Mesozoic Mind

Well, it's been a long year full of eventful crap in real life and online, not all of it good, but I persevered through it and refused to let it affect me. All aided by a very good year for palaeo-media, including yes, the debut of the seminal  Prehistoric Planet , probably the biggest thing in palaeo-media since the Trilogy of Life, as well as Jurassic Park ending its current chapter (no it's not ending - I highly doubt Universal will have that). And quite a few palaeo-documentaries have also been announced for next year, so things are looking up. The most beutiful thing a content creator can see I hit new highs, in views, output, and writing, with Mesozoic Mind seeing views into the 1000s in a month, a rarity here, while views for pages hsve also soared, including one of my proudest achievements this year, The Stratigraphy of Palaeo-Media . I started social accounts on Twitter and Mastodon and even my own Discord server to promote the blog and expand viewership, all without ...

Merry Chistmas and happy holidays everyone at Mesozoic Mind! Let me show you my holiday gift, which I was inspired by seeing on Twitter. The book is written by noted palaeoartist John Conway, who as you may or may not know, was one of the creators of the Naishian style with the seminal book  All Yesterdays  (10 years ago, no less!), depicting dinosaurs as way more muscular and speculative then the more conservative depictions of yesteryear. Painting with Dinosaurs proffesses to be the collection of an old art professor and collector Ernst Erstwesesn who sadly perished along with his collection of artwork of dinosaurs made by artists throughout history (suspiciously even before they were discovered, let alone so up to date). That last part is part of the joke of the book, a framing device. All of the artwork in question is nice, the way it homages and mimics classic art, from Rennaiscance, to Kahlo and O'Keefe, to Pollock and Warhol. Art lovers will get a kick out of recognisi...

Happy holidays! Here's what I got for y'all this Christmas day, two very similar but different stories of prehistoric survival. Swampland Remember the book Hatchet ? No not the slasher film, the book about a teen who gets stranded in the Canadian wilderness and must survive the elements until rescued. Swampland would be a story (ideally a YA novel) like it, or perhaps Yellowjackets , where a group of teens at a gathering wake up to find themselves back 76 million years ago, and naturally must survive both the local fauna of the time. Other teen stuff ensues, like romance, love triangles, bonding, and feuding. So basically Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous . Accuracy would be a given, though it might be because I cannot write let alone picture believable teens for $#!+, and I'd rather focus on that. Yes, there would be an antagonistic tyrannosaur against the group, a male Albertosaurus . His main  reason for constantly going after the humans would be a mix of wanting to elimin...

  With winter season in full swing, I think its as good as time as any to focus on a rising star in palaeo-media, the Prince Creek Formation of Alaska, which has been seen in quite a few documentaries over the last decade and even a movie (which I swear I am avoiding) as a snowy wonderland. Among the first is today's subject  March of the Dinosaurs  (2011), a feature-length documentary (with a name that references another certain documenary about (avian) dinosaaurs in arctic conditions) written by the Trilogy of Life's Jasper James, and directed by Matthew Thompson ( Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough ).  The film is about a herd of the duck-bill giant Edmontosaurus and the hornless horned dino Pachyrhinosaurus migrating from the PCF in Alaska to Alberta across Laramidia for the winter, but run into much trouble along the way; occasionally we cut back to the PCF to follow a Troodon named Patch struggling to survive in the winter up there. However, the m...

Happy holidays everyone! What better way to celebrate the festive season at Mesozoic Mind then a christmas film about prehistory? Well options are VERY limited, so the only thing I can find is something from the time-honoured tradition of crappy, cheap animated christmas specials,  The Christmas Dinosaur (2004). Created by the sadly now-defunct PorchLight Entertainment, it tells the story of a young dinosaur-obsessed kid named Jason Barnes who decides sneak into the Christmas presents gifted to him, only to discover the one for him isn't the toy he wanted, but a real egg that hatches into a Quetzalcoatlus . Which is you know, not a dinosaur? Even the target audience knew better, not to mention the film keeps flip-flopping on calling it a dinosaur versus (correctly) a pterosaur. Anyways, he adopts it as a pet, and has fun with it as it grows up while having to dodge his parents and his nosy, grumpy neighbour to keep them from finding out about the flapling, but when Spot gets lone...