agreed and Prehistoric Planet is better

This, I couldn't believe it, but this is so true

@@zookeeperchris ikr? just like how Rick and Morty made dinosaurs boring

@@tyrannozilla1 Oh my gosh yes. That episode was such a train wreck. Some of the most awe-inspiring animals in all of history, reduced weird high and mighty plot about how humans can't be happy and healthy. sad

@@zookeeperchris that show did Dinosaurs dirty

For what it's worth Life On Our Planet was made around the same time as Prehistoric Planet going into production, for me it felt more like LOOP was trying to go for Trilogy of Life's greatest hits with little variation, but forgot that Trilogy of Life managed to feature obscure taxa that became household names, something LOOP very much failed at.

But yeah as a friend of mine said, one of its biggest issues is that it just does not know what it was trying to be.

Prehistoric Planet did the "stick a prehistoric animal in a real location" too, but they handled it way better. They carefully chose the real environments to match the time period and their CGI was straight up photo realistic.

The show is basically the Walking with Trilogy with all the trilogy’s flaws and very few of its strengths.

​@@BugsandBiologyExactly, and that's not the way it should be.

I think it's really important for people to remember that species don't think of themselves on Team Mammal or Team Reptile whenever they do actually compete with other organisms. They just...do their own thing. That's what results in ecosystems where various clades fill in various niches. This also means that no matter how much they might compete, "dynasties" need each other. Were it not for the "ray-finned fish dynasty" or "cephalopod dynasty", the cetaceans and pinnipeds of the "mammal dynasty" would starve, among countless other examples.

I’m glad I’m not the only person completely annoyed with dynasties crap. It reinforces dated and problematic myths about how evolution and life on the planet operates as a whole.

Dynasty is just a metaphor

Exactly. Modern day herbivorous animals are all NOTORIOUS for having a bad temper. They can and will EASILY attack those they perceive as threat. So what would make you think prehistoric herbivores were any different?

And the trike not able to kill a fricking trex when it proven trikes can

Herbivores are usually more dangerous than carnivores. Hippos kill more people than any other animal.

Walking with Beasts had a much better understanding of the lengths large mammals would take to protect their young.

a Buffalo alos can kill a Lion and it happens still when a Lion aproaches a Buffalo the buffalo will in most cases run away first Nature is not allways on for non stop brawl if you can avoid the fight alltogehter go for it it means oyu dont get injured not getting injured means prob no infection and an infection can kill you in the end @@pierre-samuelroux9364

Impossible. A show that portrayed its dinosaurian carnivores more disbelievingly overpowered than Jurassic Park? Can’t be done.

@kziila0244 'It is impossible for the triceratops to fight off the t Rex and its babies, it must retreat back to the herd.' Meanwhile triceratops being adapted to fight off tyrannosaurus. ( yes, I know that the t Rex killed the triceratops from Jurassic Park, but that's like saying a lion easily kills all elephants because it killed a half dead one

​@@kziila0244 lmao 💀

@@MinmiGamer Meant to be a joke. Sorry if I wasn’t clear.

Realistically the two baby T. rex would’ve posed no threat to an adult Triceratops at all. It could’ve run them into the ground without noticing.

It’s basically the Trilogy of Life hastily rehashed and retaining all its weaknesses but very few of its strengths.

Do you mean the Walking With trilogy?

@@COVID-19_CrabThose old documentaries produced by the BBC and narrated by Kenneth Branagh. Walking with Dinosaurs Walking with Beasts Walking with Monsters

The Trilogy of Life is another name for the Walking with Trilogy.

Ain't no way this guy is here

That Triassic episode would’ve been a perfect opportunity to give the massive ichthyosaurs of the time a media debut, but nope, they gotta stick to familiar ground, so Jurassic Pliosaur it is!

Wow, you lasted a lot longer than me, I stopped after the double whammy in episode one that was them calling maiasaura defenceless, then the t-rex attacking the trike from the front, then the trike turning its back and running away for some reason.

The pliosaur scene was really uninteresting too, it was so generic

@@BugsandBiology yeah god like, the Triassic has to be one of the most interesting periods of life on the planet but it was completely skipped over in the doc. The missed opportunity was so egregious.

