Walking with Monsters: Before the Dinosaurs (2005)

Member Rating:

Theorizing that the dinosaurs may not have been the Earth's first inhabitants, paleontologist Peter Ward spent over ten years in the Karoo Desert of South Africa and devised a conception of a hideous and fantastic creature called the Gorgon, the dinosaur's ancestor -- theories projected in Ward's bestselling books. Yet Ward's was only the first notion in a rapidly expanding subfield of paleontology, conjecturing that hundreds of such creatures may have existed and thrived prior to the dinosaurs, some 300 million years ago, until a global cataclysm brought them to a sad and helpless end. In Walking with Monsters, the final installment of the Walking With... series, the BBC uses cutting-edge CG technology to sculpt an animated onscreen world where these terrifying beasts hunt, swim, rest, and vie with each other for survival. Children ages six and up will be enthralled by the beasts of the Cambrian period, with a jellyfish-like ancestor believed to have preceded everything and everyone; the later Carboniferous period, where scientists theorize that evolution enabled amphibians to thrive; and the final Permian period, a volcanic era that gave birth to the Euparkeria, a more recent reptilian ancestor of all mammals. Computer-generated graphics are used here to bring evolutionary ideas to vivid life, exploring how the evolution and adaptation of species occurred -- entertaining young viewers while encouraging them to think about prehistory. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi