Random Palaeo-Media Work ideas of the Day #5: Holiday Edition!

Happy holidays to all of ya! Here are some ideas for all the support and views you gave me!

Savage Lizards

A film about a family which washes up on a Lost World inhabited by mesozoic life, including a race of highly intelligent raptors who take them in and give them sanctuary. However, one member doesn't appreciate it, an asshat teenager who buys into the awesomebro rhetoric of all dinosaurs being violent savage monsters who can't do anything but but fight and kill, and threats them accordingly, refusing to see otherwise, even though A) he acts very violent and bellicose himself, and strains his relationships with his family, and B) the raptors are fairly pacifistic outside of hunting and aren't all that violent, and as a whole the other dinosaurs would act as animals do and avoid conflict. Things get so heated between the three that a fight erupts between them, leading the family to leave the island for home, save the son, whose arrogant beliefs get him disowned and abandoned, left to stew in his own anger, hatred and small-minded beliefs.

This is a story that mocks and subverts the cliches that awesomebros make about dinosaurs and delves into the effects of it and related societal beliefs about nature, like the idea humanity supposedly being superior to animals, let alone animals not like us like reptiles entitles us to commit horrible things to them. In other words, a deconstruction of Lost World and B-Movies.

Yeah, the plot could use some refinement, but I'm not interested in it right now. Sorry.

Mesozoic Voyage

A documentary about a team of scientists going throughout the islands of Europe during the Mesozoic era in a boat, though mostly the Cretaceous. In each episodes, the crew would track certain species and. Just a sampling of episodes would be:
  • Hateg Island in Maastrichtian Romania, where the team search for two vastly different creatures in size .
    • Featured taxa: Hatzegopteryx thambema, Magyarosaurus dacus, Rhabdodon priscus, Balaur bondoc,
    • Featured science: Baron Franz Nopcsa and Insular dwarfism
  • Maastrichtian France, where our team stakes out the arrival of the sauropod dinosaur Hypselosaurus at their nesting site, who will lay the first dinosaur eggs ever found.
    • Featured taxa: Hypselosaurus priscus, Ampelosaurus atacis, Gargantuavis philoinos, Variraptor mechinorum, Mistralazhdarcho maggii
    • Featured science: Fossil eggs found in 1859 as the first scientifically recognised dino eggs.
  • The Netherlands, where the team dive into the depths of the Maastricht Formation to find a giant of the ocean that will all but start palaeontology. 
    • Featured taxa: Mosasaurus hoffmani, Allopleuron hoffmani, Pachydiscus neubergicus, Thoracosaurus neocesariensis, Xiphactinus audax
    • Featured science: George Cuvier, Petrus Camper, and the origins of palaeontology.
Future episodes (I might post and write about) could include the Early Cretaceous, Jurassic, and Triassic too. You can expect Belgium's Iguanodon quarry to be here, as is Portugal's Jurassic deposits in Lourinhã, both Solnhofen and Europasaurus' islands in Germany (a la my Mesozoic Micro-Monsters idea), and pretty much everything in England.

Age of Fishes

What the BBC documentary Planet Dinosaur is for dinosaurs, Age of Fishes would do for the Devonian period, covering all the clades of fish that gave the period its name. From the cartilage-boned first sharks, to the jawed and armour-skinned placoderms, to the first land vertebrates, this documentary would highlight such formations and locations like the Gogo of Western Australia, the Cleveland Shale of Ohio, USA and the Great Lakes Basin as a whole, Red Hill in Pennsylvania, and Miguasha in Quebec, Canada, and Scotland. Naturally, one of the main species featured would be Dunkleosteus, but also everything from Tiktaalik, Hyneria, Materpiscis, and Titanichthys that you can cram into six episodes.

Nan and Nuq

An animated, film without dialogue about two orphan Nanuqsaurus struggling to survive in Cretaceous Alaska 70 million years ago after their mother is killed. It was inspired by how many other works have featured Nanuqsaurus (some made even before it was described no less!) in those that focus Prince Creek Formation in Alaska where it was found, but only as the antagonistic species which threatens to hurt our focus species, like Pachyrhinosaurus, Edmontosaurus, and a large unnamed Troodont, all of which appeared in the works as the lead. They too would appear, but as more antagonistic species.

Happy holidays and hopefully happy new year that we should all work to make that happen! Stay safe, and bye for now!
Location: Mississauga, ON, Canada

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