Review

It's the late Cretaceous, 149 million years BC, and we are in present day Montana. The modern continents have started to take their current form, but unfortunately this has led to massive volcanic activity with great swathes of the environment destroyed by lava flows and ash falls.

The mammals continue to thrive under the radar of the dinosaurs and birds are becoming much more common and varied. Ladies and gentlemen, the most feared predator ever to walk the planet has made the scene: the Tyrannosaurus. The final episode in this excellent series focuses on one mother dinosaur as her world is about to come crashing down.

We are surprisingly first introduced to a cute furry mammal, Didelphodon, a black and white (go the magpies!) marsupial. Guess the critter looks something like a Tasmanian devil, of the real rather than Disney kind. The little rascal is trying to dig into a mound covering a nest of T. Rex eggs. Unfortunately mum is home, and to a resounding crunch "hey it's another reference to Jaws" the mammal becomes a pre-dinner snack. Cue some more shenanigans from the effects crew, this one rocks, folks. Mother T. Rex whips around and roars at the camera, her breath condenses on the camera lens and streaks down it. Tim Haines going for a bit of reality television right there. For no apparent reason we then cut to the silhouette of a T. Rex bellowing from the top of a cliff; guess all those reddish hues helped get across the whole volcanic eruption thing going down in the period.

Haines, pleased with the effect he is getting here, simply goes buck wild with the whole thing. We see a group of smaller dinosaurs drinking at a lakeshore from approx the middle distance, but Haines then shifts his lens to put them out of focus before a predator's head pops up in the lower left of the frame in sharp focus. We get a real feeling that this is live action filming going down due to the focal treatment, something a lot of CGI movies and documentaries fail to do. Haines is really getting on top of this directing malarkey.

We get a little expose that helpfully informs us that due to volcanic toxins, a lot of animals are suffocating and also a lot of dino eggs are becoming non-viable. A clear extrapolation from the effects of modern day chemicals on bird eggs.

We return to our female T. Rex who has abandoned a nest due to her eggs going off. Naturally a Didelphodon has taken advantage of that free meal. The T. Rex calls for a mate, which apparently can take some time due to the huge territories these dinos claim. A male T. Rex, significantly smaller than the female, has made a kill and offers it to the female "to stop her attacking him on sight". Having wined and dined her, it's dino sex all round as Walking With Dinosaurs threatens to hit pornoville for very disturbed people. A few days later the female T. Rex drives the male off cause she's bored with him and stuff. The male offers to call next Friday and disappears into the wild blue yonder.

The world is changing, was the volcanic activity the cause of the dinosaur extinction event?

Naturally the female T. Rex is up the duff and three chicks survive from a clutch of 12 eggs. Mom then has a full time job defending them and keeping food up to their demands.

Joining our pinups for the episode, T. Rex and Didelphodon, are the heavily armoured Ankylosaurus, a Triceratops identified as Torosaurus, the duckbilled Anatotitan, a small swift raptor called Dromaeosaur, and a one-ton crocodile called Deinosuchus. Clearly your dino plate runs over here, and Haines is planning to go out giving dino freaks a hard on. Snakes have evolved by this stage and we get one coming to the attention of the T. Rex chicks. Think that's about all the critters covered, my apology if I have missed one or two.

Naturally, since this is the last show in the series, Waking With Dinosaurs has to broach the subject of why the dinosaurs disappeared. After throwing toxic fumes and unviable eggs onto the table, Haines rather meekly goes for the by now disputed theory that a massive comet crashed into the planet killing off 65% of animal life including all the large dinos. You get the impact and the aftermath in a rather tasteful fashion without the pyrotechnics Hollywood would normally insert.

Haines signs off with a reiteration of an earlier point, the birds are the one branch of dinosaurs that survived the mass extinction.

Fundo Word on the street

Three final points of conjecture from the religious extreme before we stop beating them over the head with a wooden cross.

"The program talked about T-rexes cannibalizing their young, again, there is no evidence presented that this really occurred."

Neither is there evidence that this didn't happen, your point is? The show is once again the result of conjecture based on best guess, taking into account current scientific research. And the proof that God exists would be?

"T-Rex is described as a predator, but it may have actually been a scavenger. The program also claims that its eggs were 'closely' guarded by a protective mother, and that it did not abandon its young but we don't really know that."�

Currently there is a theory that T. Rex was indeed a scavenger, so what? It's another theory based on interpretation of the available evidence. Female protection of the young is based on the sheer investment made, show me a large predator that doesn't spend some time with its offspring after birth. Interestingly using one theory to dis-prove another theory would indicate belief in the situation, oh dear the Reverand "I Need Money" Shiller would not be impressed!

"T-Rex is described as being capable of giving out a mating call, and its territory is stated to have been over hundreds of square miles. Pure speculation again."

Yes it is speculation, but quite likely to be correct given the size of the dinosaur and predator territories in modern savannah Africa. You really want to get into this argument when your entire belief system is based on a book of stories! Currently speculation that Fundos are mentally challenged and easily lead is increasingly being proved to be correct.

Pretty good finishing episode to an excellent series, Death of a Dynasty takes us out of Walking With Dinosaurs in fitting style. We get plenty of dinos, Tim Haines going to town with the effects, and a well-handled final summation. I thoroughly enjoyed the episode as much as I have enjoyed the previous five in this superb presentation from the BBC.

Well that's it for Walking With Dinosaurs; next we'll have a look at the Monsters entry, right after finishing off a season of one of our other guides. On the good news front, the ABC have released a DVD collection containing all the spin off documentaries so that's about got us covered for the foreseeable future.

If you haven't dived into this amazing documentary series yet then there's really nothing more I can say to get you to make the commitment. One of the better documentary series coming out of the U.K. in recent years, the only downside is that there isn't anymore.