patiently waited for every time I sat down to watch every episode of WWD in sequential order. Let’s see if it still is.
• The first animal we see in this episode is Didelphodon. Given how the mammal lineage has been ignored in the documentary after the first episode, and how it’s going to be the Age of Mammals* soon, I think this is fitting.
  
  *Although in real life, Didelphodon itself never lived to see it, having gone extinct at the end of the Cretaceous with the non-avian dinosaurs. Womp, womp.
• I don’t really know how much Didelphodon material we had back then, but more recently discovered material suggests it looked far different from how it’s portrayed in this show. Instead of a big-headed, short and stocky build, Didelphodon was a lot more elongated, smaller-headed (although it had a mighty powerful bite for its size), otter-like build.
  
  
  (Photo taken from the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History’s Facebook page)
  
  It’s often stated online that this animal was a semiaquatic Mesozoic mammal, something of a cross between a Tasmanian devil (with its bite strength) and an otter. But even if it wasn’t, there’s no doubt we’d reconstruct Didelphodon looking a lot different if we were making WWD today.
• Another outdated aspect about the Didelphodon is that it was actually not a marsupial as the narration states. A 2016 paper found that the family Didelphodon belonged to, the Stagodontidae, lies outside of Marsupialia, although they were still marsupialiforms (Wilson et al., 2016). So not quite true about it being a marsupial, but reasonably close enough.
• The king of dinosaurs (or rather, the queen; this is a mother guarding her nest) makes an entrance that I can only describe as swift and cruel. Without any warning it appears out of the edge of the screen. Its attack is sudden and quick enough to snatch the little Didelphodon that is most certainly leagues more agile than itself. Upon rewatching this scene for the billionth time, I was even able to see a bit of the mammal’s body outline sticking out of the T. rex’s mouth as it was being gobbled up. After doing so, the T. rex turns towards the camera – towards you – and gives off its signature roar in this series, saliva covering the camera lens.
  
  On the one hand, showing no mercy to the small and meek, and then topping it off with a loud cry of dominance, is certainly behavior befitting of a tyrant. But on the other hand, this tyrant attacks only to preserve life she created. This entire introduction is a microcosmic establishing character moment for Tyrannosaurus rex as a species/character in this episode. If it is not “the most terrifying predator that has ever walked the Earth” as episode 5’s outro puts it, it is certainly a candidate for the title. But even the most terrifying predator is still an animal.
• The brief scene of the mother tyrannosaur’s silhouette calling out for a new mate at sunset is brilliant.
• This episode is set 65,500,000 years in the past. For the longest time, dinosaurs were thought to have perished 65 million years ago, give maybe half a million years.
  
  In 2013, a paper was published that used more refined dating techniques to date the formation of the Chicxulub asteroid. It turned out to have formed just a little over 66 million years ago, give or take 11,000 years (Renne et al., 2013). Obviously not something they could have known back then, so the WWD of course gets a pass for this. But the K-Pg event is such an extraordinary event, with effects so jarring, that it’s hard not to think of the fact that the dinosaurs would be long dead and buried at this point.
• There is no evidence that Hell Creek was a desolate volcanic wasteland at any point when the dinosaurs were around. No bubbling pits, no geothermal springs spewing toxic gas, no ash fields. If you had to compare Hell Creek to any place in the modern world, it would be the Florida Everglades, but in Montana.
  
  If there were any place in the Maastrichtian that was a volcanic, ashen landscape, it would have been India (which Prehistoric Planet does a wonderful job depicting).
• Now, it IS true that volcanism was a part of the end Maastrichtian, namely in the form of the Deccan Traps. The question is how much of an impact did it play in the extinction event. WWD plays with the idea that for centuries, global volcanism has been turning Earth into a sick planet that the dinosaurs struggle to survive in. It’s these deteriorating conditions at the very end of their reign and the asteroid that causes their extinction here.
  
  While the Deccan Traps still have their proponents as the cause of the dinosaurs’ extinction (or at least a partial one alongside the asteroid), the unambiguous reality is that the dinosaurs were able to survive its effects for a prolonged period of time, even at their epicenter (India). In real life, the Deccan Traps formed intermittent eruption pulses that would have lasted ~100,000 years. There were two main pulses, one that happened 67.4 Ma and the other ~66.1 Ma, the latter of which began just before the K-Pg boundary and continued into the Paleogene. This entire episode lasted from 67.4-65.5 Ma, which means that Earth’s Late Cretaceous fauna felt its effects for a whole 1.4 million years. Yet clearly, the dinosaurs survived until a certain giant rock from space crashed into the Earth. In fact, prolonged volcanism might have actually been helpful by creating habitats more suitable for dinosaurs, and buffered the negative effects of the impact winter with whatever amount of warming it caused. (Chiarenza et al., 2020).
  
  In short, not only did the dinosaurs survive the global effects of volcanism for over a million years by the end of the Cretaceous, but they thrived.
• The WWD companion book is more clear on who the “winners” and “losers” by the last episode are. Mammals, birds, insects, and angiosperms are thriving. But ichthyosaurs and pliosaurs are extinct (which is still true, there’s no arguing with that). Pterosaurs are hanging on by a thread (more on that later), and ferns and cycads are apparently being outcompeted by angiosperms (I don’t know if this is *the* reason why angiosperms are now dominant, but it is undeniable that they are). But what about the main subject of the show, the dinosaurs?
  
  Well, the book description of them is a little more generous. The book explicitly states that the dinosaurs have not declined one bit, but that changes in the Earth’s atmosphere and the upcoming asteroid impact are going to wipe them off the face of the planet. Even so, it still claims that many of the animals living in the volcanic landscape that this episode takes place in are either rare or endangered. No points for guessing who those are.
  
