Dino Lab review - Part one
In 2005 and 2009, two specials aired on the Discovery Channel, back when it was actually about science and documentaries. These were both called called Dino Lab, and they had a rather novel premise: instead of simply being a doc of talking heads with occasional vignettes of prehistoric life or a nature documentary-style presentation with the occasional talking head, the show has a laboratory in which dinosaurs are brought into and put through experiments for scientists to study. Such a premise is pretty interesting, if an unusual one that invites more questions (where did the dinosaurs come from? Why is the T. rex first not at the lab?).
The first special, from 2005,had a special place to me, as the first one was one of the first docs I saw as a kid on TV, when I was very young. I remember seeing both a T. rex on a treadmill and a plesiosaur splashing a guy with water. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll start off with it's first special. This one is notable in that the effects are handled by Meteor Studios, which has handled many other of early 2000s Discovery's docs, and as a result has all of their models from both When Dinosaurs Roamed America, Dinosaur Planet, and Valley of the T. rex recycled for this. Both of these contain some excellent models, so I’m not complaining. Talking headwise, we have the McGill quebecer Han Larsson, Oregon State’s Kent Stevens, and USC Davis’ Ryosuke Motani.
The show’s intro, before the lab bulk proper, has a truck and its driver (named Mike, might I add) driving up to the lab to transport a dinosaur there. Unsurprisingly its a Tyrannosaurus, specifically the bulky model from Valley of the T. rex, just recoloured to a kind of greenish-grey colour.
(Side note: I distinctly remember that there was a shot of a snapping turtle watching the truck drive by, but its not here in the video uploaded. Weird.)
The first segment depicts said T. rex (or as they claim is popularly known thanks to Robert Bakker, the Roadrunner from Hell), where one is lured onto a large treadmill and made to run on it, testing to see how fast it can run. Initially the show seems to question whether T. rex was a scavenger due to how it might have been too heavy to be fast, even showing footage from the infamous Valley. However, as the segment goes on and the T. rex just keeps running faster, Hans and Kent show evidence that via hollow bones lightening its weight and the muscles in the legs and tail, it could reach high speeds, which the show claims and shows was up to roughly 40 km/hour. At the same time, Hans acknowledges things that seem minor but do bust some myths and clarify things: that T. rex was a contender for the biggest theropod as opposed to the biggest, or computer simulations in the early 2000’s didn’t take into tendons and shock absorption into account, which is quite nice. Meanwhile the experiment abruptly comes to a halt when the T. rex slips off and falls, enraging it and takes it out on some electric box. Why the lab didn’t fit it out with some kind of harness (as seen in the second special - more on that someday) to prevent this is anyone’s guess, though mine would be lazy writing.
After a brief interlude which talks about T. rex’s teeth and how its head posture indicating hunting lifestyle, we are treated to a segment on Triceratops, where one of them is herded around the main floor, while Kent dispels the idea of comparing Triceratops to rhinos due to the shoulder anatomy not suggesting it could charge that easily, instead suggesting its front limbs would squat to allow for more easily thrusting its head and horns around during fights with rival members and predators. However, during the segment, stock footage from When Dinosaurs Roamed America plays of the fight between two… Zuniceratops!?
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| Totally the same creature.... |
You know, the ceratopsian dinosaur that lacked a nasal horn and has different brow horns that look nothing like the model that’s walking around in the lab!? Blame stock footage, folks. There's no fight between triceratops from When Dinosaurs Roamed, and there was presumably no time and money to make footage of them doing so, so its a bit understandable, but still. *Sigh* The limits of stock footage.
