Random Palaeo-Media Work ideas of the Day #3

Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind! We're ending Walking with Dinovember (for realsies this time) with ideas of a trio of docs in the vein of Chased by Dinosaurs, and because stateside there's Thanksgiving weekend, a film appropriate for the holidays.

These first two shows would be tributes to nature documentaries of yesteryear, specifically of the kind put out by Steve Irwin, Jeff Corwin, or Austin Stevens that typically aired on Animal Planet where the host goes on safari and interacts with the creatures, often by grabbing creatures and holding them up to the camera. The third... well, you can read it for yourself.

Mesozoic Micro Monsters

Much like Chased by Dinosaurs, Mesozoic Micro-Monsters focuses on a human host and camera crew traversing Mesozoic in search of a specific creature of interest, much like Chased by Dinosaurs. However, the main difference it as evidenced from the the title, it focuses more on the smaller creatures of the time and area. These are creatures that wouldn't be up to the average person's knees.

I actually conceived this as something you could make during COVID-19 lockdown in your home.

Some sample episodes of this series would be:

Episode One - Madagascar

Focuses on the Maevarano Formation of Late Cretaceous Madagascar as our host searches for the giant frog Beelzebufo.

• Beelzebufo ampinga
• Masiakasaurus knopfleri
• Simosuchus clarki
• Madtsoia madagascarensis
• Falcatakely forsterae
• Vintana sertichi
• Rapetosaurus krausei

Episode Two - China

This episode would focus on the Early Cretaceous of China. Naturally, it would focus on the theropods and avian theropod dinosaurs of it. At the moment i'm not sure whether for it to be in the Yixian Formation and have Repenomamus and Sinornithosaurus, or the Jiufotang Formation to allow for Microraptor to appear. As a result, no species list for this ep.

Episode Three - Solnhofen

Set in late Jurassic Germany, our host travels through an archipelago in search of its top predator, Compsognathus.

• Archaeopteryx lithographica
• Compsognathus longipes
• Bavarisaurus macrodactylus
• Germanodactylus
• Rhamphorhynchus
• Scaphognathus
• Aspidorynchus

Other episodes I have in mind are:

• Triassic Argentina
• Late Cretaceous Mongolia (yeah, Velociraptor would appear in there)
• Early Cretaceous Australia
• Mid-Late Jurassic China (Mongolarachne)

Hell, even my Dragon Island idea from last month could be an episode of it. I may flesh them out another time.

Let me know what you'd want from this one in the comments below!

Mega-Crawlers

This one's actually based upon a dream I had some time ago of seeing the title of a documentary on TV, called mega Bug Zone. Afterwards, I came up with this duo of zoologists (one female, one male) as it's host. This is the basis of this idea, which as its name suggests, focuses primarily on the largest arthropods, particularly those of the Palaeozoic. To a lesser extent, the reptiles and early tetrapods that aren't quite amphibians would also star.

• Episode One - The giant bugs Meganeura and Arthropleura of the Carboniferous. You can't have a show about giant prehistoric bugs and not bring those two up.
• Episode Two - the giant griffinfly Meganeuropsis in Permian Oklahoma's Wellington Formation, living over the course of its life, from fierce aquatic predator as a nymph to titan of the skies as an adult, soaring over the temnospondyls and synapsids of the time, like Eryops and Edaphosaurus respectively.
• Episode Three - The hauntingly named Gigatitan, a kind of predatory Triassic bug known as a Titanopteran, native to Triassic Kyrgyzstan. Would also feature the gliding reptile Sharovipteryx and the strange, long-scaled Sharovipteryx.
• Episode Four - The giant, 2-metre long anomalocarid Aegirocassis of Ordovician Morocco. Would also feature our hosts observing a long row of the trilobite Ampyx migrating (real thing per Vannier et al. 2019).
• Episode Five - The giant sea scorpion of Germany Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, the largest arthropod ever.