Your right at that same scene I wanted to see Nothosaurus chilling on the coast like how seals do today. I also wanted to see Shonisaurus.

They were way too bent on sticking to paths already trodden.

what are the things you don't like about prehistoric planets?

​@@dolsopolarI think they were talking about actual plants, not Prehistoric Planet.

​@@sikucoon1927 ohhhhh lmao

​@@dolsopolar : DDDD

Then again, since evolution is fake, there is no correct way to represent it. It can be represented as however

@@justashark776 You're welcome. God created everything and every animal at once, therefore no such thing as evolution took place. Just wanted to give my take on this. Also you coulda just replied to me instead of copy and pasting my tag and username lol

@@justashark776People give themselves a username like that and then wonder why no one takes them seriously…

There is no set direction or best adaptations, but to say life is not an arm's race of winners and losers is sort of false as animals do evolve due to direct competition and environmental factors.

You’re not wrong. Even in the Cenozoic, the “time of the mammals” the biggest land predator was a reptile. And the biggest raptorial predator was a shark. And terror birds managed to establish themselves as apex predators even with pre-existing competition from a variety of mammalian predators.

Angiosperms of some sort are visible in nearly all the Paleozoic scenes (at least the ones on land). Although I’ll let that slide since their prevalence in almost all landscapes makes it rather hard to film on location without them.

@@BugsandBiologyThats what makes the choice of CG habitats in many post-paleozoic scenes, like the trex hunt, extra baffling.

Yeah exactly. If they were going to use CG environments, they should’ve saved them for time periods when it was really warranted. Not the late Cretaceous when flora was already relatively modern.

@@BugsandBiology Listen up paleobros, did the often lacking Prehistoric Planet turn yall into some accuracy or else, paleobro cult? Or was yall being so lame, already a thing underway before it aired? Every take & opinion sure is important, & details matter too much here in Dec 2023. Especially knowing the track record of so called Scientific Accuracy, can be summed up in a word - abysmal. Life on our Planet reminds me of why most kids "like me" went nuts over terrible lizards in the first place. But the accuracy police aint having it, kids loving this stuff the way they got to love it. So selfish, so entitled. I'll be back later after I pick apart the inaccurate crap all in Prehistoric Planet later today you paleobros you!

Oh no, how dare we care about accuracy in educational media? Yes, Prehistoric Planet has its flaws too, as I acknowledged in the video, but it is objectively nowhere near as outright misinformative as Life on our Planet. Plus it was honestly advertised as well - we saw trailers for a dinosaur documentary, and that’s what we got. Also I find it strange how so many people seem to act as if the paleo community puts PhP on a pedestal - if there is one documentary that has a “cult like” following, it’s Walking with Dinosaurs, not PhP.

Yeah agreed 100%. You may be a layperson but it seems you’ve got a great grasp of the basics of evolution.

Natural selection is better if you ask me

Yeah, the one i heard was "survival of if it works it works"

я, в свою очередь, тоже часто слышал, что выживание это не про сильнейшего, а наиболее приспособленного. Выражение "выживает сильнейший" вызывает иногда недопонимание

@@BugsandBiology I have often heard that, but it's missing the point that what explains evolution is RELATIVE "fitness". "Good enough" sounds like there some sort of imagined threshhold for an individual to clear. But what matters is the RELATIVE goodness of an allele in an environment compared to it's alternatives. So imo "fittest" is way better than "good enough". "Fitter" or "better" would probably be better. "The propagation of the better in expectation".

Yeah the allosaurus and T.Rex looked pretty bad lol

@bbpoisonn yeah, the accuracy and models unfortunately can't hold a candle to Prehistoric Planet

​@@RaptorFHWhile I did not expect Prehistoric Planet's-caliber of accuracy, I was still left disappointed with LOOP's sloppiness (and even at times awesomebroism) on their models.

@@juanyusee8197 yep, completely agree

The Smilodon-Doedicurus scene is anachronistic: Smilodon wasn’t in South America 2MYA (it had literally only just evolved) and Smilodon populator (the species shown in that segment) hadn’t even evolved yet.

