Walking With Dinosaurs errors.

Galvasean

Split from another thread.

Goduznt Xzst wrote:

I found a list of the errors in the show "walking with dinosaurs" here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_with...#Paleontological_Inaccuracies

I like to know what they got wrong before I watch it and accept anything that's in it. It's a fairly big list, I wonder how they managed to get so much wrong, and some of the inaccuracies would seem fairly obvious.

That list is a bit all over the place. In fact very few of the errors listed are actually from Walking With Dinosaurs. Most in fact are from the spin-offs Walking With Monsters (called Before The Dinosaurs in America) and Prehistoric Park.

Interestingly they didn't point out how in the first episode of Walking With Dinosaurs the Postosuchus urinates like a mammal (ie: a liquid stream) as opposed to the way reptiles and birds do (they leave behind a sort of crystalized clump).
Upon release the show recieved a lot of criticism from sections of the scientific community. The Observer newspaper came up with this headline.

Goduznt Xzst

Yeah, I mean I'm watching through it at the moment, and I can't help but feel they are making it up as they are going along. The urinating in the first episode did stand out as it seemed odd. Also, how can it be known that they used to mark their territories like that?

Also, the cynodont pair eating their young. Is this backed with any evidence or pure speculation?

Galvasean

Goduznt Xzst wrote: »

Yeah, I mean I'm watching through it at the moment, and I can't help but feel they are making it up as they are going along. The urinating in the first episode did stand out as it seemed odd. Also, how can it be known that they used to mark their territories like that?

As I said in my last post, they didn't. That's not how reptiles pee.

Goduznt Xzst wrote: »

Also, the cynodont pair eating their young. Is this backed with any evidence or pure speculation?

As for the cynodonts, I dont think there is any evidence for them eating their young (not that I'm aware of anyhow so I'm open to correction). That's something the Walking With... series tend to do a lot, implant the behaviour of modern animals on to prehistoric ones.
Incidently the dinosaur Coelophysis (which also features in the episode) is also referred to as a cannibal in popular culture, but as it stands the evidence suggesting so is fairly weak;
http://www.hmnh.org/archives/2006/09/23/coelophysis-acquitted-of-cannibalism/

Goduznt Xzst

Galvasean wrote: »

As I said in my last post, they didn't. That's not how reptiles pee.

No I was asking how they can know if they marked their territories, not the manner in which they urinated. Is it known if any dinosaurs used scent marking of their territories? Or are they just retroactively applying this trait to them as it is common nowadays.

In regards to the Coelophysis. I got the feeling that they where saying they ate their young due to the time period they existed in, when there was little to no other food available. Was this just pure speculation also?

Galvasean

Goduznt Xzst wrote: »

No I was asking how they can know if they marked their territories, not the manner in which they urinated. Is it known if any dinosaurs used scent marking of their territories? Or are they just retroactively applying this trait to them as it is common nowadays.

Oh right, well there is no way to tell if they used scent markings to mark territoies. I mean you could find the fossilized pee, but proving for certain it was used for marking teritory would almost certainlly be impossible.
Like you said, it is most likely a case of seeing modern animals doing so and implanting that behaviour on prehistoric forms.

Goduznt Xzst wrote: »

In regards to the Coelophysis. I got the feeling that they where saying they ate their young due to the time period they existed in, when there was little to no other food available. Was this just pure speculation also?

Although the Coelophysis cannibalism theory has been shown to be lacking evidence in recent years, WWD had every right to show Coelophsis as a cannibal (albeit only in times of extreme stress/pressure) since at teh time of making the programme (1999) this was still widely acepted as fact. The paper debunking the canniballism theory was not published until 2002 so the WWD team in this case were operating according to the best evidence available to them at the time.
Of course that's not to say Coelophysis definately did not cannibalise in times of hardship. Cannibalism has been uncovered in other meat eating dinosaurs, most notably Majungasaurus and possibly also Tyrannosaurus so it is probably not too far a stretch to hypothesize that other more primitive dinosaurs did so too.