Chased by Giga-Wings: A Walking with Dinosaurs Trilogy

A hypothetical instalment in the Trilogies of Life hosted by Nigel Marven. Whereas as Chased by Dinosaurs focused on dinosaurs, all of whom are land-dwellers, and Sea Monsters focused on marine animals, this would be about the big flying creatures of prehistory (Giants if the Skies, if you will) and act as a third and final instalment of the trilogy started by CBD and SM*. The premise of each episode Nigel tries to fly alongside them, whether by drones, wingsuits, or small aircraft. I intend it to be aired in 2004, a year without an instalment of the Trilogies of Life (presumably due to the other BBC doc in the same vein Monsters We Met)

• Episode One - Covers insects, specifically both Meganeuropsis and and Gigatitan. Basically the same as the above's episodes two and three but shorter.
• Episode Two - Covers the largest kinds of pterosaurs. This would thus preclude any one of the azhdarchid pterosaurs, whether Arambourgania of northern Africa, the then-recently discovered Hatzegopteryx of Romania, or of course Quetzalcoatlus of western North America. As cost-saving measures, other giant pterosaurs to be featured in the episode could be the Ornithocheirus/Tropeognathus and Geosternbergia, even if admittedly a flying segment with both of them was already done in CBD's Land of Giants.
• Episode Three - Covers the giant birds of the Cenozoic. These would include the giant bird of prey Argentavis of South America and the Haast's Eagle of New Zealand (and of course its prey the giant moas would too), and the giant false-teethed seabird Pelagornis; now admittedly the record-breaking species sandersi wasn't discovered until 2014, but even if not doubt the show would pass up an opportunity to show a bird like it. The ending of it would be the arrival of the Maori people in the New Zealand, who Nigel sadly notes will drive it to extinction as he observes them first encountering a Haast's Eagle. Since previous series have ended with the crew nearly being attacked by a creature on a cliffhanger, Mega-Wings would end with one of the crew inadvertedly alerting the Maori who finally notice the crew.

* Do note I consider Walking with Cavemen to be the third instalment of it due to the use of an onscreen presenter (Robert Winston). Nigel was even considered for the US cut of the series.

Finally, here's something appropriate for the season:

Six-Foot Turkeys

A horror-comedy about killer dinosaurs. Set in Connecticut, this film would revolve around a curse place on a small village. Long story short, bunch of settlers back in the 1600's did some very racist and hurtful things to the native tribes of the era, and apparently one of them as revenge declared the spirits of the woods would haunt them every year should destructive white people encroach on their land. Those spirits in question? Dinosaurs, specifically those actually/likely native to the region based off fossils and fossil tracks found: the basal sauropodomorph Anchisaurus, coelophysoid theropods that may either be Syntarsus, Megapnosaurus, or just Coelophysis, and of course the man-sized predator of the early Jurassic, Dilophosaurus. True to the name of the film, all of these dinosaurs would be modelled after turkeys, whether in colour or having the snoods, beards, and tail fans of them, and if you squint, the log legged and necked forms of them are very much like turkeys and other terrestrial gamefowl. Plot starts off when a suburban neighbourhood is built at the edge of the woods and one particularly obnoxious household holds a thanksgiving gathering in the woods, which attracts the attention of them.

It may not be obvious from the premise given alone, but I actually intend for the film to have subverting plot points. The myth about natives cursing the land will be criticised by our Native American protagonist as being overly harsh and mean-spirited to them just trying to defend it from intruders who were legitimately damaging to the world. Meanwhile, while the dinosaurs will not be mere aggressive monsters who zerg rush and tear apart people for no reason, but merely trying to chase off intruders to their territory, and we see that they have lives out of attacking, like when we see a mating courtship display the Dilophosaurus is doing.

Well, that's all for now! Next time, with the next month rminent, what else should I watch but WWD's successor?

Sources

• Jean Vannier, Muriel Vidal, Robin Marchant, Khadija El Hariri, Khaoula Kouraiss, Bernard Pittet, Abderrazak El Albani, Arnaud Mazurier & Emmanuel Martin. Collective behaviour in 480-million-year-old trilobite arthropods from Morocco. Scientific Reports, 2019 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-51012-3

See Also

• Chased by Dinosaurs/Sea Monsters Review (Part One)
  
• Chased by Dinosaurs/Sea Monsters Review (Part Two)
• Random Palaeo-Work idea of the Day #1
  
• Random Palaeo-Media Work idea of the Day #2