I was super hyped as well, and initially thought people were overreacting to the inaccuracies, but nope…

I honestly find Life On Our Planet to be pretty unengaging and hard to hold my attention especially past the Paleozoic segments, not helped by the fact that it had too many action scenes for the prehistoric segments.

@@BugsandBiologyI remember the comment section of a teaser which was the clip of the T. rex family hunt being a mixture of “it’s not even out yet” and “this looks really bad” . I was the latter.

​@@BugsandBiology I was also extraordinarily excited for Life of our planet documentary. I wasn't aware of the fact of the species differences between the terror birds and the big cats. Yet it makes sense from a environmental perspective of apexes differentiation in different territories. You normally wouldn't see two equal sized or powered apex predators in one single area. What did get me and my friends watching together was the rex family targeting the triceratops. Like why would the trike run when it has it's defenses facing the threat and instead backing up or instinctively panic rushing with a goring attempt much like how wild lone buffalo or cattle will do? Or let alone not gore or trample the much much smaller rexes? That was sooo insulting and bad. Not to say a rex couldn't take on a triceratops, but a triceratops has been proven to win over rexes as well. That should've been a tense ambush scene of: This rex family has found a lucky Lone triceratops that has wandered too far from it's herd. The mother/father must be very careful with how they strike their ambush. One wrong move could mean a grievous injury or even death if they do not strike their prey correctly. A lesson their young will be wise to learn. Then proceed to show the rex ambushing the trike from behind, grabbing the back of the frill/crest to pure power it to be thrown to it's side, damaging the crest Frill from the immense biting force before delivering a deadly bite to the more vulnerable areas. Or as the rex parent ambushes and fights to get a bite, one of her young who is too eager joins. Gets themselves gored, but in the process the parent rex is able to take down the triceratops due to them not facing them any longer, and instead freaking out from the biting teeth of the adolescent at it's rump. Showing both the impressive creatures, the struggle of survival, and the cost of not being careful. Maybe a note how their remainder offspring will become a excellent rex if they continue to learn from their parent, and in turn teach their young the trials of a hunt; which even the greatest carnivore ever to live, must respect the power of their prey.

I’ve watched prehistoric planet several times. I lit took me two weeks to get through the first two episodes of life on our planet and I couldn’t be bothered the start it until Christmas and can’t be bothered to watch the rest.

It was almost perfect in that the scene was well-filmed and very well-directed, but to me was ruined the the T. rex roaring as and after she chased the Anatotitan as it ruined the believability of the scene to me.

Me watching with subtitles helped finishing his sentences

TBH I don’t buy any large theropods going out of its way to eat a tiny hatchling. Juveniles yes (in fact I’d argue that would be the most common prey size). Literally newly hatched babies no. This is why I hate the “baby killer theropods” idea, because its name very heavily implies theropods were only eating ridiculously tiny prey relative to themselves even though that’s not the point it’s trying to make.

@@bkjeong4302It like me licking ants on the road cause I need protein, the logic is just off

but thats how every animal is ? its called opotunistic you ever seen a full grown lion catch an springhare ? they do it even its so small if an Allo and Cera or whatever would walk by and suddenly a Baby animal would walk past it it would stil lsnatch it up or at least try to get it predators cant really choose like nah this is to small i dont like it maybe its the only food you can get in the next 3 days i sene Thuna ..who are gigantic fish who normaly hunt mackarels and other larger fish go after small baby turltes who are jsut hatched thats not evne a bite for a fish larger then a human being then why do they do it ? cause its there and you can get it @@bkjeong4302

no it's literally shit, i cringed immediately the moment the allosaurus tried to attack the pack of Diplodocus and their response? A lil tail tap to push it away, who tf made this? a 10 years old? stop glorifyng the carnivores to be "fearless", " barbaric" and "brave", they thought that made them cool but it actually turned them into a bunch of dumbassess. An allosaurus isn't that dumb to rush into a pack of creatures double its size, Diplodocus aren't that weak or cowardly to only "gently" push it away like that, they portrayed all herbivores as weaklings

An animal is not going to be competent all the time and baby sauropods are fairly decent meals. The tail tap is merely an interaction between two species, not a showcase of the animals' daring nature. The Allosaurus was literally just looking at them, it wasn't planning on attacking them. The tail tap was all that was needed to keep the predator at bay. That ant analogy sucks, most ants are smaller than a person's pupil, young sauropods are around the size of an Allosaurus' head.

