When Dinosaurs Ruled is a 1999-2000 six-part Discovery Channel/TLC Speculative Documentary focusing on (you guessed it) the time dinosaurs ruled our planet, with each episode focusing on the saurian fauna of one particular continent (though one combines Australia and Antarctica), and with narration provided by Dr. Ian Malcolm himself, Jeff Goldblum. note
Can be seen as a poor man’s Walking with Dinosaurs (which aired the same year), as it mostly focuses on the Talking Heads and provides visual information about the titular beasts via illustrations and diagrams, and when CGI creature do get used…it’s less-than-impressive.
Subject of prehistory aside, has nothing to do with the movie When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.
Tropes used in When Dinosaurs Ruled:
- Anachronism Stew:
- Oddly enough, Deltadromeus is placed in the Late Cretaceous (70 mya), when it was actually a contemporary of Spinosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus 100-95 mya.
- A Tarbosaurus is shown hunting hadrosaurs and getting trapped in a swamp 100 million years ago. Most likely a flub from the narrator, as later in the same episode, it’s accurately described as having lived at the end of the Cretaceous.
- The episode about Europe claims the abelisaur Tarascosaurus preyed on the titanosaur Ampelosaurus, but the former lived in the early Campanian, while the latter appeared during the Maastrichtian, around 10 million years later.
- Artistic License – Paleontology:
- The CGI renditions of Velociraptor and Spinosaurus not only don't resemble an actual dromaeosaur and spinosaur respectively (especially in terms of skull shape), but they hardly resemble any real-life theropods period, looking more like they were modeled after cheap plastic dinosaur toys.
- Besides the inaccurate design (even for the time), Velociraptor is described as an incredibly fast predator that could run down any prey. In reality, dromaeosaurs weren’t particularly great runners (they were agile and well-balanced though) and relied mainly on ambush attacks and sprinting. It’s also said to be the size of a wolf, when it was actually the size of a coyote (around 30-40 lb).
- T. rex is said to have lived 70-65 million years ago when it really lived 68-66 milion years ago.
- Many of the dinosaurs are given ridiculously low weight estimates given their great size. Allosaurus, for example, is said to have stretched 40 feet long and weighed 2 tons (which would be a reasonable mass estimate for an average-sized 28-foot Allosaurus specimen, but obviously not for a 40-foot giant, remains of which are rare and fragmentary), though, in another episode, it's given a weight of 4 tons. The sauropod Ampelosaurus, is accurately described as 50 feet long (it would have been comparable in weight to a good-sized elephant
◊) but said to have weighed only one ton (the weight of a smallish rhino). - Pterodaustro is said to be part of the Brazilian Santana Group, but it actually comes from the Argentinian Lagarcito Formation.
- Tyrannosaurus rex is said to have averaged 50 feet long (15 meters), when the biggest was no more than 40 ft (12.3 meters). Even more egregiously, the narrator also claims that its name means "terrible lizard" (the actual meaning of "dinosaur") when it really means "tyrant lizard king".
- Beware My Stinger Tail: Some ankylosaurs are talked about here, but they also discuss Omeisaurus, a Mid Jurassic Chinese sauropod that also evolved a small club at the end of its tail (a trait shared with other, contemporary sauropods like Shunosaurus).
- Continuity Snarl: Certain things claimed in one episode aren’t consistent with what’s said in other episodes. For example, Giganotosaurus is said to have been bigger than T. rex at 45 feet in length, but both T. rex and Carcharodontosaurus are said to have reached 50 feet in length respectively.
- Evil Egg Eater: Debunked in regards to Oviraptor, as it’s explained how (then) new discoveries revealed that the holotype (found on top of a nest full of eggs originally attributed to Protoceratops) was actually a brooding parent instead of a nest-raider. Ornithomimids, however, get namedropped as "nest-raiding dinosaurs", despite there being no evidence that they had a taste for eggs.
- Giant Flyer: Tropeognathus (referred to by the now synonymous name “Criorhynchus”) is shown in the episode about South America, though like in Walking with Dinosaurs, it’s oversized (based on dated estimates).
- Herbivores Are Friendly: Herbivorous dinosaurs such as sauropods and ornithopods are generally described as docile and harmless animals. At one point, it’s said that the midsized theropod Neovenator could have taken out an Iguanodon, despite the latter’s acknowledged size advantage, purely because Iguanodon is an overly passive and skittish herbivore.
- Layman's Terms: Both the narrator and Talking Heads generally avoid trying to use many "scientific terms". Theropods are simply called predatory dinosaurs, pterosaurs are consistently called "pterodactyls", and Baryonyx is described as “vaguely resembling a T. rex”, but perhaps most notably, the episode about Asian dinosaurs tries to explain how tyrannosaurs and therizinosaurs are coelurosaurs and thus related to the smaller dromaeosaurs and oviraptorosaurs (pennaraptorans), but the latter are simply called “raptors” and the term “coelurosaur” isn’t used, which (coupled with some confusing wording from the narrator) makes it sound as if tyrannosaurs and therizinosaurs were descendants of dromaeosaurs.Narrator: Only one other group of dinosaurs has a foot like that, the raptors. Could this small predator sire a monster twenty times its size?
- Mix-and-Match Critters: Alxasaurus, a basal therizinosaur, is described as a cross between various other dinosaurs; having a head like an ornithomimid, hand claws like a predatory theropod, and legs and feet like an early sauropodomorph (ala Plateosaurus). At the end of the same episode, they bring up its (confirmed to be feathered) relative Beipiaosaurus (named in 1999), and suggest feathers were common among theropods.
- Misplaced Wildlife: A dwarf species of Allosaurus is shown to have lived in the polar regions of Australia during the Early Cretaceous, based on a single ankle bone found in Victoria (which has since been reinterpreted as belonging to an indeterminate megaraptoran).
- No Name Given: The cassowary-sized avian Gargantuavis is brought up during the segment about Late Cretaceous France and we even see fossils of it, but it’s only ever identified as a “large bird”.
- Prehistoric Monster: The meat-eating dinosaurs are repeatedly referred to as savage and bloodthirsty killers, and in general, little else is said about most of the referenced species other than how scary and deadly they were as predators.
- Raptor Attack:
- As this is the '90s, dromaeosaurs are not only depicted as scaly, reptilian-looking creatures with pronated hands but they are also hyped up as vicious, formidable, speedy, and cunning killers that could punch well above their weight, with one talking head saying he would rather deal with a T. rex than a pack of Velociraptor. The CGI rendition of the Velociraptor also barely resembles the actual animal (even ignoring the lack of feathers), sporting aye aye-like hands and a rounded, vaguely lizard-ish head, despite an actual Velociraptor skull being shown on-screen and (accurately) described as narrow and elongated.
- Oddly, the then-still unnamed and partially excavated Eotyrannus (named in 2001) is described as a large dromaeosaur nicknamed "New Raptor" (despite the accompanying illustration lacking the famous sickle claw), when it was actually an early tyrannosaur (as its name suggests).
- Megaraptor is erroneously depicted as a massive dromaeosaur (featherless of course), as this was before we discovered that its foot-long sickle claw was actually attached to its arm, not its foot.
- Stock Footage: The stop-motion T. rex footage that is used throughout the series is from The Ultimate Guide Tyrannosaurus Rex.
