Review

We are in the mid cretaceous 106 BC, and the place is surprisingly "Antarctica", part of a giant continent made up of present-day Antarctica, South America, and Australia. More surprisingly, Antarctica is home to forests of conifers, dense fern growths, and a myriad of animal species.

We follow a year in Antarctica as the sun finally rises after months of total darkness, and the flora and fauna become more active, before finally with the light vanishing everything settling down to hibernate again.

The setting and cast of this episode are the most unfamiliar for the veteran dinosaur watcher. Most of the action takes place in a silent forest a few hundred miles from the South Pole, a locale that simply desn't exist in past popular Saurian narratives. It's a cold, harsh world, that is dark for months on end with everything appearing in a washed-out grey-green colour. Flowers clearly haven't evolved as yet in this place.

Just when we wonder if Kenneth is simply going to have to make do with talking about ferns we come across the corpse of a small dinosaur on the edge of a pond. The dino has clearly expired due to the cold and looks pretty frozen. A huge flat head emerges from underneath the pond water to snatch up the corpse; clearly even here nature leaves nothing to waste.

We are next introduced to the star of the show, Leaellynasaura, a small, fast-moving seven foot biped with huge eyes. Kenneth can inform us that the small dinosaur had "an enlarged optic lobe that enables it to see in the dark". A lot of effort has been clearly put into animatronics and computer representation of the creature. We spend quite sometime with a focus clan who warn one another of predators, scatter rapidly through the undergrowth, and build nests of rotting vegetation to incubate their eggs. In one scene we see the dominant female fending off an egg-snatching mammal called Steropodon, a cuddly looking forerunner of possums by the look.

Kenneth doesn't keep us in the dark over our pond dweller of the ice treat-snatching variety for long. We learn it is an amphibian called Koolasuchus that is 16 feet long but only about 1 foot high. The oversized salamander is a throwback to the time before dinosaurs and survives in the polar regions because the water is far too cold for the competing crocodiles that have wiped out Koolasuchus in warmer climes.

Dinosaurs rule all regions of the Earth, even the frozen wastes

An additional villain is presented "Koolasuchus is clearly not to be liked as one of them tries to ambush a young Leaellynasaura" in the form of a dwarf Allosaur that is only 20 feet long. The Allosaur is an ambush predator who comes down south with warmer weather and will nab any unwary Leaellynasura.

For Kiwi readers, finally some of our fauna gets a look in (it's a given that the ferns are of course representatives of our flora). We not only get wetas, giant brown cricket-like insects for non-Kiwi readers, but also a lizard called a Tuatara. Both creatures evolved prior to dinosaurs and still inhabit New Zealand today. Tuataras are isolated to a few small islands off the main islands while wetas are pretty prevalent in the North Island (at least in Hawke's Bay and Wellington, personal experience there folks).

The major drama of the episode involves the Allosaur killing the dominant Leaellynasaura female, which throws the entire social structure of the clan off.

Surprisingly, director Tim Haines over the last couple of episodes has really started to get into the art of filmmaking. We get more of those fab reverse creature POVs going down, see the still above, and as an added bonus a pretty effective overhead shot of the conifer forest. With only one more episode to go before Walking With Dinosaurs wraps it may be slightly too late for the artistic touches, but no doubt we'll get the benefit in future Walking With entries. Something to look forward to right there, folks.

Fundo Word on the street

"Nowhere was it even suggested (at least with the one 30-minute segment that we were able to preview) where the genetic information required for new anatomical structures to develop could have arisen through the mechanisms that evolutionists propose (including how dinosaurs could have evolved into birds, with their hollow bones, wings, and complex feathers that would have had to change from reptilian scales)."�

Oh boy, so the whole basis of this person's review of Walking With Dinosaurs is one 30 minute segment! Once again, we are talking to the dim witted and brainwashed here; Tim Haines' documentary series is "natural life" orientated, the purpose is to show these amazing creatures in believable natural environments rather than discuss evolutionary theory, heavy biology, and a fair amount of genetics. No one dials into this show expecting that sort of heavy science. Jesus kills a kitten every time a Fundo opens his cake hole kids, you read it here first.

One of the more interesting episodes of Walking With Dinosaurs, mainly due to the surprise environment Spirits of the Ice Forest finds itself in, I was spellbound from start to finish. Of course it was also a bonus for yours truly to find some quality time spent with wetas and tuataras, who are native to the Shaky Isles even today. Yeah us, we have living fossils, not counting the ones in Parliament, cavorting around the countryside. A nice sombre tone kept things moving toward the sun going down, which of course foreshadowed the fate of the polar critters and plants.

On the good news front, looks like we have managed to snaffle a copy of The Ballad of Big Al off eBay today, assuming my bid holds up overnight. For those not aware, there are a bunch of standalone documentaries supplementing the main entries in the Walking With series.

At this stage I really shouldn't have to say it, but full recommendation on another superb episode. It's going to be simpler to just buy the entire series really than choosing which individual ones to watch. Tim Haines offers us a peek into a prehistoric forest and you really should take full advantage of that.