  Even without companion book commentary, though, it’s easy to make out who the “losers” and “winners” are by 66-65.5 Ma in this universe, and the kind of narrative WWD espouses. Just as the dinosaurs and pterosaurs are showing signs of “superiority” to the older pseudosuchians and dicynodonts from episode 1, mammals and birds are thriving where the older (non-avian) dinosaurs and pterosaurs are either struggling or on their way out.
• With regards to the tyrant king itself, TV Tropes points out something I had never thought of before. Despite the emphasis on the crapsack landscape end-Maastrichtian Montana is (but in actuality wasn’t), you kinda don’t care for it when the most infamous dinosaurian predator ever is properly introduced by Branagh. The dramatic turned ominous music playing as the male walks over the hill. Worldwide volcanism? Who cares? It’s f*cking T. rex, b*tch!
  
  In a way, you could actually argue that that’s true. Canonically (yes, I’m going to say that because this depiction of Hell Creek is not real), all the dinosaurs would have been toughing out the global volcanism for hundreds of years. And while they clearly struggle (because after all, they’re not dragons, they’re depictions of animals grounded in realism), they still explicitly rule the world.
  
  Of course, given everything I said in my previous point, the reality was even more impressive on the dinosaurs’ part.
• The male T. rex finds that the food he’s been sniffing out is in a field of volcanic vents spewing carbon monoxide. He’s kind of okay here is because his great height clears his head above the layer of gas, but he needs to bend over to reach the carcasses on the ground, where we see the victims. One of them is a mammal, the other represented by a skull (I’m curious to know what animal it’s based on, if any), and the only one worth eating a dead juvenile rex.
  
  I wonder how the other giant dinosaurs would fare in these geothermal springs. The Edmontosaurus should be fine like the T. rex thanks to their height. Torosaurus and Ankylosaurus, however, are lower to the ground, which might make them more susceptible to carbon monoxide poisoning.
• Oh, right, I should probably address the WWD T. rex model. I’ll always have a soft spot for the WWD rex, but I have to admit that the only reason for this is nostalgia. From an anatomical (read: scientific accuracy) perspective, it. Is. A. MESS.
  
  If you compare it to models like the Prehistoric Planet version or Blue Rhino Studio’s model, it’s a pretty jarring, obvious contrast. But if you want to know what specifically is wrong with it…I’m just going to let Darren Naish do the talking. On the *head alone*.
  
  

  -- What was wrong with the WWD T. rex (comment 16)? Err: everything. It's horrible, and whoever created it looked only briefly at the real animal. Philip (comment 21) mentions some of the problems. I could write a whole essay on how bad that model is, but I'll just concentrate on the head, as it's particularly offensive. The WWD animal doesn't really have the flaring cheeks of T. rex, it lacks the little cheek horns, its teeth are widely spaced and essentially homodont (T. rex was markedly heterodont, with closely packed incisiform teeth and long teeth in the maxilla), its snout slopes down such that the snout tip is 'stepped down' relative to the region in front of the eyes, it has a totally imaginary thickened rim around the edges of the upper jaws, its nostril is located on the top of its snout as if it's a hippo, it has a weird, sunken antorbital area that is in the wrong place, it has a horizontal ridge running ventral to its eye (no such structure in T. rex), it has a great big horn right over its eye (as opposed to the blunt preorbital hornlet and massive, rounded postorbital boss present in the real thing) and the back of its head was complete fiction which made it look at if the head was somehow a separate entity from the unmuscled, scrawny neck. The skull of T. rex is a shapely, sophisticated thing that we have excellent information on: the WWD thing was a total monstrosity. For those who don't know, I would like you to note that (with Dave Martill, allegedly), I wrote a book called Walking With Dinosaurs: The Evidence. Unfortunately I wasn't allowed to be too critical of any of the WWD stuff, but I did say some vaguely negative stuff about the T. rex on p. 149.

  
  scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2009/05/20/100-years-of-tyrannosaurus-rex
• Now that we’ve seen the thorns of WW-verse Hell Creek, Branagh introduces us to the roses. There’s still some greenery around. We even get to see how far the coevolution of flowers and their pollinators has come: some flowers can now only be pollinated by certain species while some pollinators (like butterflies) can only feed on flowers.
  
  Conceptually this is good, as it shows the writers of WWD care about showing us the evolution of our world. But were butterflies actually around back then? This is something I’ve seen at least one previous reviewer critique the show on, claiming that butterflies only appeared in the Cenozoic. Indeed, it was once hypothesized that the evolution of bats (free to explore their new niche after the extinction of the dinosaurs) prompted the evolution of butterflies.
  
  A 2019 phylogenomic study destroyed this hypothesis. The most recent common ancestor of crown Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies) appeared in the Late Carboniferous ~299.5 Ma (with a 95% confidence interval between 312.4 to 276.4 Ma). Crown butterflies proper (Papilionoidea) appeared during the Late Cretaceous, probably around 98.3 Ma (Kawahara et al., 2019). A later study estimated a divergence time approximately 100 Ma for butterflies, and that all extant families except one (Heylidae, from what it seems) were present before the K-Pg extinction after originally appearing in the Americas (Kawahara et al., 2023).
  
