Walking With Monsters Revisited
18-02-2025
In 2005 when Walking With Monsters came out, I was aged 13 and totally obssessed with evolution and prehistoric animals.
Naturally, this meant dinosaurs, but the rest of the Walking With ... series had perhaps caught my attention even more thoroughly.
By working to fill in the gaps between the present and the dinosaurs, Beasts and Cavemen were inspiring.
But by daring to go even further back to the the very origins of predatory animal life (at least, the kind which can be made interesting for a popular documentary), Monsters stole my heart in a way the others couldn't.
So it's a pity that on review it has some pretty serious flaws. Today I was feeling quite unwell (executive dysfunction? Burnout? If you know, please tell me) and ended up rewatching Monsters. I therefore wanted to capture a few of my thoughts on it here.
The Good
The main thing this documentary should be praised for is simply that it was made in the first place. For as fascinated as the general public is by dinosaurs, documentaries covering other forms of prehistoric animals are remarkably scant! A quick search on the topic reveals that there have since been a few programs on the subject by David Attenborough which I must watch. Nonetheless, I can't find any before 2005 so Monsters gets points for being so early to the topic.
The Bad
I fear this list will outweigh the previous
I suppose the animation is a good place to start.
It kinda just often sucks?
There are many shots in which the fact that you are watching a piece of CGI feels so plainly evident, but never more so than when animals interact.
Seeing one of the titular monsters take down another and feast on its flesh is one of the most thrilling parts of the show, but it is always slightly undercut by the jankiness of the interaction between the models.
It's certainly not all bad though, and it's still great fun to see such animals brought to life in the first place.
I'll lay down my life in defense of diictodon (pictured) if I have to.
The other major flaw for me is its relentless insistance of applying some grand war narrative to the history of life.
Consistently it pits large swathes of the tree of life against each other in some conflict which never really existed.
Competition is no doubt a part of life, and in the first episode we see various arthropods hunting vertebrates (who, as our ancestors, are the 'home team').
But then we fairly regularly see arthropods feasting on other arthropods, or vertebrate-on-vertebrate chomping.
Don't get me wrong, I can see the value of this in crafting a narrative for your documentary, but it seems needlessly combative.
If I were trying to be high-minded, I might argue that this conception of nature and evolution as solely being about unrelenting competition in a constant zero-sum-game where only the strong can be considered worth is very directly tied into social Darwinist ideas which have been disastrous for a great many people.
And I do argue that.
In one episode we are fed the natural drama of a mother dimetrodon who must defend her nest for 7 months from egg-eaters.
It's a common story for this sort of documentary and not the best-told version of it, but perfectly good.
Finally, she hears the egg hatching and her job is done; her limited maternal instincts are severed, we are told.
Now the babies are on their own, and as a group they make a break for the forest, hoping to be safe from predators.
But of course, predators abound in the form of adult dimetrodon!
The babies run and we focus in on one (pictured), who climbs a tree to escape its pursuer.
The camera pans back to the hunter and we realise that this isn't just any dimetrodon: it's the mother.
We're then reassured that by hunting her babies, the mother actually helps by weeding out any weaklings to help the stronger babies, and the species as a whole, to survive.
I always find this sort of logic to be dubious at best: you may or may not regard parental cannibalism as a strategic error, but in evolution there is no real strategy.
There are plenty of things out there to kill weak baby animals.
Siccing parents on them is not required for this.
The Noteworthy
One thing which kept grating on me during this rewatch was the use of the phrase 'mammal-like reptile' to refer to synapsids such as dimetrodon.
Indeed, I think this show is the origin of my own misconception that mammals evolved from reptiles, and during this rewatch I considered it to be a mistake.
If you're not aware, mammals and reptiles (including dinosaurs and birds, tortoises, lizards, pterosaurs, crocodiles, and iguanas) are all part of a group known as amniotes (see the tree of life, pictured).
Indeed, mammals and reptiles are the only extant lineages within the amniote group.
Whatever the amniote common ancestor of you and a chicken was, it undoubtedly had more resemblance to a lizard than to a rat.
However, it was not a reptile and no mammal is descended from a reptile, no matter how mammal-like.
On looking into it though, it may just be that scholarship has moved on in my own lifetime.
I haven't dug deeply into this (academic papers fill me with a sense of panic) but from skimming the introduction to one paper it looks like the term 'mammal-like reptile' was already contested in 1996, almost a decade before the show came out (http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1996.0170).
So perhaps the term was simply not something the show's scientific consultants knew to pick them up on.
Perhaps it would not have been strictly correct either way at the time the script was written.
If nothing else, I will concede that for describing the significance of a synapsid as a creature which looks reptilian but is in fact a mammal ancestor, the term 'mammal-like reptile' does have utility.
And the fact that dimetrodon often gets mistaken for a dinosaur says all we need to know there!