WWD: Death of a Dynasty (Redux) (Patreon)

And the sixth and final compilation is complete after a couple months of intermittent progress, showing every single animal that appeared in Walking with Dinosaurs (with the exception of insects) in as cohesive a manner as possible, including those which appeared in The Ballad of Big Al and the distant prologue of Walking with Beasts. I didn't include the butterfly, but butterflies are not known to have evolved until the Eocene, long after non-avian dinosaurs died out.

This one didn't have any real difficulty in needing to change too many taxa due to the extremely well-documented and diverse ecosystem of Hell Creek. The pterosaur species is the only animal present not strictly known from the formation, and even then it unquestionably lived on the same landmass at the time alongside some of the same animals. Only the dromaeosaur, crocodilian, and snake were technically changed, and even then they weren't mentioned by name in the episode proper. A few minor animals were also given specific identifications here to avert making them nameless generic background things. The prehistoric world wasn't just big impressive beasts, but an incredibly packed menagerie of life all the way from ten-ton reptiles down to rat-sized mammals. If anything, that made this one pretty difficult to arrange considering the organization of the varied animals.

The might be my least favourite episode from a narrative standpoint due to how poorly the story itself has aged (not that I dislike this episode, or any episode, it's just the least favourite). The episode uses the viewpoint that dinosaurs were already in decline and teetering on the brink even before the asteroid arrived, and the Hell Creek region was mostly a volcanic wasteland barely capable of supporting life. This goes against evidence known which shows the region was a lush, subtropical, heavily forested swampland, an environment rich enough to support at least six species of multi-ton megafauna at the same time as well as numerous of other large animal species. Even supplementary texts admit the evidence for mass volcanism at the time was controversial, the evidence was slim, and the idea was not widely supported. Current evidence more strongly supports the notion that dinosaurs were thriving up until the very end of the Cretaceous. Increased volcanism had minimal impact on their success, if there even was any impact at all. WWD (and WWB) is one of the few paleo-documentaries that even mentions this idea.

Also, more precise radiometric dating puts the K-Pg extinction event as having occurred closer to 66 MYA (give or take about ninety-thousand years) rather than 65.5 MYA, as was thought at the time.