Dino Wars: The Obscure Doc to end all Obscure Docs

At Mesozoic Mind I have written (or at least tried to write about) very obscure documentaries few have heard about or remember, as a way to stand out. However, today's subject is a very, very obscure one, as in "literally never heard of it before" and "No one else ever did": Dino Wars. This was a Discovery Channel doc from 2005.

The only evidence for it was this schedule screenshot found by someone in the Discord server I frequent trawling for other Lost Media related to Dinosaur Planet, and finding this schedule there.

"Cold Case"? Ugh, the irony here....

And this is all we have. No screenshots, no press releases, no DVD releases nor clip let alone that was once on Youtube at some point, nothing on Internert Archive. No known species in it. No nothing. Literally nothing else is known save the date, November 5, 2005. No wonder everyone forgot it so soon. It's Lost Media. I didn't even know about it until last year thanks to that Discord user, The King of Frogs, and we weren't even discussing it first to begin with.

So with nothing to go on but the name, what exactly might one think Dino Wars about?

I presume it is about some kind of conflict between dinosaurs, albiet filtered the hyperbolic lense awesomebro, perhaps the arms race-like co-evolution between the tyrannosaurs and ceratopsids or perhaps details evidence of a fight. While at it, footage from When Dinosaurs Roamed America and Dinosaur Planet would probably be used a lot in in it or even be procided by Meteor Studios, as all Discovery palaeodocs were inclined to.... But all that ia just vague guesswork.

It's honestly kind of creepy how Dino Wars came with no fanfare then immidiate vanished off the face of TV and the internet without anyone knowing, even in the day and age where anything can be saved online.... but deleted so easily too, and no one would ever know. It's just like the thousands of species that go unfossilised or undescribed by us, forgotten by time and only able to be speculated upon by the one species able to even partially understand the exsitence of past species in deep time. Alternatively, one could compare it to taxa name in the 1800's and barely studied or referenced in subsequent decades, with Wikipedia articles only a single sentence long.

But only until now.

As luck would have it, I have mangaged to find something deep within the furthest depths of the internet, taken from a torrent website. Specifically a screenshot of the single known species known from it, Apatosaurus.

Wow. The Apatosaurus is terrible in every way. The anatomy is really really off in every way, and looks like AI generated it, barely looking like the real thing, almost toylike. Quite the downgrade from Discovery's output at the time, but a harbinger for what's to come for Discovery as it decayed away from actually educating and appealling more to horrid Middle Americans with crap reality TV.

Oh, if you want to know more....

THIS LAST BIT'S IS AN APRIL FOOLS Y'ALL. This image was AI-generated by me a month ago (I am so sorry for dipping my toes in) for funzies and to see what it woulds look like. Surprise suprise, it's terrible and lacks artistic quality and value entirely.

I might make a serious version of this review some other day, going further in-depth to the subjects discussed here.

Special thanks to The King of Frogs for bringing it up.