Not to mention the fact they promoted that outdated "Smilodon superior, Terrorbird inferior" belief.

@@kade-qt1zuFr, I’m sick and tired of people saying that Smilodon is superior when they simply weren’t

@@kade-qt1zu I couldn't help but read that in Soundwave's voice from transformers.

@@FlufuxAh, a fellow person of culture here 😁

​@@FlufuxSoundwave superior, Autobots Inferior.

The issue with the first one is that terror birds were likely altricial if they were anything like all other Australoaves, so by the time the juveniles first start to explore outside the next they’d already be at full adult size (like with other Australoaves), and if the juvenile Titanis are at a small enough size to be viable targets for S. gracilis they’re going to be near-immobile and not fully feathered babies in a guarded nest, not remotely the sort of predator vs. predator battle most people would imagine by any means. A lot of media depictions of terror birds (and even academic research) assume far too many similarities between them and ratites, even when there’s fossil or phylogenetic evidence to show they were very different animals, not only in terms of diet but in most aspects of their biology. This is why the idea of baby terror birds following their parents around is a thing even though it makes zero sense, and it’s also why everyone thinks terror birds were open-country animals (which most of them weren’t, especially the bigger ones) and why terror bird body masses have been chronically underestimated until very recently (and are still underestimated in publications today). The juvenile mammoth scene could have been fixed just by having the cave lions take a lot longer to bring it down (and have a lot more cave lions involved in the attack as well, as with cases of lions hunting adolescent elephants IRL). The idea isn’t bad in itself, but the execution was horrible. Though the least explicable error is the decision to have galloping Alamosaurus, while the Lystrosaurus portrayal was the most blatantly insulting.

​@@bkjeong4302Yeah their nonsense with _Lystrosaurus_ is particularly egregious especially when one remembers that it still had to contend with predators right after The Great Dying (_Proterosuchus_ especially), thus it wouldn't be helpless against predators, and that when _Erythosuchus_ appeared, _Lystrosaurus_ already went extinct

@@juanyusee8197 Also, the idea of a prey animal being hunted to extinction by a predator that evolved alongside it is kinda...idiotic...

@@justashark776with that logic, shouldn’t Smilodon have died out a few years after Titanis?

@@joshuaW5621 Could you elaborate what you mean by that?

To quote a friend of mine, one of LOOP's biggest issues is that it just doesn't know what it is trying to be.

Speaking of PBS Eons, their episode on the CPE also massively fucks up by arguing this event wiped out dicynodonts and rauisuchians and allowed dinosaurs to dominate, even though rauisuchians actually became even more dominant as land predators during and after the CPE and the dicynodonts weren’t much affected. We really need to get rid of the trope of dinosaurs taking over the world during the Triassic: not only were there not that many larger dinosaurs during the Triassic, all the ones that did exist were restricted to higher latitudes because they were poorly suited to the hot, arid Triassic conditions compared to pseudosuchians (so basically the opposite of what WWD argued).

​@@bkjeong4302I feel this is one of the other examples (alongside the notion that dinosaurs were already in decline prior to the K-Pg, sauropods getting "replaced" by ornothopods, pterosaurs being "displaced" by birds, terror birds displaced by placental mammals) of evolutionary narratives often repeated in documentaries and books were in fact down to premature interpretation of highly incomplete data.

It’s such an old cliche too. Documentaries should be trying to dispel these long standing myths, not play into them.

This guy is fussy as hell, I loved even, even knowing the innacuries noe

It fucking hurt me. I was looking forward to it and even was hyped when I saw Scutasaurus look so cute in the intro. I watched all of it and they reused some scenes in some episodes even.

