Mesozoic Mind

Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind . Have you ever noticed a reccuring thing in your favoyrite genre but no one ever discusses? I have, and I'd like to do that. Dinosaurs (andotherprehistoriclife) living in our modern, anthropocene world is very common in palaeo-media. The most common way is either time-travel, the Lost World trope of isolated lands, or genetic ressurection, or even whatever phlebotinum is at hand, magic or scientific. However, it usually reserved for hard fiction: books, games, and movies all apply, but never documentaries, based in rigorous science and truth, which stick to their respective time periods for portraying life. Right? Right ? RAAIIIIGHT ? Palaeo-documentaries have actually had a long history of showing prehistory in our time, which primarily occupies the 2000's onwards, particularly during the latter period of it. It's always entertaining to watch prehistory walk about our cities or chase us dumb apes, but what is the meaning of it? The...

What if the dinosaurs never died out? Its a question we all have asked, with awsnsers ranging from comic scenarios to serious speculative evolution projects, and even documentaries have dipped into it.  My Pet Dinosaur is an episode of the long-running BBC science series Horizon  that answers exactly this question and how humans (if we'd even be around) would interact with them. It features palaeontologists like Don Lessem, Phil Currie, Kristie Currie Rogers, Larry Witmer, and Greg Erickson as talking heads, with one Mark Everest behind the camera. (Link; apologies for mirroring) * Not to be confused with a 2017 australian movie of the same fiom which I have intent on seeing let alone reviewing. The episode begins with a trip to Alberta's Dinosaur Park to determine how likely dinosaurs would survive given how they were doing at the time, which was very good. It also tackles the temperature of dinosaurs and the implication it would have for them to survive the ice age: but of ...

Yesterday I have just learnt there is another recut of Walking with Dinosaurs out there thanks to the ever-reliable (sarcastic) TV Tropes. This was a recut that cut each episode down, just as the other  Prehistoric Planet did, to focus on the subject species of each episode (naming the episodes after them), trimming out a lot to a ten minute slot (for comparsion, the other PHP cut episodes doen to 20 minutes). For instance, in the episode corresponding to Cruel Sea , Ramphorhynchus  is gone, and Eustreoptospondylus  only appears at the begining and the very end and goes unnamed, its beachcombing scenes removed entirely, while in the second episode, Brachiosaurus and Stegosaurus are removed, and in the fourth, the same goes for  Iberomesornis and its sequence entire, implying he went straight to the mating grounds entirely from North America. Kenneth Branagh does not return for this bite-sized cut of the series, instead replaced by british actor Sean Barrett. Unlike...