Anyways, the next segment of the show features a pterosaur (no genus here, just pterosaur - although the 30 foot wingspan line would suggest Quetzalcoatlus*). The bad news, its not even the decent scavenger of the WDRA Quetz we get in stock footage, but the faux pteranodon from Dinosaur Planet. Did I mention After some cheesy attempts at humour by coaxing the pterosaur into the fight path needed for the experiment, the pterosaur flies out the roof and soars about. Its supposedly majestic, but just don't feel it does, and I keep wondering what’s stopping the pterosaur from flying off and ruining the experiment? I suppose the plane that shows up is part of the lab to help prevent just that, but still. On a more positive note, we at least get Motani talking about how pterosaurs aren't flimsy winged-creatures many still think of. Course, the way the scene is handled doesn’t make it age well, since we now know most pterosaurs, Quetzalcoatlus included, could easily launch themselves, no wind required.
*Problem: as the first image shows, this isn't true, unless its a juvenile.
As you may have noticed, a general theme throughout the special is clearing up misconceptions the general public may have about dinosaurs andotherprehistoriclife. Its an interesting idea few other documentaries have done as their focus. Only one other documentary I can name that does it to any degree is The Truth About Killer Dinosaurs. However, the latter was way more entertaining and informative then this show is so far, I might say.
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| Whoo boy.... |
Would you believe me if I told you this was Troodon (or as its properly called nowadays, Stenonychosaurus)? If yes, well this is actually a model of the basal theropod Coelophysis, taken from the documentary When Dinosaurs Roamed America, now please educate yourself on dinosaur phylogeny. If no, well welcome to the party. Its an utterly bizarre move, especially when you consider there was the decent for its time and feathered Troodont models from Dinosaur Planet (maybe something to do with animating feathers?); at the very least though, at least they stuck to using stock footage of the coelo from WDRA instead of the DP, which would be far too incongruous. For the “Troodon”, which i'm just going to refer to as Troophysis from now on, the scientists are testing its high cognition, as expected from anything involving troodon in just about anything. The experiment is trying to get it to repeatedly return a basketball rolled at it. Its rather tedious and repetitive, even using the same shots in the span of a few seconds. At the very least, we do get an interesting titbit of Hans reminding us that us humans are the control of how intelligence is measured and as such things can get skewed, and there is a bit of humour in how it ends with the Troophysis loosing interest and biting the ball. Plus, at least they didn't get into the infamous Dinosaurioid hypothesis and show some horrid Uncanny Valley-born creature.
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| "Why the heck are you still here?" |
Remember Mike, the trucker dude who brought the T. rex? Well he’s still here, and by a hugeass tank containing a plesiosaur (also no specific genus), and its the atrocious Nessie wannabe from one episode of Dinosaur Planet. Its also said to be the lab's mascot (if you scroll back up, you'll see why I call bull on it). We don’t get much out of it besides Motani discussing how plesiosaurs swam, so I’ll skip over it. (By the way, the original cut of the show had the plesiosaur splash water on Mike, but its not in the video upload I have provided. That would at least add something with it.)
We round the episode out with the lab guiding an Apatosaurus from WDRA named Nelly to get weighed and fed. While its not the most eventful thing in the show (its just her being guided onto a scale before a truck load with plants pulls up and she eats), it does click with me more then the others. The idea of this is about how much food sauropods like it need to grow, and the amount of land to sustain such. We even get a neat sequence of several apatosaurus in NYC’s Central Park to get an idea about how much land sauropods would need to eat before they strip of leaves. Hans even discusses how the existence of other dinosaurs in the ecosystem can affect how numbers really were. Reminds me of the recent study of T. rex’s population dynamics by Marshall et al. (2021).
After a sequence of discussing both gigantism and the obligatory mention of rge [non-avian] dinosaur extinction, the show ends with yet another moment of slapstick where Mike nearly gets knocked over by some pipes after Nellie. Its just before a pretty interesting-looking shot of her being led outside through the light.
So what are my thoughts on it? Its… not too good. Compared to the likes of other documentaries of the time, the whole thing feels pretty uncooked and underdeveloped. Unlike say, Prehistoric Park, we don’t get much of the way in world-building stuff like seeing how the lab works beyond the experiments, and unlike the same year’s Truth about Killer Dinosaurs, which also does a similar thing in debunking misconceptions about dinosaurs, its not done as in an engaging way, mostly relegated to the talking head portions and a few of the experiments themselves.