@@jugo1944i wouldn’t say he’s fussy, I would say he’s actually pretty fair with his review

The Paleozoic as a whole needs some much more in-depth coverage. Walking with Monsters is pretty much the only documentary that focuses on it, and that was over a decade ago.

@@BugsandBiology and it crams a period twice as long as the Mesozoic into the same amount of episodes that walking with dinosaurs gets.

​@@SYMBIOTEDINOSAURWalking with Monsters is half the length of Walking with Dinosaurs.

As someone who wants to study Therapsids in the future-absolutely in on that idea.

​@@BugsandBiology I have an idea for an exclusively paleozoic show.

Contrast to David's lines in "The Hunt": "The margin for error is tiny, the odds are against them. All any predator can do, is keep on trying."

Even in PhP Attenborough repeatedly mentions hunts fail most of the time. Plus there’s a lot of failed hunts on screen too.

I never got to the mammoth part, but for the whole terror bird scene, I was like "Just peck them with your beak or kick their lights out, they're like half your height! You're an apex predator, not a dodo!"

@Flufux Exactly! I’ve seen geese and chickens put up much more of a fight!

@@Internetpurge I've seen a goose pick a fight with an elephant.

Maybe there was a version where this could have worked, but this was absolutely not it.

Half the time I can’t even tell if the modern day scenes are meant to be set in the prehistoric periods they’re spliced between.

Here's a tip: Don't watch the other Netlfix documentary 'Alien Worlds'...as it has the exact same problem...only ten times worse somehow.

@@Flufux Sadly, I already have watched it 😞

@@nathaniellippert9238 My condolences.

Exactly, most dangerous animals today don't look scary. Bears and hippos look even cute, but they would kill you without hesitation. Scientifically accurate dinosaurs (having lips and feathers) maybe don't look scary, but that is exactly the point.

@@ExtremeMadnessX You are damn right

Yup, I'd even go so far to say alligators do look pretty cute and endearing from the surface, and Komodo dragons do have pretty derpy-looking faces.

@@juanyusee8197 Great whites too, when seen from the front.

And they claimed horse/zebra teeth do not grind down. I work on and off in a stable during the summertime, and you can tell the horses age just by looking at the teeth.

I guess I should just be thankful the show never depicted Carcharodontosaurs. Cause we all know they’d have gotten the Planet Dinosaur treatment.

Prehistoric Planet should air on tv.

From what I hear the Allosaurus design was likely ripped from Jurassic World.

A very succinct but accurate way to put it!

Besides, how hard would it even be to convincingly recreate an Ediacaran ecosystem on screen? Basically every animal is sessile and/or has a super simple appearance.

@@BugsandBiology It would be interesting to see any take on it, even briefly!

I believe this is more of a personal issue than an absolute fact, after all there are people who find the T.Rex's fictional roars scarier than its real sounds.

I think PhP would consistently have new viewers awestruck.

Yeah I understand mucking up some of the dinosaur behaviour, but I can't believe they were so incompetent that they fucked up the behaviour of two Ice Age mammals with actual living modern analogues.

This is something I expect to see from Jurassic Fight Club.

​@@joshuaW5621 You could argue that the way JFC depicts prehistory is possibly BETTER than how LooP shows it. The awesomebroish cage-fight structure of JFC's episodes is stupid, but interspecific combat between contemporary animals IS at least something that happens. Mass-scale competitive displacement through "superior" animal groups wiping out "inferior" clades using the power of awesome coolness energy doesn't.

Yeah that stuck out like a sore thumb to me, even Walking with Monsters got that part right!

Exactly what I thought ! The models are fantastic (at least for prehistoric planet) and accurate but they don’t feel for a second like real, breathing animals. The only real default of walking with dinosaurs is its accuracy

​@@Charlie-CharlotEhh not really, looking past the rose-tinted glasses of WWD's nostalgia, most of the time Prehistoric Planet's creatures actually felt much more like actual animals in their behaviour and mannerisms, while WWD has its fair share of moments where its creatures do not behave realistically at all (WWD's T. rex hunt had her roar at her prey while hunting solo and roaring at the end vs PhP's Rex brothers being largely silent in their hunt; the some of the animals constantly making noises (Coelophysis and to a lesser extent the Leallynasaura are the worst offenders) even when there's ZERO good reason for them to do so; Postosuchus, Placerias and juvenile Diplodocus being far too ridiculously slow to the point of comical unbelivability considering elephants were able to run pretty fast despite having similar weight-bearing issues with the juvenile Diplodocus in the show; etc.)

