Image via ABC
Published Oct 12, 2026, 8:42 PM EDT
Collier Jennings is an entertainment journalist with extensive experience. Collier, or "CJ" to his friends and family, is a dedicated fan of genre films - particularly science fiction, fantasy, and comic book adaptations, not to mention all forms of animation. This stems from a close bond with his father, who introduced him to these genres via copies of X-Men comics and reruns of the original Ultraman series. With his near-encyclopedic knowledge and bottomless love of genre, he's tackled a wide variety of articles.
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If fans remember one thing about their favorite sitcoms, it's the ending. Seinfeld bucked tradition by having its main characters spend the entire finale in jail. The Good Place and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air both ended on a high note, reflecting on how their respective casts grew over the years. How I Met Your Mother arguably became the best example of how not to end a series, or at the very least, how to torch nearly a decade's worth of goodwill. One sitcom delivered what might be the bleakest ending in television history, and it's aged like the finest wine.
That sitcom is Dinosaurs, which premiered on ABC in 1991. True to its title, Dinosaurs centers on the Sinclairs, a family of anthropomorphic dinosaurs; to hammer the theme home, the entire series is populated with life-sized dinosaur puppets. The late Jim Henson made this creative choice, developing the series before his death. Dinosaurs quickly won an audience with its clever humor, and a family of talking dinosaurs fell into the same absurdly entertaining camp as The Simpsons. That makes its series finale, "Changing Nature," hit that much harder.
The ‘Dinosaurs’ Series Finale Ends on a Bleak Note
Image via ABC"Changing Nature" opens when the Sinclairs learn the Bunch Beetles, which gather in the spring to devour a fast-growing plant, are nowhere to be found. Patriarch Earl Sinclair (Stuart Pankin) eventually encounters a Bunch Beetle named Stan, the last of his kind, because Earl's employer, WESAYSO, sprays the beetles with insecticide to clear a path for its new wax fruit factory. This triggers a series of events that leads to the death of all plant life and the eventual beginning of the Ice Age. That's right: Dinosaurs ends with the extinction of its entire cast.
That's a massive swing for a comedy series with dinosaur puppets, yet unlike other sitcoms, Dinosaurs sticks the landing. Part of that was because the ending was meant to reflect the dinosaurs' actual extinction, and series co-creator Michael Jacobs later discussed the decision in an oral history conducted by Vulture.
"From the moment we first talked about the show, we discussed the idea that it was the domestication of these dinosaurs that made them go extinct. The thing that human beings knew about dinosaurs was that, in the end, they were extinct, so we always had that idea in the back of our minds. The show would end by completing the metaphor and showing that extinction."
Jacobs also said that he and co-writer Bob Young intentionally penned "Changing Nature" as an aesop that extinction can come from the smallest choices. WESAYSO's decision to spray the Bunch Beetles with pesticide is what kick-starts the apocalypse, and instead of speaking out, Earl goes along with the company's decision. He doesn't realize his mistake until the advent of the Ice Age, and Dinosaurs ends with a quiet yet haunting shot of the Sinclairs' housecovered in snow.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes What Fantasy World Do You Belong To? Middle-earth · Grand Line · The Continent · Camp Half-Blood
Pick your magic, your crew, where you want to wake up and who you would rather be fighting, and we will tell you which world you actually belong in. Four are open to you: an ancient kingdom living through its last good age, an endless sea full of pirates, a continent that pays people to kill monsters, and a summer camp where the Greek gods are extremely real and mostly a nuisance.
💍Middle-earth(Rings of Power)
👒Grand Line(One Piece)
🐺The Continent(The Witcher)
🔱Camp Half-Blood(Percy Jackson)
FIND YOUR WORLD →
01
What kind of power do you want? Every one of these worlds runs on a completely different sort of magic.
ASomething ancient and half forgotten that came down through my family. BSomething completely ridiculous that works in a fight and gets a laugh. CNo magic at all, just training, potions and a very sharp sword. DSomething I inherited from a parent I have barely met.
