Walking with Dinosaurs: The Ballad of Big Al

In a Walking With Dinosaurs special, dinosaurs come alive once again to feature in a paleontological documentary made by the BBC.

This time, we’ll follow an Allosaurus throughout his full 6-year life. The dinosaur is affectionately given the name “Big Al” by the show producers, and shows a reconstruction of what life the Allosaurus might have lived during the Late Jurassic Period, about 155-150 million years ago.

The special begins at the University of Wyoming, showing the bones of a sauropod followed by our Allosaurus named Big Al.

After the ghost of Big Al wanders the museum passing by his own skeleton and a nest of fossilized eggs, the film then travels back in time to 145 Mill. years ago showing a similar nest.

Al and his siblings hatch and are helped out of the nest by their mother. She brings them to a river bank and the hatchlings start to hunt for insects. When the mother leaves the hatchlings temporarily, a year-old Allosaurus comes out of hiding and kills one of them.

Years pass by for Big Al, where palaeontologists explain his world in the Late Jurassic and each stage of the Allosaurus’s life – both through the easy guidance of the shows CGI and our modern (1999) knowledge of dinosaur life.