  So yes, WWD showing a butterfly in Death of a Dynasty is fine. They were accidentally correct, but correct nevertheless.
• The version of “Islands of Green” that plays as Branagh is narrating is really nice and soothing. It’s even accompanied by this one specific sound effect after Branagh is done talking about butterflies that I just can’t really describe (otherworldly?). It sounds like music, but I’m not even sure it is. Whatever it is, this iteration of the track is even better than the one that actually appears in the official soundtrack IMO.
• We hear the vocalizations of birds in the forest, which Branagh describes as thriving. At least one group of dinosaurs seems to be doing well? One of the sound effects almost sounds like a baby crying. Keep this in mind for the end of the episode.
• A brief scene at a watering hole is shown to show some of the dinosaurs that are around in this time. The small ornithopods are just recycled Nanosaurus from Time of the Titans (where they themselves were just background characters) down to the color. Stalking them is an unspecified “dromaeosaur”. It’s important to remember it’s not called Dromaeosaurus proper in this episode, which lived in the Campanian. If you were making this today, you’d just use Acheroraptor. The dromaeosaur uses the same model as the Utahraptor, except the animal is smaller overall and its color scheme is totally cooler (okay, that’s obviously just my silly opinion, but the black and white mottling together with a red tail tip looks much more interesting to me than the Utahraptor’s beige with mottled black stripes).
• I also love how the shot of the dromaeosaur splashing into the water in an attempt to capture its prey. Unfortunately for it, it fails to catch anything and it releases this cry of frustration that I will forever associate with dromaeosaurids.
• Ankylosaurus is presented as if it specifically evolved to defend itself from Tyrannosaurus. While no one doubts that ankylosaurids could defend themselves well from large theropods with their tail clubs and armor, more recent thinking is that these adaptations evolved primarily for fighting their own species. If we were making this model today, I also think the body shape and certainly the osteoderm arrangement would be worked on. This is a better idea of how an Ankylosaurus would look (skeletal by fadeno).
  
  
  
  One thing that Branagh ISN’T lying about, though, are the bony eyelids. Ankylosaurids were so awesome.
• The nest at the prologue of the episode has since been abandoned. Given how the one egg that a Didelphodon cracks open has an already-dead embryo (thanks to acidic pollution), it was probably worth giving up on. This is a common occurrence in the volcanic landscape according to Branagh, and adds to the “dinosaurs are struggling in their last years” narrative of this episode. The ridiculous, almost charming Didelphodon fight has remained the better of the two aspects of this scene IMO.
• Who ever imagined a T. rex making such a weird mating call before this documentary came out?
• The Torosaurus may just be my favorite things from this episode now. Of all the models, they have aged the best (or rather, the least horribly), their noises are candy to my ears (and something I will always imagine for ceratopsids), their scene is action-packed and awesome, and even their movements have captured my attention. They can do this sort of gallop-like gait, but it’s not quite like what we see in mammals. I wonder if this is actually still a feasible way for ceratopsians to have moved, especially at top speed.
• This is where the track “Torosaurus Lock Horns” gets its name from. Two male Torosaurus, well…lock horns, and what follows is one of the best implementations of soundtrack in this documentary. Especially towards the end, the wrestling contest is a lot more tense as the two rivals struggle to gain the upper hand, and I really like that. And then one has its orbital horn broken off. If you’re wondering if that’s plausible, bovids today will sometimes break their horns, even those with robust horns like Cape buffalo (example->).
• One of the biggest shames of this episode, apart from the characterization of (non-avian) dinosaurs and pterosaurs as struggling in their final years while the mammals and birds thrive, is the fact that Triceratops’ only appearance is as a carcass. I find this to be an odd choice, quite honestly. Triceratops seems to have been significantly more common than Torosaurus in the northern parts of Laramidia, if anything, and it’s certainly far better known.
• The idea that female T. rex were larger than males was once an actual hypothesis (that is no longer taken seriously as far as I can tell), but I have the impression that the entire mating segment in Death of a Dynasty popularized it. For the record, we have no idea whether T. rex was sexually dimorphic or monomorphic. If it was the former, we have no idea which sex was larger.
• Even tearing 70 kg of meat in one bite sounds like an understatement. I’ve heard figures of up to 500 pounds (250 kg) of meat in one bite. A while ago I actually emailed Thomas Holtz what he thought, and he told me 250 kg in one bite doesn’t seem unreasonable for T. rex. That said, where these calculations for how much meat it could rip off in one sitting is unknown.
• Ah yes, the mating scene. Oh how I had no idea what was really going on when I was a toddler. I wonder how my parents felt if/whenever they saw mating scenes like this while I was watching it. Obviously they didn’t care enough to ban me from watching.
  
  After they finish mating, the difference in size becomes quite obvious.
• Branagh at last introduces us to Edmontosaurus. Although, because this was 1999, it’s called “Anatotitan”, which would later be known to be a synonym of Edmontosaurus. In terms of accuracy, I would say the one most obvious thing we’d change about it today is the fact that it looks like it’s hunched forward while moving on all fours. Edmontosaurus may have had longer hindlimbs than forelimbs, but that doesn’t mean a hunched forward posture. The front feet look very un-hadrosaur-like as well, looking more like an Iguanodon’s.
  
  
  
  Of course, we’d also want to give them a less duck-like beak, and more of the downturned beak meant for cropping vegetation that hadrosaurs actually had in life.
• Branagh claims that hadrosaurs were meant to thrive in lush lowland swamps (as opposed to an ash wilderness). This sounds like a holdover from the time when hadrosaurs were thought to be semi-aquatic swamp dwellers, even though the Edmontosaurus are correctly depicted as fully terrestrial animals.
• The female kicks out the male. It’s that one scene that introduces you to the dinosaurs all the way back in episode 1.
  
  But the dude got laid, and there’s nothing more he could ask. Something the book acknowledges.
• Just about everything about the Quetzalcoatlus has turned out to be outdated, but I’ll save the most offensive thing for last. The one thing I genuinely love about it is the color scheme, but everything else is…well, let’s have a look at the model.
  
  
  
  You can tell that it’s a slightly modified version of the Tropeognathus model, with the exception of its color scheme and a short crest on the back of its head (the latter of which Quetzalcoatlus was sometimes depicted with in the past, but is now known not to have had). It even has teeth at the front of its mouth; obviously the real animal didn’t have this, but rather a straight, toothless pointed beak. It’s said to be 13 meters wide in wingspan (meaning it’s canonically *bigger* than the Tropeognathus), although more modern estimates have revised this down to 10-11 meters (which still makes it one of the largest flying animals ever, rivaled only by other azhdarchids).
  