Accuracy-wise, you can expect a 15+ year old doc to have some poorly aged stuff. Now at least where anatomy of the dinosaurs is concerned, all of them are holdovers from their parent series, like with the pronated hands and exposed teeth of the T. rex and “Troophysis”, elephant-footed and four-nostriled (!?) Apatosaurus [both from WDRA], and just about everything with the plesiosaur and quetzalcoatlus (both from DP), so i'll explain those in entries of their own. However, besides those, we get others. For instance, we’re told and shown that T. rex was capable of very fast speeds in order to catch prey. Thing is? More recent studies have shown it couldn't even crack 27 km/hour thanks to how damn heavy and robust it was. There’s also a skeleton of Allosaurus in the talking head segment being described as a relative of T. rex, which isn’t true in the slightest. There's also the fact that this debate fails to take in a novel, obscure hypothesis that predators like T. rex did what's called ambush hunting, where they hid, waited for prey until they got close enough, and then attacked.
Another example of of a mistake is that the pterosaur at one point is referred as a flying dinosaur. *Breathes in*
Visuals-wise, the CG for the dinosaurs (and quetzalcoatlus and plesiosaur) is rather dodgy. The dinosaurs are quite clearly pasted into the scene with little attempt to blend them in. The lighting is clearly at fault here, since the kind of brightness of it used does effect it. Film and visual effects folk will know what I mean.
Dino lab itself is also on the bland side, being filmed in some industrial warehouse and just has some monitor workstations here and there. The talking head portions meanwhile, are in a large garage or warehouse with fossils placed about it, including skeletal mounts of an Allosaurus and Apatosaurus. Hardly the most aesthetically attractive thing to me. Again, perhaps little time and money are to blame here.
Music wise, the BGM wasn’t that special as to be rather generic save one or two moments, so I can’t even comment on it.
As for what I did like about Dino Lab:
- One such music snippet I can comment on is using horns for the Apatosaurus' arrival. They're quite befitting for a giant like it, even if its hardly one of the largest dinosaurs as the show says.
- The designs, while just those from either When Dinosaurs Roamed or Dinosaur Planet, and have certain problems outlined above, are pretty good. The T. rex and Apatosaurus in particular are the best in my opinion. There’s a tangible amount of bulk and heft to it and its movements. Granted, this is carried over from their parent series, but my point still stands.
- The talking head segments are pretty decent, and provide essential context and science for the main bulk.
- As for how the animals themselves behave and are treated… good. The dinosaurs generally act and are treated not as violent monsters, but simple animals treated with the requisite amount of caution you'd expect for dinosaurs. The triceratops in particular is appropriately treated as a dangerous creature, with poles to help keep it at a distance for the handler's sake.
- Above all else, I was at least entertained by the show, thanks to its novel premise and presentation.
My final verdict is that while it does have its moments of brilliance and is unique compared to other palaeo-documentaries, I did not want to say this, but wouldn’t recommend Dino lab for anyone but completionists, due to how wasted and flat Dino Lab is.
- Accuracy - 6/10
- Aging - 6/10
- Presentation - 7/10
- Visuals - 6/10
- Music - 3/10
- Storytelling - 6/10
- Rewatchability - 6/10
Overall score: Okay. May watch once or twice, but not in my top ten best paleo-docs list book.
I don’t know whether I’ll do a fellow source doc for its 20th anniversary next or the second part of this two-parter, but whatever and whenever it is, I’ll be glad I made it. See you next time and goodbye!
Sources
- Marcotte, Lissette, (2005). Dino Lab. Discovery Channel.
- Marshall CR, Latorre DV, Wilson CJ, Frank TM, Magoulick KM, Zimmt JB, Poust AW (April 2021). Absolute abundance and preservation rate of Tyrannosaurus rex. Science. 372 (6539): 284–287.
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