Dinosauria is an Anthology series created by animator David James Armsby. The first volume consists of five short films that tell the stories of various dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures from across Late Cretaceous North America, with the second volume expanding to other time periods and geographic locations. Each film is also followed by an in-depth behind-the-scenes video detailing the artistic work and research that went into the final product. The official trailer was released on Armsby's YouTube channel Dead Sound in early August of 2021, and the first episode premiered in early September, with the following film set to release the following month.^note Each episode is released in full for Armsby's Patreon supporters concurrent with a publicly released teaser announcing its YouTube premiere two weeks later. The season finale was released publicly on June 11 2022.

On September 20th, 2024, in the closing portion of his behind the scenes video for the third episode of Sauria, James confirmed that a second volume for the series is in the works. The first episode of the second volume was released on July 19th, 2025.

Trailers: Series Trailer, "Old Buck" Teaser, "Our Frozen Past" Teaser, "A More Ancient Spring" Teaser, "Sea and Sky" Teaser, "The Last Tyrant" Teaser, Second Volume Trailer, "Terrible Lizards" Teaser, "Hunted by Moonlight" Teaser, "Monsters Down Under" Teaser.

This series provides examples of:

• Anachronism Stew: Lampshaded in "Terrible Lizards", which ends with Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus migrating away, as if to acknowledge that they weren't contemporaries of Megalosaurus.
• Animals Lack Attributes: The various reptiles all lack cloacas, which while not as noticeable as the external bits that mammals have, can usually be seen as at least a slit on the underside if not a slight bulge in the animals' profiles.
• Art Evolution: Invoked with "Terrible Lizards", showing a confrontation between an Iguanodon and a Megalosaurus in three separate styles: first as the quadrupedal giant iguanas that early/mid-Victorian Brits thought they were, then as the kangaroo-tripod-posed retro-dinos straight out of a Willis O'Brien or Ray Harryhausen movie, and finally as Dinosaur Renaissance era fighting animals. The end of the episode shows the most up-to-date depictions of the two animals.
• Artistic License – Paleontology: Very refreshingly averted, with up-to date depictions of dinosaurs with some speculative behaviors and color patterns and a decidedly non-monstrous portrayal of them. Still, there are some artist licences that make it through for the sake of the story; they are best detailed in the recap page entries.
• Awe-Inspiring Dinosaur Shot: Considering that this is a series about dinosaurs that presents them in all of their glory, it is natural that such scenes will often appear here.
• Bigger Is Better: The trailer for the first volume at least focuses on the large species with minimal attention given to the smaller ones, despite the fact that most dinosaurs weren't necessarily giants and many were in fact comfortably smaller than a human. "Our Frozen Past" focuses on a troodontid family, which are slightly smaller than most other dinosaurs featured in the trailer, though it is still the largest representative of its clade, tall enough to look a human in the eye.
• Breaking Old Trends: While the first volume focused exclusively on Late Cretaceous North America, the second volume focuses on different places and time periods (like how "Terrible Lizards" shows English dinosaurs from the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous, while "Monsters Down Under" takes place in Middle Cretaceous Australia).
• Chekhov's Skill: The mother troodontid in "Our Frozen Past" has the ability to mimic sounds, which she demonstrates by mimicking the noises made by a pair of icicles falling from a tree at the beginning of the short. At the climax, she mimics the cry of a baby Pachyrhinosaurus, causing the adults to come and chase off the attacking Nanuqsauruses.
• Classic Carnosaurs: In the 1933 segment of the episode "Terrible Lizards", Megalosaurus is depicted as, in Armbsy's words, "a super generic, almost undiagnosable chimera of what would be called a carnosaur at the time." The Megalosaurus is shown being a roaring, terrifying Prehistoric Monster that brutally mauls an Iguanodon before the next segment shows the scientific understanding of Megalosaurus evolve to a more nuance, realistic interpretation of the animal.
• Colony Drop: "The Last Tyrant" features, of course, the asteroid impact that caused the K-Pg mass extinction.
• Covered with Scars: Both the old male Styracosaurus and his young challenger have their share of these to drive home how tough and experienced fighters they are, though the former has more owing to his longer life in combat, with a broken horn to boot.
• The Day the Dinosaurs Died: "The Last Tyrant" is set in the aftermath of the asteroid impact.
• Death of a Child: "Our Frozen Past" has a troodontid chick get killed and eaten by a Nanuqsaurus.
  • "The Last Tyrant" has the stillborn baby T. rex still curled up in its broken egg after the asteroid hits.
• Deliberately Monochrome:
  • Most of the episodes featured in the series' trailer have a very stylized and limited color palette, such as the black and white color scheme of "Old Buck" or the rusty orange look of the Hell Creek installment.
