Mesozoic Mind

Happy Halloween to y'all! For the end of spooky season and Aquatober, here's a special treat! A new thing i here! My palaeontology-obsessed mind is always coming up with all sorts of ideas for documetaries, movies and other fiction works about all kinds of prehistory, so I'm writing down many of them whenever I want and posting them here for you to read and judge! So without further ado, I present.... Dragon Island: Prehistoric Wales ( Ynys y Ddraig: Cymru Cynhanesyddol for welsh speakers) Inspired by a relatively recent fossil find, this would be a documentary about Late Triassic Britain, specifically Wales and southeastern England and in particular the Pant-y-Ffynnon Quarry site. According to many studies (Whitside 2007), the area was an archipelago of limestone islands dominated by dry forests and limestone caves known as karst, hereby known as Gwaelod, after a mythical sunken kingdom in Celtic Welsh mythology. We'd follow the lives of its small but fascinating rept...

For the weekend of my birthday (despite really wanting it on my birthday), me and my wonderful mother headed to my stomping grounds, the Royal Ontario Museum in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The whole museum encompasses a whole lot of subjects, from ancient and world cultures, canadian history and Indigenous Cultures of it, ecosystems and animals (they have a cool walkthrough bat cave diorama for instance), and geology. However, what we're here to discuss is its palaeontology galleries. Respectively known as the James and Louise Temerty Galleries of the Age of Dinosaurs and Reed Gallery of the Age of Mammals, these two opened as part of a 2007 renovation that added the iconic "crystals" that look out onto the streets. Anytime I passed by them being driven by since I was a kid, I always tried to get a glimpse of the dinosaur skeletons through the glass, and begged my parents for a visit. But enough nostalgic waxing. Let's walk through the ROM's prehistoric gal...

 For anyone reading this blog, I have two very important announcements to make: the first that its my Birthday! I'm now 20 years old  The second is this: For the last couple of months, I've been working on making my own book! My first one is starting small and will be a simple picture book for children, much like the one I read as a kid and nostalgically love. The concept will be relatively straightforward, each spread focuses on a different creature, lists off a few facts on them, and we see the subject of the next spread in the background. Here some examples I'm the most proud of. Now some of you may be thinking "Gross! Are those stock models!?" Well to answer your question, yes! They're pre-included on a laptop of mine, and I found out about them while fooling about in :PowerPoint. To be honest, I don't know if I would publish this (whether online or as a physical copy) as it is, or have these be mere previsualisation for a more refined version. I reall...

Oh, I'm gonna love this Hello, and welcome back to Aquatober here at Mesozoic Mind. Last time we looked at Sea Rex , a documentary for IMAX theatres in museums. Now we're gonna take a look at... basically the exact same thing. Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure . Released by National Geographic in 2007, this film is undoubtedly a familiar source of nostalgia, whether its the film, its video game, or the series of videos Nat Geo uploaded. The film chronicles life in the Western Interior Seaway of Late Cretaceous North America through the perspective of a female  Dolichorhynchops ; I believe many have taken to calling her Doly for short and henceforth I shall too. She encounters may other denizens of the sea, including the giant sea lizard the Tylosaurus . The film also has a framing device of scientists uncovering Doly's skeleton. The film to put it in one word, is breathtaking . The visuals are all excellent and top-notch. The animal designs are bright, vivid, and amazin...

We all have our memories of seeing palaeo-documentaries, whether in theatres on online. Today we review one such I was obsessed with seeing back in the day, Sea Rex: Journey to a Prehistoric World . We're reviewing it because around the time I wrote this I lately developed an oceanic obsession and watched both this, National Geographic's Sea Monsters (that hopefully will come up later), and listening to Moana songs. The film runs down the history of the Mesozoic's marine reptiles and touches upon the scientific history of them, in particular using Georges Cuvier and the famous Maastricht Mosasaurus hoffmani . Georges himself appears courtesy of Richard Rider in the film's framing device, where he co-hosts with Julie, a woman played by Chloe Hollings (the future voice of Widowmaker) in an aquarium as he explains things to her and audience. Its not clear if he's his ghost or a figment of her imagination, and the film doesn't seem to explain it either way. We get...