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Walking with Dinosaurs/Tear Jerker

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Tear Jerkers in Walking with Dinosaurs include:

  • The death of the Giant Flyer Ornithocheirus in Giant of the Skies and the eventual extinction of the dinosaurs. But "Giant of the Skies" especially. Not to mention the poor young cynodonts from the first episode...
    • Just the music itself in Giant of the Skies is heartbreaking enough.
  • The Walking with Dinosaurs Special about Big Al : Many people felt sad when the allosaur dies still young from his injuries and starvation.
  • The poor old Liopleurodon getting beached in Walking with Dinosaurs. This series is not kind to it's older characters.
  • Walking With Beasts has also a sad scene when a young Indricotherium is violently driven off by its own mother as she got a new calf. The scene when the Gastornis chick is eaten alive by ants is an odd mixture of this and Nightmare Fuel, just like the aforementioned cynodonts. Still another example from Beasts is the opening with the australopithecines "mourning" their elder female in "Next of Kin", probably because of how human they look.
  • Also in Walking With Beasts, the mother bear dog whimpering while she digs her dead pups out of the collapsed den.
  • The entire Late Permian in Monsters is a slow journey to death for all creatures, since the infamous Permian/Triassic extinction is going to take place soon. And that was the worst mass extinction ever, the Cretaceous one coming only in second or third place : 90 % of marine and 70-80 % of terrestrial lifeforms went extinct.
  • In a meta sense, the eventual removal of the highly addicting Evolution Game (which accompanied Walking with Beasts) and later the Big Al game (which accompanied The Ballad of Big Al) from the franchise's website. Especially the latter, considering that it had been there for more than ten years. To make things worse, neither of these removals were announced beforehand, and a former major policy of the BBC website is to only remove content that is so dated it could potentially cause harm.




  • One episode of Walking with Dinosaurs featured the last flight of a male Ornithocheirus (a massive flying reptile ) on his way to the mating grounds: it ends with the male dying alone on a deserted beach over the course of several agonizing hours. Everything about the scene, from the heartwrenching music to the sight of the creature trying desperately to rise one last time.
    • In the sequel series Walking With Beasts, when the young indricothere (a giant giraffe-like rhino) was violently abandoned by its own mother as she got a new baby. RL is such a Crapsack World...
      • What gets me every time isn't so much the Parental Abandonment itself; that was strongly foreshadowed earlier on in the episode. Instead, it's the scene where the young indricothere is injured while on his own, prompting him to return to his mother -- except, now that she's suckling her new baby, she sees the previous one as nothing but a threat, and drives him away. It's worth noting that this practice occurs among modern-day rhinos as well.



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