28.10.1999
In living colour
José Villa reviews BBC1’s ‘Walking with dinosaurs’
The BBC is internationally well known for its excellent documentaries on living species. Now it has become the first company ever to film an entire documentary on how extinct species lived, fed, moved, mated, reproduced and developed their day-to-day life.
In Dave Attenborough’s ‘The life of birds’, the BBC used computer-animated shots of prehistoric animals. The six programmes in the ‘Walking with dinosaurs’ series are based almost entirely on excellent animatron-ics and electronic animation, in which it is hard to believe that the animals we are watching had been artificially designed. The creatures’ shadows, reflections in the water and impact over the terrain look so real. Tim Haines re-creates the old world, and for many he opened a new world as a result.
The flora and fauna shown in ‘Walking with dinosaurs’ is founded on good scientific evidence. The six episodes describe six different periods of evolution. Haines’s team travelled to the most distant places on earth - from southern Chile to New Caledonia and New Zealand - in order to find vegetation without grass and flowers, to match that which existed during the age of the dinosaurs.
The programme represents a slap in the face to the creationists who are for banning the teaching of the theory of evolution; in Kansas they have proved successful. It shows from episode to episode how radically different our own planet was from period to period. In fact everything is in constant movement and change. The continents are drifting, splitting and colliding. In the process new weather systems, topographies and seas are constantly being made and unmade. At one time most of the mass of the land was hot desert; at others lush forests spread from pole to pole.
We humans have only existed for less than one per cent of the period of our planet’s existence. More than 99% of the species that have ever been are now extinct. We are newcomers whose presence on this globe is temporary. Sooner or later we are destined to evolve or perish. Species have to adapt to face changes in the ecosystem, and if they cannot evolve they disappear.
The vacuum left in an ecological niche could be filled by other species or even a whole class of new plants or animals. In ‘Walking with dinosaurs’ it is possible to see that the ecological niches which today are dominated by sea mammals - whales, dolphins, seals, etc - were filled by marine reptiles, or that the big plant-eating mammals and great cats of today have a similar relationship to the herbivores and carnivores which dominated the dinosaur era.
‘Walking with dinosaurs’ represents a double achievement. On the one hand traditional scientific documentaries on dinosaurs were based on filming excavations and fossils and interviewing palaeontologists. On the other hand in popular films dinosaurs were used as pulp fiction which muddled species - including humans - and did not contain a single worthwhile scientific fact.
The Haines series combines the best animation techniques with a serious effort to be guided by objective scientific evidence and interpretation. Extinct animals are gone and it is impossible to know in detail many things about them. Palaeontologists have found some traces of dinosaurs’ skins or feathers, but nobody has seen their colours or heard the sounds they produced. The latest science believes today that dinosaurs were related to birds and that in all probability they had multicolour vision. Like their modern relatives dinosaurs could therefore have used vivid colours to distinguish themselves, intimidate enemies or attract mates.
Analysing dinosaur footprints and skeletons, palaeontologists can deduce how fast and in what position they walked or ran. Current theories have abandoned the old paradigm which portrayed them as slow, lizard-like creatures. Dinosaurs did not sprawl or have legs partly tucked under their bodies like crocodiles. They walked on straight legs, and some were capable of very fast spurts like today’s ostriches or lions.
When it comes to the diving four-flipper marine reptiles or the flying reptiles hauling themselves about on land, there is no precise equivalent nowadays, and the series had to rely on guesswork using scientific methods.
The BBC producers acknowledge that they employ some techniques used in ‘Jurassic Park’. However, the BBC have made a much more serious film. Steven Spielberg’s mega-dollar blockbuster had the merit of presenting dinosaurs as living creatures with levels of intelligence and agility more akin to the ‘warm-blooded’ birds than sluggish, ‘cold-blooded’ reptiles, as previous films inaccurately portrayed them. But Spielberg introduced a lot of fantasy. In his dinosaur theme-world we saw creatures in reality separated by tens of millions of years. Most of the dinosaurs presented in his film did not live in the Jurassic.
The T-rex, which was portrayed as an animal without a sense of smell and became the symbol of ‘Jurassic Park’, actually lived in the late Cretaceous, around 65-67 million years ago. The Jurassic (138-205 million years ago) was very different - no flowers, a different atmosphere, etc. As to Spielberg’s dilophodon, this bore no relation to the large carnivore discovered by palaeontologists, but is an imagined monster - a combination of an Australian lizard and a venomous spitting serpent.
Haines has been criticised for using too many Latin names. Yet he could not do otherwise. The alternative would have been to invent ‘popular’ nicknames creating far more confusion. Some of his story lines are based on valid hypothesis, such as when he suggests a symbiotic relation between some flying reptiles and a diplodocus: certain birds today live on or around elephants or hippopotamuses. However, what we can criticise Haines for is that he sometimes departed from strict scientific criteria and conceded too much to unfounded speculation. Haines presumably did this in order to gain audience appeal, but in so doing he handed ammunition to the creationists.
Some examples. Well documented evidence exists about how the maiasaurus incubated eggs in nests. However, this dinosaur is not mentioned in the series. Haines preferred to invent a dichotomy. So we have the T-rex and leaellynasaura as carers who laid their eggs in leaves (Haines even tells us how many days they were with their mothers), while in the case of the diplodocus he showed a turtle-like creature who abandons her young to fend for themselves. Likewise, purely an act of imagination, he decided that a proto-mammal like the 220 million-year old cynodont lived in burrows, coupled for life, had fur and produced milk. Probably Haines was trying to invoke sympathy for an extremely distant relative by suggesting that they had human-like social qualities.
The fourth episode centres on the transcontinental flight of the 12-meter-long ornithocheirus. The creature travels from ‘Brazil’ to ‘Europe’ for its annual mating ceremony. This is something that does not have the slightest scientific evidence supporting it. The same can be said regarding the leaellynasaura (the main creatures in the fifth episode) which Haines claims hibernated and was ruled by a leading pair. Nevertheless, this episode has extraordinary merit in that it shows that dinosaurs could survive polar weather, but it also mistakenly portrays a modern Amazonian coati as a contemporary inhabitant - 106 million years ago. Actually this placental mammal only arrived in the relatively recent past.
Haines dedicated the last episode to the most popular dinosaur (the T-rex). Palaeontologists are still debating whether the T-rex was a big carrion-eating animal or one that killed for itself. Haines decided to go with the latter interpretation. But he did so in an extremely free and easy way. He gives us a lonely female who does not eat for months while she tends her eggs. When a mate eventually arrives with an offering there are three days of mating ritual before the female attacks and expels him. In fact, the study of ‘Sue’, the most complete T-rex skeleton and most expensive fossil ever, reveals that this female suffered so many terrible injuries that she could only have survived with the assistance of others. This suggests that these were not the solitary animals portrayed by Haines.
Overall the series is highly informative, and I would recommend the accompanying book. However, future documentaries on extinct flora and fauna should be more rigorous in their scientific accuracy.
José Villa