  • Played straight in "Terrible Lizards", with the Crystal Palace segment being sepia-tinted black-and-white, and the "classic" segment being just black-and-white.
• Fairytale Motifs: "Hunted By Moonlight" takes inspiration from gothic fairytales about children disappearing in the woods, in particular Hansel and Gretel. Two young Scutellosaurus wander into a dark forest in search of food and come across a disguised predator. Unlike Hansel and Gretel, only one of them makes it back alive.
• Genre Roulette:
  • "Old Buck" is a Western or chanbara with the duel between the old male and young Styracosaurus.
  • "Our Frozen Past" is a thriller as the Troodon family is being stalked by a Nanuqsaurus pair.
  • "A More Ancient Spring" is a love story about male Lambeosaurus searching for love.
  • "The Last Tyrant" is an apocalyptic tragedy.
  • "Terrible Lizards" is both a monster movie and a surrealist work: the fight between the Megalosaurus and Iguanodon evokes a fight between anachronistic animals you'd see in a King Kong movie, while the presentation jumps between various formats.
  • "Hunted by Moonlight" is a horror story where two young Scutellosaurus wander into Dilophosaurus territory.
  • "Monsters Down Under" is a Coming of Age Story that centers on a male Kronosaurus entering the next phase of his life.
• Goofy Feathered Dinosaur: Averted. All the dinosaurs that are feathered are portrayed accurately and can be just as distinct or majestic as their scaled compatriots.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Plenty of blood gets spilled onscreen, but the troodontid chick being eaten by a Nanuqsaurus in "Our Frozen Past" is only shown indirectly.
• Mama Bear: The confrontation between the Megalosaurus and the Iguanodon in "Terrible Lizards" was initially provoked by the latter eating the vegetation in the former's nest, exposing her eggs.
• Mighty Roar: The trailer is full of these, but the most notable is the T. rex's at the end with the title card.
• Mime and Music-Only Cartoon: A natural product of the a series featuring non-talking dinosaurs and lacking a narrator.
• Mythology Gag: In "Terrible Lizards", the Megalosaurus in Dinosaur Renaissance segment resembles mother T.rex from David's earlier animated short film about dinosaurs, Sharp Teeth.
• Narrative-Driven Nature Documentary: Though lacking narration and being only short stories unlike a proper documentary, the series uses narratives built around the daily lives of prehistoric animals based on evidence and current hypotheses about their appearances and behaviors, so an educational component is still present despite that not necessarily being the main aim.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown:
  • The Styracosaurus fight in "Old Buck" is a brutal and bloody affair.
  • The third segment of "Terrible Lizards" shows an Iguanodon giving a particularly brutal one to a Megalosaurus, after having been on the losing side for the past two segments.
• Non-Malicious Monster:
  • The Gorgosaurus male in "A More Ancient Spring" doesn't kill the female Lambeosaurus out of spite, but so he can present a gift to a potential mate.
  • In "Terrible Lizards", the mother Megalosaurus only attacked Iguanodon because she was defending her nest from an unwittingly intruding ornithopod.
• Noisy Nature: The trailer and teaser provide ample examples of dinosaurs roaring, chirping, and bellowing at full blast. The actual shorts keep the dinosaurs vocal, but they can have their moments of silence (such as the Daspletosaurus trio watching over the Styracosaurus fight and the mother troodontid trying to hide herself from a Nanuqsaurus).
• Non-Standard Character Design: "Old Buck" shows this on full display; aside from the sexually dimorphic colors and nasal horn shapes seen in the Styracosaurus, each of the three individual adult males have their own unique horn configuration and patterning.
• Painted CGI: The animation is heavily cel-shaded 3D CGI, with a limited color palette, giving the series a distinct, stylised, painting-like visual style instead of photorealism.
• Prehistoric Monster:
  • Averted. The series aims to present its subjects in a naturalistic manner, depicting them as real living animals just trying to survive.
  • Intentionally played straight and then subverted in "Terrible Lizards", which starts out with the depiction of Iguanodon and Megalosaurus in their famous 1842 display and has them acting like simple-minded, savage brutes, but then updates them to 1920s, 1990s, and finally 2020s depictions, with similar changes to their behavior at each time to show how the public perception of dinosaurs has changed over the last 200 years.
  • Played for Horror in "Hunted by Moonlight", which deliberately portrays Dilophosaurus as monstrous creatures haunting the depths of a dark forest in order to fit with the overall gothic Fairytale Motifs of the short (a decision Armsby himself was conflicted about). That said, it's downplayed: while they're shown in a far more ominous and sinister light than usual, the dilophosaurs are never shown to be any more sadistic or persistent than the other predatory dinosaurs seen in the series.