  Despite the objectively smaller Tropeognathus having a dramatic entrance, the Quetzalcoatlus is hardly treated as a remarkable animal, with no background music whatsoever or anything (which actually sounds nice and peaceful). The context for this drastic difference in presentation is the most irritating thing about the Quetzalcoatlus: it’s among the last pterosaurs alive. Remember how episode 4 claimed that in the future, the skies will belong to the birds? Episode 6 is that future. It’s claimed that pterosaurs have been in decline for the past 20 million years, and the program’s wording all but outright says that it’s because of competition with birds. The companion book is more precise and claims that there are only one or two species of pterosaur – giant ones, to be exact – left in the world.
  
  I’ve already addressed what’s wrong with the outcompetition hypothesis for pterosaur extinction in my episode 4 review, so I won’t do so again. But if you thought the last episode’s treatment of the dinosaurs was a disservice to the group, this blows that out of the water. Here, it’s like the pterosaurs would have gone extinct anyway even without the asteroid.
  
  
  Actually, the companion book’s stated reason for pterosaur decline is a *little* better. Just a little. According to the companion book, pterosaurs declined not because of competition with birds, but because of shifting continents resulting in altered air currents, colder temperatures, and more unpredictable weather. It also robbed pterosaurs of their supposed favorite hunting grounds: warm, shallow seas. Nevertheless, the book states that from then on, the pterosaurs were doomed. And even then, once the book gets to the scene with the Quetzalcoatlus, it still implies that birds flourished at the expense of the pterosaurs (contradicting what they said earlier?).
  
  Because I’m reviewing the documentary and not the book, the former’s claims when they contradict the companion book take priority here. None of this climate change/food supply loss stuff makes it into the documentary, only that the pterosaurs get outcompeted by birds. And the Quetzalcoatlus’ brief appearance feels like the writers’ final chance to sh!t on the entire clade before they die off for good.
• Apparently “one ton crocodiles” live in this lake, visually represented by a brown-ish orange puppet in the likeness of a generic crocodilian. Although these crocodiles aren’t identified in the documentary, the book identifies them explicitly as Deinosuchus (the book also ups their weight by a ton, and thinks that a 2 ton croc is enough to challenge an elephant-sized T. rex if one nears the water). Needless to say for paleonerds out there, Deinosuchus was long extinct by this point, and could certainly get bigger than a ton.
• After several months pass, the female rex has a new nest that she guards such that she won’t leave the nest or even eat for two months. Something tells me that an elephant-sized endothermic active predator is not going to survive two months without food.
• One night a pair of dromaeosaurs try their luck with a Torosaurus herd. They get close to one of the youngsters at one point, but they barely make any contact with it. This is apparently enough for them to “taste blood”, though, and they spend the night trying to get their claws on the baby Torosaurus as the adults try to fight them off.
  
  They succeed and by the morning the baby has had its torso horrifically stripped to the bone with some meat still left for scavenging a Didelphodon. Undoubtedly one of the sadder moments of this episode, not helped by the narration once again emphasizing how not enough dinosaur babies are growing up and how the volcanies+asteroid will be the end of them.
• The Edmontosaurus gather at the same stagnant watering hole that the Quetzalcoatlus was at and that the Deinosuchus reside in. Branagh mentions predators being a danger here, and the juxtaposition between his narration and shots of the Deinosuchus make you think that these are the predators in question. But after the Edmontosaurus flee, we see who’s really the danger: the mother T. rex.
  
  The attack is swift. Indeed, for a land animal of its size, T. rex was still respectably fast. It bowls over the Edmontosaurus, which for the remaining several seconds of its life produces panicked noises as the theropod delivers multiple bites to its abdomen that the audience can clearly see bleeding, even from a distance away. When the T. rex targets the neck, the hadrosaur’s cries become more distressed and rapid, until its neck is snapped. After a loud but brief roar, the mother rex starts vigorously ripping flesh from the carcass.
  
  To this day this remains one of the most brutal and hard-hitting examples of the predatory power of Tyrannosaurus rex. In my opinion it’s only topped by Prehistoric Planet’s, which arguably rivals it in the raw power it displays, but also far exceeds it in sophistication.
• Three rex chicks have been born. According to Branagh, this is only a quarter of the entire clutch that was laid by the mother. Already she’s got less surviving offspring than Hank (PhP T. rex dad), and she has even less by the end of the episode (when one of them is literally bullied to death by the other two).
• I’m not sure if the baby rexes are “accurately” proportioned. Again, I look to PhP as an example of what they should look like. On the one hand, the baby rexes of WWD are certainly not built like the adults. But could the skull and leg proportions be passed off as juvenile enough? I can’t tell if criticizing their proportions would be justified or nitpicking.
• A snake appears. Their evolution is briefly covered by Branagh; it’s said that they’ve only recently evolved from the same family as lizards (snakes actually ARE literal lizards). Some clarification may be in order: while it is true that Serpentes proper wouldn’t have even been around during the time of the previous episode, by the time Death of a Dynasty takes place, they would have been around for almost 30 million years. Compared to other groups like the dinosaurs and pterosaurs, they certainly are recent, although they’ve already been around for quite a while.
  
  This snake is supposedly Dinilysia. The real one lived nearly 20 million years before the end of the Cretaceous and it lived in South America, not North America.
• The mother rex is disturbed by an intruding Ankylosaurus, which cracks her femur with one tail swipe. The companion book’s version of the fight is much, much more violent. In the book version, the Ankylosaurus itself is a mother (with “scutelings”), and it not only clubs the rex’s leg, but continues to beat her after she falls to the ground. It finishes the onslaught with a blow to the head, killing the mother rex. The youngsters eventually drink from the pool of blood around her head and begin to eat her.
• A brief montage shows how the other dinosaurs are doing as the chicks wait for their mother who will never wake up. It’s really just recycled footage, but in this context can be read a different way. The Torosaurus herd have lost one of their young at this point. The Edmontosaurus are just getting by, but one of them looks up as it bellows. The dromaeosaurid dashes away from…something. No matter where you are, no matter how shitty your situation currently is, there’s no escaping.
  