​@@Charlie-CharlotAre you sure that you didn't mix Prehistoric Planet with Dinosaur Revolution? Animals in Prehistoric Planet actually behave as animals.

If is this about Prehistoric Planet, you couldn't be more wrong, especially when many behaviors in dinosaurs were inspired by many modern animals. Maybe you should watch some documentaries with modern living animals because you would be surprised of complex behaviors many animals have.

@@ExtremeMadnessX Yeah Dinosaur Revolution was the one with good models but cartoony behaviours (due to it being meant as a live-action cartoon before being shoehorned into a doc format).

Given the papers on their diet already came out in 2011 and 2015 respectively (before the show went into production), this was also something they should have already known. How embarassingly incompetent.

Honestly could’ve gone on forever with listing individual inaccuracies. Which is why I generally stuck to the more overarching issues.

I wouldn’t call things like reindeer “small prey” TBH compared to a cave lion.

@@bkjeong4302 I meant “Small prey” in comparison to megafauna like wooly rhinos, wisents and mammoths. I’ll change it because it gives the wrong impression to people who haven’t read the papers.

To be fair, Triceratops is actually well-suited for mobility (far more so than, say, an elephant), but even then galloping is a serious stretch. A fast trot would be much more reasonable.

@@bkjeong4302 I completely agree.

Prehistoric Planet is single-handedly responsible for getting me interested in Pterosaurs.

The T. rex teeth issue is also baffling to me considering that JP/JW Rexes (also done by ILM) somehow had more accurate teeth lmao.

A PhP-style documentary set in the Triassic is an absolute dream for me, but I doubt it’d happen since nothing in the Triassic is especially well-known or marketable to lay audiences.

I agree with most of what you said, but I think the lystrosaurus being canon fodder made perfect sense given the context. These lystrosaurs have had absolutely no predators for hundreds if not thousands of generations. They've completely lost their instinct of fear, and literally cannot feel threatened. It's the same situation as dodos on Mauritius. They had no predators and no sense of fear, people could reportedly walk right up to them and kill them while the other dodos didn't even react.

@@BugsandBiology A PhP sequel set in the Norian of the Late Triassic could work (Chinle Formation, Shastasaurus, Himalayasaurus, etc). Shame nobody really realizes how impressive the cast of taxa would be.

@@yissibiiyte You're basically repeating what was said in the documentary verbatim. You're both wrong. Lystrosaurus co-existed with predators prior to the evolution of Erythrosuchus. In the Lystrosaurus Assemblage Zone, both the therocephalian Moschorhinus and the archosauriform Proterosuchus were large enough to prey on Lystrosaurs and both existed before Erythrosuchus. Two species of Lystrosaurus existed in the Permian period. That's how long-lived this synapsid was. You don't just waltz over the Permo-Triassic boundary, speciate, and then thrive for millions of years only to go extinct because you're unable to recognize that Erythrosuchus wants to eat you. You really think that arguably the most successful organism in the whole of the fossil record wouldn't recognize a predator? The documentary is simply wrong (as most are). No legitimate scientist studying the Beaufort Group would ever make such a claim. Lystrosaurus isn't analogous to a dodo in any way, shape or form.

I would actually say the Cave Lion vs. Mammoth was actually worse than the Smilodon vs. Terror bird one owing to the fact that as you said, both animals have closely-related modern counterparts.

Lions can get bodied by a single Hippo, who can easily get bodied by a Rhino, who can get bodied by one pissed off Elephant Not trying to put a hierarchy of power here, but i think it's pretty clear lions are WAY underdeveloped to fight any kind of Elephant

Honestly I felt that I would still be massively disappointed with LOOP regardless of Prehistoric Planet, largely due to LOOP's absolutely misleading portrayal of evolution, as that was what I hated from Walking with Monsters in particular.

