That's my only beef with this program. And my info could be out of date, but last I read the Smithsonian, in the late 80s (circa 1988 or thereabouts) ran an international symposium where the super-majority of scientists agreed with the new model of the dinosaur was that they were warm blooded (mostly anyway), and had all of the range of motion and features of a lot of modern animals.Beyond that, the first installment of this series has me hooked. Great CGI animation brings to life creatures of millions of years long gone, and like any good wildlife documentary, this program shows the brutal kill or be killed environment that creatures of millenia long gone contended to survive in, including eating their own young to preserve themselves. These are animals with pure basic instincts of survival and territorial domination alone. They know little else. Water comes, they drink, food is either hunted or scavenged if you're a meat eater, otherwise they tear at the primitive ferns and primitive palms that are the forerunners of today's flora.It is as honest a look as you can get. I think of all of the great wild life special s and programs that I have seen throughout the years, and this magic behind this piece is that it attempts to imitate those programs to really give us a sense of the liveliness of these creatures that dominated the Earth long before we came along.But it's not just the animals and insects that are showcased here, but the natural environment. We are shown a bare-bones earth. One where grass has yet to evolve. One where primitive seedlings give rise to a limited number of plants. One where the Earth itself is a tropical over much of its surface; where there are no polar ice caps. This is Earth in the raw, as it perhaps was meant to be and is headed towards now regardless of man's activities. This is more than just prehistoric Earth, this is primordial Earth, when it was young, and life was just beginning to take root and feel its way around.Gone are charts showing what creatures developed where and from what other creatures. We're not given other graphics describing postulated bone structures from fragments of fossils, nor are we given the long winded and sometimes boring video lecture on geophysics and how it impacted species development on a young Earth. No, we are merely given how it was like back then to our best approximation and understanding based on the natural forensics that scientists the world over have studied for over a century.And the effort pays off with some very nice animation of creatures that we may never see again on the face of this planet.If you're into natural history, or just have a mild curiosity about what life and the environment were like ages ago, then give this show a chance.Enjoy.

When i was small, i just loved dinosaurs (who didn't?). When this series aired in Finland, we recorded every episode on VHS. Then i watched them over and over again. Now, more than 11 years later, i found those old recordings. After watching a few episodes I was surprised about two things: firstly, i'm still very fascinated about those creatures, and secondly the computer animation still looks amazing, the dinosaurs look real and very much alive (and i might add: thirdly, rewinding a VHS still isn't much fun...)So if you have even the slightest interest in dinosaurs (or computer animation?), "walking with dinosaurs" is a must-see.

For some time there has been this new word: "edutainment". The basic idea is to combine entertainment with making the people learn something. It has changed the way documentations are made and presented completely. The problem is what sort of trade-off you want to make. Something with pure information isn't usually that entertaining anymore ('Life on Earth' probably wouldn't sell too well today), but some information SHOULD still be included.The BBC have found an acceptable balance here. The series is a lot of fun to watch and you do get some insights into the world of the dinosaurs. The special effects and animations are very good. Too bad the scenes with puppets (especially when the dinosaurs are eating) look very unreal. Some of the scenes are also repeated frequently which doesn't matter much when you see the documentation for the first time but tends to annoy later on.The biggest problem with "Walking with Dinosaurs" is the fact that it is built upon speculation. No one knows how the Dinosaurs lived for sure, if they traveled in herds or hunted in packs or not. We can only guess if a diplodocus wagged its tail to help others in the herd see it - not that the pure bulk of more that 10t in an adult would probably do that more effectively than a wagging tail."Walking with Dinosaurs" leaves this fact nearly completely in the dark. The viewer never really gets to know that this interpretation of the fossil clues is just one of many. To make matters worse, in many cases the story-telling style of the series (like the life of a diplodocus in "Time of the Titans") drops some of the facts we really DO know. Only in the special with "Big Al" some of the facts are even mentioned.In the end we have to admit that information doesn't sell that well and this product fits just fine into modern times.

This is about the most convincing animation possible. One thinks that one has somehow been transported to a world that Man could never have evolved into. One is among nasty beasts, amimals even more ferocious than those that we humans warm up to -- dogs, dolphins, whales, and cats. One may never know exactly what dinosaurs were like, but this is the most convincing description yet of them and their world. Sure, the behavior of other animals, typically birds, is imputed to the most menacing of the carnivores. Then again, who would want to meet an oversized, flightless eagle? This treatment of dinosaurs is very different from the anthropomorphism that one associates with Disney fare. This is Nature red in tooth and claw, which their world was to the extreme. (Then again, it is unlikely that some series that reconstructs our world by some intelligence creatures 80 million years after our human demise will see much cute or cuddly in dogs, cats, dolphins, or whales -- let alone us.This documentary is gory -- as gory as a typical war movie or western at times. Do not show this to small children; show them instead the animated "Land Before Time" series of Disney-style anthropomorphism. Better yet, show them "Dumbo", the most successful anthropomorphism of an animal in the Disney pattern (elephants approach human intelligence, have a human life span and social structure, and have human-like emotions -- and they are almost dinosaurian in size). When the great rock fell into the Yucatan Peninsula, the remarkable era of the dinosaurs came to an end -- and ours became possible. Tragic as that collision was for the dinosaurs, that catastrophe made our world possible.