  First a weirdly bright light shines across the horizon; the asteroid (or comet, as Branagh says) has hit the Earth. The cries of animals jumble together as the light grows in intensity and fades away, sounding like ghoulish souls wailing in sorrow. They stop right before the shockwaves rumble the Earth…and then they pick up again. As the blast makes its way toward the T. rex chicks, the helpless horror of the animals is condensed to a few final baby-like cries of that off-screen bird (or whatever it is) from earlier in the episode.
  
  How powerful is this blast? Powerful to knock down trees, sweep away the chicks at breakneck speed to their premature doom, and enough to haul the gigantic corpse of the mother off the ground and flying (maybe the fact that she succumbed to her injuries hours earlier was merciful to her).
• If you’re like me, what immediately follows is probably your least favorite part of the entire documentary. The dinosaurs go extinct, with the sad music used for Giant of the Skies returning to set the mood for the most tragic plot point in the entire series.
• Going by often-cited figures for extinction casualties for each major mass extinction, even the 65% figure given here is downplaying the K-Pg event. It was more like 75%.
• But surely this episode can’t end on such a sad note, right? Well, we cut to the present day African savanna, where elephants, lions, and Cape buffalo roam. Although no truly gigantic dinosaurs remain (the closest we ever got to that was Vorombe titan), mammals have stepped up as the chief terrestrial megafauna. If you like mammals, this alone is enough of a happy ending.
• If that doesn’t count as a silver lining to you, there’s more: one group of dinosaurs DID make it and WWD chooses to end on that very note. I don’t imagine that at the time this was a popular thing to do, and even later documentaries don’t emphasize the overall (if marginal) survivorship of the dinosaurs. You still walk with dinosaurs today, most of them just fly past you. The end credits is literally just footage of modern birds, and it couldn’t have been more beautiful than that.
• Actually, the T. rex graces our ears with its voice one last time after the credits roll.
  
  There. NOW it’s art!

Final verdict:

This was one of the reviews I took the most amount of time writing. There are so, SO many errors after 25 years. Some not even acceptable for the time. Still, I suppose the episode still has its promising aspects.

Let’s start with the cons. The thing I hate most about this episode now is the portrayal of the dinosaurs (and to a greater extent, the pterosaurs) as ancient has-beens about to die out, while the mammals and birds are apparently well off. Okay, the non-avian dinosaurs really WERE about to die off at this point, but that’s ONLY because a Mt. Everest-sized asteroid was on a collision course with their planet. The global volcanism was something they had evidently put up with, in reality, for over a million years by the time of their extinction, with no discernible effects on their diversity and dominance over large-bodied terrestrial niches. Basically, the way the program treated non-avian dinosaurs and pterosaurs compared to mammals and birds in the final episode was the same way they treated pseudosuchians and dicynodonts compared to dinosaurs and pterosaurs in the first episode. To say nothing about how hard mammals and birds were hit by this catastrophe.

A lot of the models are also clearly either out of date or were horrible even for the time (I’m looking at you T. rex…as nostalgic as you are to me uwu).

What about the pros? Well, I feel like it did a good job of animalizing the most infamous prehistoric animal of all time. While the T. rex is certainly a powerhouse of a theropod, its struggle to survive is made obvious with how it deals with volcanic gas, calling for mates that are territories away, and of course, raising young. If, as one reviewer said, you “want to watch the world burn”, the story is also great for that if you ignore the scientific accuracy perspective. And of course, the acknowledgement of birds as surviving dinosaurs at the very end was beautiful (though at this point, nothing tops the ending of Dead Sound’s Dinosauria). Planet Dinosaur acknowledges dinosaurs as birds, but forgets to in its final episode featuring the K-Pg. The consultants of Prehistoric Planet certainly knew birds are dinosaurs, but the writers for the narration ultimately chose to artificially distinguish the two.

As a result I feel very ambivalent about this episode, and how you view it ultimately comes down to the perspective you’re coming from. The way it depicts what the (non-avian) dinosaurs’ final months were like? It will leave a sour taste in your mouth (and it kind of has for me). A story about life in the end of times and continued survival? You’ll probably love it.

[dinosauria101]

Spirits of the Ice Forest:



-The episode begins a few hundred miles from the South Pole, with mystical music and a sunrise. This is the first sunrise after months of total darkness.

-As the music turns more morose, we are revealed a dead Leaellynasaura full-body animatronic on a shore covered in frost/ice (I very much appreciate the steps the producers took to get it to look like this!).

Branagh’s tone of voice likewise turns appropriately morose as he describes to us that this is a cold, harsh world where even specially adapted polar dinosaurs struggle to stay alive, and then a Koolasuchus animatronic head comes out of the water to eat the Leaellynasaura animatronic (which I would absolutely concur about making an appropriate noise: the noise is so appropriate that it fits in seamlessly and I never thought to note it until Infinity Blade did).

-”This far south, the first day of spring lasts only a few minutes. But it triggers the start of an astonishing story of survival through the polar year”.

The music turns more upbeat for this statement, and in my opinion, this is one of the more enchanting scenes: it gets viewers hooked and interested in what living in this world must be like for polar dinosaurs.

-We are in 106 million-year-old Antarctica, introduced with more upbeat music over fog-covered forest that is likewise appropriately enchanting.

At this point the dinosaurs are more widespread than ever, reaching every part of the globe - however, Antarctica presents a challenge. Although ocean currents keep it from being inhospitable, considerable seasonal variation ranging from hot midnight-sun summers to continually cold, dark winters is present: quite the difference to the aseasonal tropical climate in many other parts of the world.

-Leaellynasaura (one of Branagh’s best pronounced dinosaur names IMO) is a dinosaur that has adapted to cope with this. They spend their winter in the thickest part of the forest and now emerge in spring to feed on plant growth.

I very much like both the CGI model’s mottled colors and the bouncy-pitched sfx. The sfx I particularly appreciate after having seen Prehistoric Planet for comparison: in my opinion their Morrosaurus had far too deep-pitched sfx for a small ornithopod.

-According to Branagh, they are just 2m long, and their most notable feature is their large eyes to find food in the dark - to illustrate which we get animatronic head and body views of them browsing. Unlike Infinity Blade however (although I will admit it’s probably because I don’t have the ornithopod anatomy knowledge to have seen this, and I still can’t see it), I have no problem with the cheeks of the animatronic.

-These dinosaurs are sociable and live in clans to make the most of scarce resources. These are dominated by a breeding pair, with the hierarchy ensuring there is always an individual on lookout duty.

To illustrate the latter, we get an animatronic head closeup as the lookout issues reassuring clicks to signal that the coast is clear.

-But the music turns ominous as the sentry sees danger approaching through water in the form of more animatronics.

The music, if I remember right, is the same as is used in Death of a Dynasty’s Dromaeosaurus hunt. Did not notice that before.

-“The sentry has spotted a giant amphibian, Koolasuchus. He has massively powerful jaws, weighs about half a ton, and is a carnivore”. Surely the Leaellynasaura are in serious danger…..right?

Wrong. He is slow and cumbersome on land, being of no threat to the lively little dinosaurs.

-As a matter of fact, he isn’t even hunting them: rather he is making an arduous 200m trek over land to a river where he shall spend summer after hibernating in the forest for winter.

-Koolasuchus is part of a group of amphibians from long before the dinosaurs, and in the WWD universe, competition from crocodiles has driven these amphibians to extinction throughout most of the world. But in Antarctica the waters get too cold for crocodiles, and in Branagh’s words, “the world’s last Koolasuchus survive, still patrolling the waterways just as their ancestors did 150 million years before them”.

We are told this as he enters the river, and with the very mystical music, it is decidedly primordial in my opinion - any inaccuracies be damned. Excellent flashback to my favorite episode of my favorite palaeodocumentary: WWM Clash of Titans’ labyrinthodont .

-Following that, some shots of him and a fellow Koolasuchus swimming, with more mystical music and animatronic head closeups in the water. Cherry on top.

-Next, we move into the heart of spring. With more upbeat music, we see some fast-timed growth of ferns as the day length increases.

This is my favorite comparative appreciation part of WWD from a comparison point besides another documentary. Being interested in climatology and being a user of the astronomical seasons because I like monitoring the changes in daylight from season to season, that scene is a great shout out.

-Another comparative appreciation, this time from another documentary, is the fern growth not substantially detracting from times spent with the animals. The comparison is Prehistoric Planet’s Austroposeidon scene, for which one of my main criticisms was that the time lapse fern growth took too much time away from the dinosaurs - especially considering the 5 minute segment was already too short for my liking.

-The ferns aren’t the only thing responding to the increase in day length: our Leaellynasaura clan is doing so as well (the illustration of which has an animatronic head closeup). They have begun to build their nests with the first spring sunrise, with subordinate pairs building around the dominant pair’s nest, and have even went to lengths enough to include predator-fooling decoy nests.

-“But no matter how busy these little dinosaurs are, they always have to remain alert to danger”.

Oh, you thought this nesting scene was going to end on a peaches and cream note? Think again!

-As the music turns more ominous, we see said danger. It is a polar allosaur, a summer visitor from the north and a 1 ton ambush predator.

I think this is my favorite predatory dinosaur in all of WWD. Not because of its role, color pattern, or what it is (although I do like all 3, especially considering the color pattern really makes it seem like its own animal despite just being a reused Allosaurus model from Time of the Titans), but because in my opinion Kenneth Branagh does the best job of saying ‘polar allosaur’ compared to Coelophysis, Ornitholestes Allosaurus, Utahraptor, Dromaeosaur, and Tyrannosaurus.

-Likewise, this is another point at which I appreciate WWD for its timeless entertainment value. I used to be extremely annoyed in the nostalgia days at the polar allosaur for its inaccuracy (especially as a very staunch supporter of tyrannosauroid megaraptorans), but with that out of the way my opinion of the polar allosaur is of course quite favorable.

–But this danger turns out to not be such. He steps on a stick, the sentry Leaellynasaura notices him, and he proves to be nowhere near a match for their speed and agility as they melt into the undergrowth, roaring angrily and unintentionally knocking some dead wood over in failure.

I like this scene for making small ornithopods out to be appreciably competent animals even against large predators. In my opinion it’s just not entertaining to see ornithopods treated as the fodder they are in poor documentaries like Jurassic Fight Club.

-With more mystical music, we get a view of the riverbank forests as spring goes on. Flocks of pterosaurs (which look like a pretty similar species to the one the Giant of the Skies Ornithocheirus got into a scrap with over a fish) head south to their summer roosts, and in Branagh’s words, “among the trees there is the echo of unfamiliar sounds”.

The makers of those unfamiliar sounds? Muttaburrasaurus, the biggest dinosaur in this episode of WWD. I would concur with Infinity Blade on both the appropriateness of the Brachiosaurus track from Time of the Titans for a whole herd of 3 ton animals, and how great those bellows are (best ornithopod and maybe even dinosaur sfx ever IMO).