Hope you've recovered from COVID at least!

I wouldn't consider the pack-hunting trope to be that problematic, if anything I feel the resistance against it has gone to overcorrection territory. With _Deinonychus_ in particular, we know most of the _Tenontosaurus_ feeding sites consist of Tenontos that are half-grown, which heavily implies that they do at least hunt together some of the time (whether they stayed in groups in occasions other than hunting is another matter though). At the very least, the notion that _Deinonychus_ cooperatively hunted together is still much more plausible than the idea that _Tyrannosaurus_ hunted in multigenerational family pack units...

Thanks! Yeah I should’ve touched on that as well, but I felt the video was already getting a little long, plus there was a pretty tight deadline cause I’m going away in a few hours and thus otherwise wouldn’t have been able to complete the video until I get home in about a week. But yeah, LooP was playing it way too safe. So many things we’d seen before, and I get the impression they were trying to cater to laypeople’s expectations of what prehistoric animals “should” be like.

​@@BugsandBiologyFair enough, and yeah the show played too safe for a palaeodocumentary that is supposedly meant to be this ambitious. Another thing I just remembered as well was that Walking with Beasts handled the terror birds a lot better than LOOP's portrayal, as at least WWB gave the nuance that they were doing well in North America despite being pushed into the sidelines by _Smilodon_ in South America. It's still very wrong, but compared to LOOP's, definitely much better. And I also agreee that LOOP's claim that _Lystrosaurus_ was eaten to extinction by the _Erythrosuchus_ was just dumb, especially if one remembers that _Lystrosaurus_ still had to contend with predators after the Great Dying (_Proterosuchus_ for example), and _Erythrosuchus_ only showed up after _Lystrosaurus'_ dying out. I also fully agree with your point about how more "awesomebro" approach to creature designs is the cheapest way to make prehistoric animals scary that may not even work, LOOP AND the Jurassic World films largely using more "awesomebro" designs as a crutch is probably why they don't feel scary at all compared to Prehistoric Planet's hunting scenes and even the first 2 JP movies. All in all, it feels like LOOP put the most effort in the Paleozoic segments, but dropped the ball hard on the Mesozoic onwards, with very few segments in the Mesozoic and Cenozoic that I would genuinely consider "good" or "great".

My opinion in a nutshell. Definitely agreed.

That's defo the best Cenozoic sequence in the series. As for best sequence in the series it's second to or tied with ghe Arthropleura courtship scene IMO.

Aside from anachronistic plants in the background, I’d say the Arthropleura sequence is basically Prehistoric Planet tier.

Sorry for the late reply, but thanks! Was worried this video dragged on too much, so glad it felt faster than the runtime.

I generally have low expectations for documentaries these days.

The problem is that while the concept behind it is fantastic, its confusing and utterly misleading take on how evolution works (which served as the backbone of the show's narrative) significantly tanked any educational value it had, rendering what should be a great documentary into a mediocre one due to the active misinformation presented. Already posted this elsewhere here, but to quote a friend of mine who has an evolutionary biology background: "From the perspective of someone who took his evolutionary biology TA jobs very seriously; (Life On Our Planet) does so much more to reinforce incorrect views about how evolution works, how things evolve, that some things "don't evolve" etc that the idea this is good, accessible evolutionary biology feels very wrong. Part of this comes from the narration, and some is a problem with using SO MANY modern stand-ins, many of which are not appropriate." Because of it, I can't say it did a good job of even explaining the evolutionary history of well, life of our planet itself.

​@@juanyusee8197 Evolution isn't real so they can play with the hypothetical idea as however

​@@juanyusee8197Don't reply to the guy who replied to you. Trust me

​@@kade-qt1zuI just disliked his conment lol.

Huh?

@@KOurboi Sorry wrong video. My phone glitches like that.

