Mesozoic Mind

  Well, it's official: Tim Haines is BACK! After years of waiting, Tim Haines has made a new palaeo-doc. Surviving Earth , which covers many of the extinctions of Earth's history. The first episode, "When the Earth Burned" , naturally starts things off with the Permian Extinction. Set in Russia, we follow a family of the gornopsid Inostrancevia . Pretty inspired choice. Without spoilers, what are my thoughts on it? The effects and design are excellent. The cinematograohy is alsao very lush, with the Californian forests . The animal behaviour is up to par. I like the gorgonopsids have a lion-influenced social structure... though I do object to them fighting even as lava looms to be the alpha (which is a bunk term). The species selection is great, showing both the big guys of Permian Russia (Ino, Scutosaurus) and the dicynodont Elph  (no joke I genuinely thought they said elf and was wondering why they were calling them by snything other then their real name) and Sumini...

Yes, you read right, the legendary Nigel Marven made another palaeodoc series.... kind of. In 2023 he did some prmotional shorts for Shropshire's Hoo Zoo and Dinosaur World, a zoo with a dinosaur attrctio attached to it, Nigel Marven's Prehistoric World . In these shorts, he wanders around the Dinosaur World portion (Hoo-Rassic World, har har) and pretends if he's back on time, just like in the olden days. Its clearly aimed at young viewers then Chased By Dinosaurs or Prehistoric Park . Still,  Nigel is an enthustiatic and charming enough to make it work. I love he mentions Chased by Dinosaurs' eps by name. The information he tells is basic, though sometimes it is a bit off, like Nigel calling Dimetrodon a reptile. The cinematography on the other hand is well shot, at least in the sense you cant tell there's a fence just metres away. The designs are just the park's animatronics, and they look fine at best. Otherwise, they all have tons of issues the plague all ...

 My 50th vid (if you ignore Shorts)! And yes, I had this classc Tribute To vid in mind making it.

  I decided to make this AMV about the Pleistocene fauna of North America, mostly La Brea's. Enjoy.

  The day before I uploaded this AMV, I learnt some terrible news: Benjamin Bartlett died. For those somhow not in the know, he was the composer for Walking with Dinosaurs and the rest of the original run. I thus dedicate the video to him. Rest in peace, Ben.

 Man, 2026 is the gift that really keeps on giving! Surviving Earth , the new 8-part palaeodocumentary series from Tim Haines that ecompasses not just the Mesozoic, but the other eras, is coming! It's shaping up to be quite the  Actually in fact, the trailer for Surviving Earth debuted last year! How no one noticed, I'll never know. Anyway, here's the trailer for it! APRIL FOOLS! It's one of those cases where an entirely different work has the same name as a palaeowork. In this case, some drama film has the same name as SE. See you June 4 for the real thing. EDIT: Now it's eleventh... and the real thing is here.

Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind. Let's begin again, to close out winter with an ice age palaeodoc! L.A. 10,000 BC is another one of those forgotten documentaries from the early 2000's. Naturally its from Discovery Channel. Man, I really need to branch out more and watch other docus not owned by a certain conglomerate now.... The docu's premise is of using Hollywood stuntmen (Greg Fitzpatrick, Cheryl Lawson, and Richard Bucher) to demonstrate how ancient Indeginous people would have survived and even hunted the megafauna in Reality show-style challenges. Wow, the 2000s were something else.  We first see three people, played by the stuntmen, having bad days as the narrator talks up how no matter how bad it seems to get these days, the past was way more difficult when all the megafauna were still around... and then its completely forgotten. It's a shame, as I feel like a potential set up of snooty rich folk getting a taste of real survival would be a novel premis...

Yes, this blog is still going on. Here's an assemblage of all the video-based palaeomemes i've made to tide you over:

  Man, what a great year for good palaeomedia, from fiction to documentary, to small youtube channels. Granted, even the big ones had flaws (looking at you, Jurassic World and "Walking with Dinosaurs"), but still. It just continued the hot streak since 2022. Hopefully even with all that's going on in the world I can get back to this blog and find my love for it again.

IT'S BACK! I'M BACK! Do I mean my blog or Prehistoric Planet ? Both. This time, instead on continuing with the dinosaurs, we go to our era, or rather the period before the human era: the Pleistocene. Granted, there are key differences that at least for me make it feel more like a spinoff then a proper new season. I rank the episodes (without elabouration): Grass Lands New Lands Desert Lands Big Melt Big Freeze The effects are great as ever. Framestore takes over from MPC after they sadly went the way of the di-, nah, pterosaur, and they still have have it 20 years on from a certain other cenozoic palaeodocumentary. Also ever, the sequences and photography are brilliant as ever. The species selection is good, going beyond the usual stock genera/northen hemisphere fauna, from australian megafauna to deep cuts like the giant otter Enhydriodon . That was a thrilling sequence. But all that said, I do admit Ice Age feels a bit... downgraded from the first two seasons. Here's why ...

Shark Week is on, that sesanationalistic pile of crap. All the docs are utter crap and do ittle to educate the public on what sharks are really like. But given I do like movking it, if I had to make a special for Shark Week... Sharks Vs. Dinosaurs Looks at fossil specimens of dinosaurs with evidence sharks fed on them, like bite mark or even teeth, and the sharks the made them, like Squalicorax , Certoxyrhina , and Cretolammna among others. Czechia’s only dinosaur Burianosaurus  Claosaurus and Silviasaurus from interior US. Appalchian dinosaurs as described by Brownstein (2018). Sources Michael J. Everhart and Keith Ewell "Shark-bitten dinosaur (Hadrosauridae) caudal vertebrae from the Niobrara Chalk (Upper Coniacian) of western Kansas," Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science 109(1), 27-35, (1 April 2006). https://doi.org/10.1660/0022-8443(2006)109[27:SDHCVF]2.0.CO;2  Madzia, Daniel; Boyd, Clint A.; Mazuch, Martin (2017). "A basal ornithopod dinosaur from the Ceno...