-They have migrated for almost 2 months, following the sun, to lay their eggs and feed on the vegetation. When they feed they stay in touch with those trumpeting calls, which are from their inflatable noses (and I have to mention how much I like both the look of this inflatable nose and the yellow nose on the green CGI model)

-The Leaellynasaura continue minding their nests: our lead female adds and removes vegetation as needed from hers to keep the eggs at 30C, while she can even communicate with the babies from inside their eggs. This is illustrated with more Leaellynasaura animatronic head and dinosaur egg practical effect closeups.

-For the more risky parts of minding their nests, they must scare off egg thieves. This particular egg thief, a mammal, is scared off by vegetation hurled in its face by the Leaellynasaura.

As mentioned in Infinity Blade’s review, said mammal was supposed to be a Steropodon but it’s just a live-acted coati, which I have seen that a lot of viewers aren’t fans of and would have preferred to see a Steropodon recreated.
This is a valid criticism, and it is something I wouldn’t mind seeing fixed in let’s say WWD 2025, but I only just learned it from his review. Therefore - although the fact that I wasn’t exactly familiar with coatis for a long time certainly played into this - I can absolutely let this slide.

-I do wonder however whether the producers had to be the ones hurling the vegetation in the coati’s face, or if they filmed it when another animal was doing it. The latter would be much more acceptable in my book since they take it as it happens.

-Then, back on the riverbank, the Muttaburrasaurus herd is being watched by the polar allosaur, with the same ominous music from when it tried to hunt our Leaellynasaura clan. They are able to put up a more than convincing show of strength+bellows to let him know there will be no easy pickings, and as Branagh’s tone of voice perfectly suits him saying, the allosaur is “forced to back down”.

-I concur 1000000000000% with everything Infinity Blade said in both his review and on Discord about this scene’s perfect aversion to the idea of defenseless ornithopods - it would have to be my all-time favorite theropod vs ornithopod scene in any documentary. However I’ll take this a step further: having seen Prehistoric Planet Ice Worlds’ dromaeosaur and hadrosaur scene for comparison, I appreciate this scene even more.

My main criticism of that scene is that even though it was no Jurassic Fight Club carbon copy, it was still faaaaaaaaaaar too similar to said bad show for my taste, because the whole herd of large hadrosaurs fled from the 3 tiny dromaeosaurs with no standing their ground at all. This is in quite the contrast to this scene: even though there are far fewer Muttaburrasaurus and they are only 3x the size of the polar allosaur instead of 100-200x the size like the dromaeosaurs and hadrosaurs, they do a far better job at standing their ground and making abundantly clear to the predator that it will get no kill.

-Later into spring, although many Leaellynasaura nests have fallen victim to predators, the work of the clan ensures the survival of at least the dominant female’s. She feeds her young in the nest (as is illustrated by some animatronic heads of both her and her young), carries out housekeeping by eating the unhatched eggs (more great animatronic use here), and retrieves any stray young (which IMO have very appropriate calls for needing help).

-We get a little reminder of wetas and tuataras, which is nice to see.

-Further into summer, the Muttaburrasaurus herd on the riverbank is being annoyed by swarms of biting flies, which attack softer parts like the ears. I do quite appreciate that they had the whole ear animatronic to illustrate the annoyance of the biting flies, it feels very authentic.

-Similarly authentic are some full-body animatronics of sleeping adult Leaellynasaura in the forest. As they sleep the youngsters play, practicing the sort of agile moves that may prove to save their lives someday.

-Back on the riverbank, with death-announcing music, Branagh morosely announces the bringing down of an old Muttaburrasaurus - for which we get not just an animatronic head, but also a swarm of flies. Cherry on top.

As our polar allosaur feasts on the rotting flesh. Branagh tells us about how his kind are descendants of great Jurassic carnivores, rare in the Cretaceous but surviving here at the South Pole. Yet another inaccuracy I used to find extremely annoying in the nostalgia days, but it’s quite intriguing from my current pure entertainment perspective.

-Despite there being enough meat for twenty allosaurs (which I can buy, if this Muttaburrasaurus is a large individual because it is old then that would fit a later given figure by Branagh well), he will not tolerate a rival female. She is gutsy, and ignores his warning roars while snatching a piece, but is driven away before she can take any more.

As she retreats with semi-ominous music, Branagh forewarns that a fully grown polar allosaur needs 100 kilos of meat a week, necessitating that she comes back once the male eats his fill. This is the figure I alluded to earlier: if twenty allosaurs need 2 tons of meat, and this is a large >3 ton Muttaburrasaurus, there is more than likely enough hide, muscle, fat, and internal organs to meet that threshold.

-With summer comes the midnight sun, and underneath it a baby Leaellynasaura ventures alone to the river for a drink. Forewarned with ominous dromaeosaur music, an intimidating from-underneath full body underwater shot, and an appreciable animatronic head, is a hungry Koolasuchus…..which ultimately fails to catch the baby because of its lightning reactions.

Beyond simply forewarning, they also use the animatronic head to initiate the attack. I would prefer if they moved it faster to simulate a lunge better, but it’s still appreciable to me that this extra step was taken.

-Another thing summer brings is violent tropical storms and floods, which drive forest animals somewhat astray due to reduced land area. For our Leaellynasaura clan, this brings them into conflict with a rival clan, and it is crucial they create a convincing enough show of strength to defend their territory.

I appreciate the animatronic heads and general violence/willingness to fight in small ornithopods shown in this scene, especially the latter. It helps cement that these Leaellynasaura are appreciably competent animals in all the aspects they need to be, as opposed to the pop culture pushover small ornithopod view.

-As the floods recede, the herbivores may return to grazing. With plenty of food around, they are very tolerant of each other, allowing our Leaellynasaura clan to eat falling podocarp fruits grazing Muttaburrasaurus herds leave in their wake (and shown with some Leaellynasaura animatronic heads eating actual podocarp fruit).

Although they run the risk of being stepped on, they must take every opportunity on offer, because time is running out.