@@DJLucas-xv7oe ok

Absolutely agreed. Movies can do whatever movies do, but documentaries should be educational. The people behind these shows should know that a lot of viewers will walk away taking what they “learned” as fact, and thus try to ensure the information they are delivering is as up to date and accurate as possible.

like this documentary cares more about looking awesome bro than it does about teaching people dinosaurs were amazing animals and so were so many of animals depicted and documentaries should not treat its animals like movie monsters Terror Bird in this show can join JFC Ceratosaurus in the unfair "punching bag" of the show

Yeah I (and many of my friends) had trouble finding this show engaging too. With most other paleo-documentaries (not just Prehistoric Planet and WWD) I did not have this issue, but with LOOP I found it very hard to finish an episode in a day.

Definitely agree. There’s enough good in the show for it to be clear that it had some serious potential. So much was going for it, and yet they dropped the ball big time. Again, it’s not terrible, but I definitely paid the price for my high expectations.

Yeah that’d be amazing. And fairly easy to film on location given early Cenozoic flora was already relatively modern.

Why the hell LOOP skipped past almost the entirety of Cenozoic terrestrial mammal evolution is beyond me. Plus repeating the myth of mammals being tiny in the Early Cenozoic before getting big and outcompeting giant flightless birds, when in reality mammals moved into megafaunal niches first (in both herbivorous and predatory roles).

@@bkjeong4302 Yeah i was really bumbed out when they did that as there was after of course the first million years mayby even 30,000 years mammalian megafauna like the Pantodonts, Dinoceratans and brontotheres existed some of the groups having members as big as asian elephants oh and the avians like the early Thunderbirds of Australia there relative Gastornis and the recently evolved bird of prey family Phorusracidae all these groups had just evolved. Also the whole terror birds went extinct cause of the smilodon genus is just absurd because the only species the phorusracus wouldve come across was Smilodon gracilis who would get killed easily by one of those animals.

@@bkjeong4302 We could have had _Uintatherium_ finally appearing in pop culture here, we could have had it all...

I would watch an entire documentary on the wildlife of South America before it connected to North America alone. Every documentary I've seen on the subject always takes place after that and focuses way more on a cat with unusually large teeth rather than the extreme variety of crazy animals that existed on the continent without interference from the outside world.

(they actually mentioned this dont look at me pls)

Yeah a recurring complaint about this series from many (myself included) is that it just doesn't really do a good job hooking the viewer in.

I think Freeman even went on to list the modern groups of amphibians, but went with (if I remember correctly): Salamanders, Frogs and Toads. Wait what, don't you mean Caecilians for the last one? I was stunned.

@@PaleoEdits (He also listed newts) yeah I was expecting him to mention the caecilians too. The amphibians really got the short end of the stick.

People who own something bigger than an Doberman Dog: 💀

They were. I noticed a whole bunch of shots from previous SIlverback Film documentaries. In the behind the scenes video on youtube, you can also hear the producer saying that they wanted to film the triassic scene in canada but couldn't because of covid. Well, clearly travel wasn't a restriction for these wildlife shots...

A "dinosaur" show being mostly about bugs. Hmm...feel like I've seen that before.

TBH, the rise of flowering plants was a FAR bigger deal in the grand scheme of things than any old dinosaur - and is arguably the most important event since the great dying. And so for a documentary that's supposed to showcase grand evolutionary changes across the whole of life, I think it was more than apt. I have a lot of criticism of the show, and while I see where you are coming from - this is one I can't agree with it.

@@PaleoEdits I’m not saying talking about the evolution of plant life isn’t important, and on its own that would definitely be an interesting aspect that most prehistoric documentaries choose to ignore. However, in the case of this documentary I think it has far more to do with budgetary issues and Netflix trying to rush out something to compete with Prehistoric Planet rather than any creative vision. This approach allowed them to fill most of the show with reused footage from National Geographic and Animal Planet rather than making high quality CGI renders, hell I half expected them to use that one famous slow mo capture of a Great White killing a seal after they reused the crocodiles killing wildebeests.

@@aceofspadesguy4913 That would certainly explain a lot. Many of the evolutionary stories, plant evolution being a prime example, did feel like someone was paraphrasing a summary of 20 year old popular science book. In other words, half-baked script with stock footage. Comparing it to the plant evolution episode of BBC's "Earth" is quite a stark contrast.