I was listening to KFOG's Acoustic Sunrise on the radio. Rosalie said that the Walking With Dinosaurs thing at HP Pavilion is great, and that "Kids really love it!" I figured why not and asked Melanie if I could take Jamie to see it. She said  okay, so I did. This is some of what we saw.

  

As the show opened this guy came out to explain that vertebrates first evolved in the water. The adaptation that made exploring the land possible for them was the egg, which gave the young a safe place to develop their organs before going out into the world. About then the first full sized beast came out, this agile predator who promptly ate the guy who had just crawled out of the egg.

About then this large herbivore lumbered onto the scene. At that point some dinosaurs were already quite large.

 

She was the mother of that brood of eggs. The narrator explained that by this time evolution had evolved the instincts in mothers to fight for their young. It wasn't long before she drove off the ancestor of T-Rex.

At the beginning of that period all the land on earth was still in one continent, Pangaea. Slowly as time progressed the tectonic shifting that later will produce the continents as we know them creates narrow sea channels between the land masses.

  

Plants evolve to grow large, and some of them already look the way we know their children today. Much of what happened in those days is a total mystery. So much of what we know is based on speculation about the few bones that survive. For a scientist, more information about how things really were is valuable. A single footprint can give us ideas about what the flesh on the bones we see looked like.

A whole row of footprints can say so much about what the musculature was capable of, everything from walk to weight.

  

The biggest herbivore of this time frame has these mysterious big triangular bones on his back. The narrator acted puzzled about what the triangular bones were for. His best guess was that they fill with blood and turn red when predators are around to warn others to stay away.

  

A few million years later the biggest land animal to ever evolve came along, brontosaurus. This particular one was still a juvenile, and as such more likely to be prey for predators like the guy in the background.

About then a really huge mama brontosaurus came out and the narrator explained that the instinct to protect the young is still a successful gene, and brontosaurus had it to.

It wasn't hard for her to scare of the predator.

As the continents slowly drifted apart, it created niches where the ability to fly was a real competitive advantage. Guys like this one evolved to fill them. The modern descendants of these beasts are the birds we  are all aware of.

  

By this time behavior adaptations like pecking orders have evolved.  Weak and young creatures like the one not eating yet have to wait for their betters to finish before they pick through the leftovers.

  

Another 75 million years pass. All the way back to the beginning, plants have had to deal with insects preying on them for food. However, flowers are a symptom of more symbiotic relationships. The insects have learned to pollinate in exchange for food, and the plants have learned to support their pollinators.

  

The peak herbivores of this time fame is triceratops, whose large bony eyebrow thingie seems to have evolved as a sexual display. Now herds of these guys have competitions between males for the top guy status. Whose bony eyebrow thingie is bigger seems to be an important consideration.

  

These two guys battled it out for head guy status. The noises were very loud, and it was very dramatic.

   

Eventually, the old boss gave up and slunk off. Meet the new boss! The narrator explained that already the battle scars are more emotional than physical for these guys.

  

The boss left a stool on the stage. The narrator explained that even then dung beetles were recycling such stuff into raw materials for the next set of plants to grow on.

  

This guy was the most armored being to evolve on earth so far. The bones in the guys tail alone weigh more than 150 pounds.

  

Tyrannosaurus Rex is the peak predator of these days.

There was an epic battle between these beasts.

  

The narrator's parting thougth was that even Tyrannosaurus Rex cared about her young. Jamie thought the whole thing was great. If you get the opportunity to share Walking With Dinosaurs with some kid go for it!