Trailer title card
Dinosauria is an Anthology series created by animator David James Armsby. The full series consists of five short films ranging from 3-8 minutes in length that tell the stories of various dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures from across Late Cretaceous North America. Each film is also followed by an in-depth behind-the-scenes video detailing the artistic work and research that went into the final product. The official trailer was released on Armsby's YouTube channel Dead Sound
in early August of 2021, and the first episode premiered in early September, with the following film set to release the following month.note The final episode was released publically on June 11 2022.
Trailers: Series Trailer, "Old Buck" Teaser, "Our Frozen Past" Teaser, "A More Ancient Spring" Teaser, "Sea and Sky" Teaser, The Last Tyrant.
This series provides examples of:
- Artistic License – Paleontology: Very refreshingly averted, with up-to date depictions of dinosaurs with some speculative behaviors and color patterns and a decidedly non-monstrous portrayal of them. Still, there are some artist licences that make it through for the sake of the story; they are best detailed in the recap page entries.
- Animals Lack Attributes: The various reptiles all lack cloacas, which while not as noticeable as the external bits that mammals have, can usually be seen as at least a slit on the underside if not a slight bugle in the animals' profiles.
- Bigger Is Better: The trailer at least focuses on the large species with minimal attention given to the smaller ones, despite the fact that most dinosaurs weren't necessarily giants and many were in fact comfortably smaller than a human. "Our Frozen Past" focuses on a troodontid family, which are slightly smaller than most other dinosaurs featured in the trailer, though it is still the largest representative of its clade, tall enough to look a human in the eye.
- Cartoon Creature: "The Last Tyrant" has the sole wholly imaginary animal, a fictional mosaic of enantiornithean birds David dubbed "Madeupornis birdi" ("Made-up bird bird").
- Chekhov's Skill: The mother troodontid in "Our Frozen Past" has the ability to mimic sounds, which she demonstrates by mimicking the noises made by a pair of icicles falling from a tree at the beginning of the short. At the climax, she mimics the cry of a baby Pachyrhinosaurus, causing the adults to come and chase off the attacking Nanuqsauruses.
- Colony Drop: "The Last Tyrant" features, of course, the asteroid impact that caused the K-Pg mass extinction.
- Covered with Scars: Both the old male Styracosaurus and his young challenger have their share of these to drive home how tough and experienced fighters they are, though the former has more owing to his longer life in combat, with a broken horn to boot.
- The Cretaceous Is Always Doomed: "The Last Tyrant" is set in the aftermath of the asteroid impact.
- Death of a Child: "Our Frozen Past" has a troodontid chick get killed and eaten by a Nanuqsaurus.
- The Last Tyrant has the stillborn baby T. rex still curled up in its broken egg after the asteroid hits.
- Deliberately Monochrome: Most of the episodes featured in the series' trailer have a very stylized and limited color palette, such as the black and white color scheme of "Old Buck" or the rusty orange look of the Hell Creek installment.
- Goofy Feathered Dinosaur: Averted. All the dinosaurs that are feathered are portrayed accurately and can be just as distinct or majestic as their scaled compatriots.
- Gory Discretion Shot: Plenty of blood gets spilled onscreen, but the troodontid chick being eaten by a Nanuqsaurus in "Our Frozen Past" is only shown indirectly.
- Mighty Roar: The trailer is full of these, but the most notable is the T. rex's at the end with the title card.
- Mime and Music-Only Cartoon: A natural product of the a series featuring non-talking dinosaurs and lacking a narrator.
- Narrative-Driven Nature Documentary: Though lacking narration and being only short stories unlike a proper documentary, the series uses narratives built around the daily lives of prehistoric animals based on evidence and current hypotheses about their appearances and behaviors, so an educational component is still present despite that not necessarily being the main aim.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: The Styracosaurus fight in "Old Buck" is a brutal and bloody affair.
- Noisy Nature: The trailer and teaser provide ample examples of dinosaurs roaring, chirping, and bellowing at full blast. The actual shorts keep the dinosaurs vocal, but they can have their moments of silence (such as the Daspletosaurus trio watching over the Styracosaurus fight and the mother troodontid trying to hide herself from a Nanuqsaurus).
- Non-Standard Character Design: "Old Buck" shows this on full display; aside from the sexually dimorphic colors and nasal horn shapes seen in the Styracosaurus, each of the three individual adult males have their own unique horn configuration and patterning.
- Painted CGI: The animation is heavily cel-shaded 3D CGI, with a limited color palette, giving the series a distinct, stylised, painting-like visual style instead of photorealism.
- Prehistoric Monster: Averted. The series aims to present its subjects in a naturalistic manner, depicting them as real living animals just trying to survive.
- Real-Place Background: The final shot of the series, showing a T. rex skeleton in a museum, is not just a generic museum set; it's recognisably the natural history wing of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
- Signature Roar: Albeit not a proper roar, but the series uses the distinctive call of Parasaurolophus as digitally recreated in a 1997 study.
- Shown Their Work: Despite not being a proper documentary, the series has an admirable amount of small details and references to specific paleontological discoveries of the last decade or so.
- The two main Styracosaurus males in "Old Buck" are each based on a specific real-world specimen with unique horn configurations, and the overall variation in designs among the whole species is reflective of the recent discovery of the extent of individual variation in Styracosaurus albertensis.
- The old male's inward-pointing frill horns are based on the formerly proposed holotype of Styracosaurus ovatus, which was sunk into the type species of Styracosaurus, S. albertensis, in 2020 after being considered a distinct species and even genusnote for almost 90 years.
- The young challenger is based on the specimen UALVP 55900note (nicknamed "Hannah"), which shows an asymmetrical arrangement with three frill horns on one side and four on the other. It also has a pathology on the lower left base of its frill that was incorporated into the design.
- All of the hadrosaurus have a large hoof/nail on their main toe on their forefeet, per the (still unpublished) late 2019 discovery of this feature in an Edmontosaurus "mummy".
- Unlike other onscreen depictions of the Alaskan Pachyrhinosaurus, which are usually modeled after the earlier and southern-dwelling species P. lakustai, here the proper species, P. perotorum, is properly shown.
- Geosternbergia are depicted with an upturned beak, covered in pycnofibers, diving and swimming after fish, wings that fold as a result of the hands rotating backwards, and using their wings to vault off the ground.
- In "The Last Tyrant" juvenile Pachycephalosaurus are given flatter heads without the pronounced dome, the juvenile Triceratops has horns that curve upwards, and the baby Tyrannosaurus have a coat of feathers while the adults don't really have much.
- The two main Styracosaurus males in "Old Buck" are each based on a specific real-world specimen with unique horn configurations, and the overall variation in designs among the whole species is reflective of the recent discovery of the extent of individual variation in Styracosaurus albertensis.