• Real-Place Background: The final shot of The Last Tyrant, showing a T. rex skeleton in a museum, is not just a generic museum set; it's recognisably the natural history wing of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
• Signature Roar: Albeit not a proper roar, but the series uses the distinctive call of Parasaurolophus as digitally recreated in a 1997 study.
• Shout-Out:
  • Several from the "Terrible Lizards":
    • In the first segment, several of the Iguanodon are sitting or standing in poses lifted directly out of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs.
    • The second segment is strongly influenced by King Kong (1933), with the score taking influences from the movie in this part.
    • The date given on the Dinosaur Renaissance segment, shot as though it were camcorder footage, is 20:30, October 4, 1999, the exact time Walking with Dinosaurs premiered.
    • Near the end of the episode, baby megalosaurs after waking up made similar sounds to Tyrannosaurus rex triplets in Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Bonus points for them being triplets themselves. Also, after they hatch up from their eggs near the end of early 20th century segment, one of them has a shell of their egg on their head, quite similar to how one of the rex triplets had a shell of their egg on their head after they had hatched.
    • The short takes several design and narrative cues from Tippett Studio and their stop motion dinosaur animations from the 80s; the general plot is similar to that of Prehistoric Beast, when a hungry herbivore wanders away from its herd and into the territory of a predator, and the Iguanodon's (apparent) death throes mimic those of the Struthiomimus killed by the Deinonychus pair in Dinosaur! (1985).
    • The Iguanodon's Renaissance look bears more than a passing resemblance to Aladar.
    • Hylaeosaurus is seen traveling alongside with the Iguanodon herd at the end of the episode, similar to how Polacanthus often travelled alongside with Iguanodon's in Walking with Dinosaurs (and that's not mentioning the fact that Hylaeosaurus at the end of the episode looks similar to how Polacanthus appeared in the series).
  • The Kronosaurus that appears in "Monsters Down Under" has similar coloration to Liopleurodon from Walking with Dinosaurs.
• Shown Their Work: Despite not being a proper documentary, the series has an admirable amount of small details and references to specific paleontological discoveries of the last decade or so.
  • The two main Styracosaurus males in "Old Buck" are each based on a specific real-world specimen with unique horn configurations, and the overall variation in designs among the whole species is reflective of the recent discovery of the extent of individual variation in Styracosaurus albertensis.
    • The old male's inward-pointing frill horns are based on the formerly proposed holotype of Styracosaurus ovatus, which was sunk into the type species of Styracosaurus, S. albertensis, in 2020 after being considered a distinct species and even genus^note being referred to Rubeosaurus in 2010 for almost 90 years.
    • The young challenger is based on the specimen UALVP 55900^note University of Alberta Vertebrate Paleontology (nicknamed "Hannah"), which shows an asymmetrical arrangement with three frill horns on one side and four on the other. It also has a pathology on the lower left base of its frill that was incorporated into the design.
  • All of the hadrosaurus have a large hoof/nail on their main toe on their forefeet, per the (still unpublished) late 2019 discovery of this feature in an Edmontosaurus "mummy".
  • Unlike other onscreen depictions of the Alaskan Pachyrhinosaurus, which are usually modeled after the earlier and southern-dwelling species P. lakustai, here the proper species, P. perotorum, is properly shown.
  • Geosternbergia are depicted with an upturned beak, covered in pycnofibers, diving and swimming after fish, wings that fold as a result of the hands rotating backwards, and using their wings to vault off the ground.
  • In "The Last Tyrant" juvenile Pachycephalosaurus are given flatter heads without the pronounced dome, the juvenile Triceratops has horns that curve upwards, and the baby Tyrannosaurus have a coat of feathers while the adults don't really have much.
• That's No Moon: The Dilophosaurus crests look almost exactly like the bioluminescent mushrooms that grow on trees in their forest. As such, there are several shots that seem to be normal forest....until something moves in a way it shouldn't.
• Terrifying Tyrannosaur: Averted with the tyrannosaur couple in "The Last Tyrant", who are shown as a sympathetic and tragic characters. Played straight by the Daspletosaurus pack in "Old Buck", who are an ominous presence throughout the episode and eventually kill the young challenger, and the Nanuqsaurus pair from "Our Frozen Past" that play a direct antagonistic role towards the Troodontid mother and her chicks.
• Whateversaurus: "The Last Tyrant" has the sole wholly imaginary prehistoric animal, a fictional mosaic of enantiornithean birds David dubbed "Madeupornis birdi" ("Made-up bird bird").