-Autumn arrives with the first sunset in 4 months and some mystical music to herald its arrival. Sensing the change, the Muttaburrasaurus begin to migrate north, although some get lost in the forest on the way.

Unfortunately, although this is no more than a minor problem for them, they are not the only animals negatively affected by getting lost.

-More specifically, the noise such huge herbivores inevitably make drowns out the sounds of danger for our Leaellynasaura clan, allowing the polar allosaur to launch a successful ambush - on the dominant female, nonetheless.

As with the unsuccessful polar allosaur hunt on the riverbank, I concur 100% with everything Infinity Blade said about the brutality of this scene. In fact, I’ll even elaborate: further reasons why I concur with it being so brutal is because the dominant female being killed just before a time of hardship is arguably twice as devastating as her being killed without such looming hard times, and because of the fatal bite marks showcased very well on the full-body Leaellynasaura animatronic used to simulate the attack.

-Our Koolasuchus must do what he did at the start of the episode in reverse: head back to winter refuges in the forest, for which we get an animatronic tail closeup.

So does the forest vegetation: with the weather getting colder and the daylight decreasing, they stop photosynthesizing and either lie dormant or shed their leaves.

-And of course, our Leaellynasaura clan. Their strategy is to head to the heart of the forest, where it rarely freezes, and where nutritious foods such as fungi may be found, to help them stay active and maintain their body temperature.

This reference to the warming impact forest has on some weather is, again, another appreciative comparative point to my climatology interest. I have been researching for the past year and a bit this impact (specifically, the trio(->) of(->) studies(->) on the Tallahassee, Florida Minimum Temperature Anomaly), and being such a focal point for my research is what makes its reference so appreciable.

-But once they gather round a waterfall, it becomes clear that the summer predators have taken a toll. Only one hatchling survives and there is still no lead female - which in my opinion Branagh’s tone of voice tells us spectacularly.

-At last, the final day of autumn arrives and is over in a few minutes.

With the onset of winter, we see some montages of the biggest danger to the forest - freezing temperatures. However the weta is capable of freezing itself and waiting it out.

-We also get some more mystical music and even a view of the southern lights.

–”Under the sleeping trees it is almost pitch black, but with image enhancement it is possible to get a Leaellynasaura’s eye view of the clan”.

Comparative appreciation time again! The reference point for my appreciation of this image enhancement is Prehistoric Planet: their night scenes (especially the T. rex hunt) are dark to the point of being unwatchable for me no matter how much I turn the brightness up, so I am extremely glad to see that that is not the case here.

-This year the ground has frozen solid, leading the Leaellynasaura to do things like try and break pond water with their beaks for a drink (for which there are animatronic head closeups that I find especially appreciable considering they were in the dark).

Although temperatures cold enough to freeze the ground don’t usually last very long, with no lead female the clan’s fate hangs in the balance (for which Branagh’s narration strikes an ideal morosity to say). They are forced to push deeper into the forest.

-After two months of darkness, another cold snap necessitates even more drastic action on the part of the clan. They must head into a state of torpor to resist the effects of the cold, and huddle together, although they cannot do it for more than a few days.

A whole bunch of full-body Leaellynasaura animatronics are huddled together to illustrate this. I give the BBC one round of applause per animatronic.

-But hope is on the horizon. A slight yet sustained increase in temperature allows the weta to thaw out, and with it comes the first sunrise of spring.

This thaw is slightly evocative of the very lively, upbeat thaw in Walking with Monsters; Reptile’s Beginnings. Nice flashback.

-With spring comes the arrival of mating season for our Leaellynasaura. Two males are fighting over a mate in a short yet vicious conflict, and the victor’s choosing of a mate allows the clan to reestablish a hierarchy over a dominant pair, allowing the annual struggle for survival to begin again.

I would extend my appreciation from the territorial fight of our clan to this scene as well.

-To end the episode, Branagh tells us with more mystical music that in the WWD universe, at least, a slight cooling in the world’s temperatures will spell doom for these unique forests and the dinosaurs within.

Overall Verdict:

I’m happy to say Time of the Titans and Giant of the Skies have another competitor for being my favorite WWD episode. Comparative reasons that said competitor is Spirits of the Ice Forest is because it has in common with Time of the Titans the strength of substantially WALKING with dinosaurs (since we can get a whole year into the insights of clan life) but also has in common with Giant of the Skies very very very substantial comparative appreciation (whether from real-life interests, other documentaries, etc) and animatronics - in other words, plenty of the best of both worlds without compromising either.

Furthermore, it stands on its own with its uniquely mystical music+title (I concur with Infinity Blade about the title and IMO it’s even better combined with the music), and episode-specific inaccuracies turned into great entertainment and fun. In particular the former appreciably stands out among a ‘Dinosaur Opera’ while still being coherent with the theme.

Last but not least, as much as I love all the real-life filmed backgrounds in the Trilogy of Life, I think Spirits of the Ice Forest deserves special recognition for its background of choice. They filmed this episode in what is now New Zealand, which - for obvious reasons - is about as prehistoric-looking as you are going to get in the modern day, and the dinosaurs fit ideally into it.

Wow: a very strong episode immediately prior to the final episode. Yet another thing I appreciate about Spirits of the Ice Forest!

[thalassotitan22]

I think a simple way to update "Giant of the Skies" would be to have it take place circa 112 million years ago, keep Tropeognathus and Tupandactylus (they don't come from the same formation but are pretty damn close in time) and use Deinonychus, Tenontosaurus and Sauropelta in place of Utahraptor, Iguanodon and Polacanthus, and cut out Europe and just have the journey take place in the New World, with Iberomesornis being replaced by Cratoavis and have it show up before the raptors instead of vice versa. The small crested pterosaur and pliosaur could be Ludodactylus and Monquirasaurus in this version.