NEXT QUESTION →
02
Who is travelling with you? Nobody gets through any of these stories entirely on their own.
AA fellowship drawn from every corner of the world who barely trust each other. BA crew I picked up one at a time, all of whom would die for me. CTwo or three people I would never describe out loud as friends. DTwo mates from school who are exactly as out of their depth as I am.
NEXT QUESTION →
03
Where do you want to wake up tomorrow? The best fantasy is usually just somewhere you would genuinely like to live.
AA high city of white stone with the sea somewhere far below. BA ship under sail, with an island ahead that nobody has mapped. CA rented room over a tavern, in a town I am leaving in the morning. DA cabin at a summer camp with everybody else already awake outside.
NEXT QUESTION →
04
How are you making a living out there? Even in fantasy somebody has to pay for the horse.
AI am not, because somebody far older than me decided this was my duty. BTreasure, and I am not always careful about whose it used to be. CI take contracts, since people will pay well for what they will not touch. DI am fifteen and this is all technically a school trip.
NEXT QUESTION →
05
There is something in the woods. What do you do about it? All four of these worlds keep something unpleasant out there in the dark.
ASend word to somebody who has seen this before, then hold the line. BWalk straight in, because it is interesting and possibly edible. CAsk what it has been eating and what the village is willing to pay. DWork out which myth it escaped from, then improvise very badly.
NEXT QUESTION →
06
Who is the villain of your story? The enemy tells you far more about a world than the hero ever does.
AAn ancient evil that has been patient for several thousand years. BA government that has spent a long time calling itself the good guys. CA man who turns out to be far worse than anything I hunt for money. DA god, or possibly my own family, and quite likely both at once.
NEXT QUESTION →
07
What do you actually believe in out there? Every world hands its heroes one rule and asks them to hold onto it.
ASome things are worth defending even when the odds are hopeless. BNobody gets to tell me where I can go or what I am allowed to want. CPick the lesser evil, and never pretend afterwards that it was not evil. DMy friends come before anything a prophecy has to say about it.
NEXT QUESTION →
08
A thousand years from now, how are you remembered? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your world.
AIn a song, in a language hardly anybody still speaks. BAs the one who got there first and proved the whole thing was possible. CBarely, and mostly wrongly, in ballads I would absolutely hate. DOn a plaque at a camp, read by kids about to do the same thing.
REVEAL MY WORLD →
The Map Is Drawn Your World Is…
Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in return.
Middle-earth
You belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime.
- This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat, fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends.
- You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost everything you touch is older than your entire family line.
- The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight.
- You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot.
The Grand Line
You want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is finding out what is over there.
- One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together.
- You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea.
- The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land harder because of that rather than in spite of it.
- You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of it.
The Continent
You would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the people are where it all gets complicated.
- Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept.
- You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer.
- The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people.
- You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story got told wrong.
Camp Half-Blood
You want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as everybody kept telling you.
- Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners, which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse.
- You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for something nobody thought to test for.
- The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud every time a prophecy tries to get in the way.
- Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong.
↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ
‘Dinosaurs’ Tackles Themes in Its Series Finale That Remain Extremely Urgent
Dinosaurs was no stranger to folding deep messages into its episodes. "The Greatest Story Every Sold" served as a meta commentary on religion and how it shapes people's outlook on life, while "I Never Ate for My Father" doubles as a metaphor for coming out to your loved ones or as a metaphor for the dangers of drug use, depending on who you ask. "Changing Nature" hits so hard because it reflects issues that are still prominent today. Climate change is once again a topic of discussion as data centers consume much-needed water and temperatures riseacross the globe, mirroring the plight the Sinclairs find themselves in.
It's easy to watch Dinosaurs and be entertained by a family of reptile puppets. However, if viewers look deeper at the series finale, they'll find a message that your actions have a far greater impact than you'd expect, especially on Earth's future.
Release Date 1991 - 1995-00-00
