I Want My DinoTV: Walking With Dinosaurs E4
"Rose" the Albertosaurus is a gorgeous dinosaur, but did she really hunt in a cooperative pack? Let's dig into the science.
It’s hard to not be envious of paleontologists who exhume fossils from the Dinosaur Park Formation. The landscape is stunning, for a start, hills upon hills upon hills of banded rock formations under an endless sky. And in those rocks, it’s dinosaurs all the way down. Many are complete. Many are delicately-preserved, their bones smooth and gleaming under museum lights when cleaned and propped up in a facsimile of their skeletal posture in life. It’s a place full of incredible stories, an exquisite setting to imagine the Mesozoic. The fourth episode of Walking With Dinosaurs takes us there, in “The Pack.”
Our central character for this outing is Rose, an adult Albertosaurus with permanently-blushing cheeks. She’s heralded as a “super predator,” a meaningless term, but her first on-screen hunt fails. She picked an adult Arrhinoceratops to confront, charging before the danger of taking down such prey became clear. Many hunts fail, as much a part of a carnivore’s natural history as the days they get to eat. It’s a decent start to an episode that gets scientifically wobbly as it again reaches a little far out in its speculations.