Mesozoic Mind

Happy halloween season, reader! Say, remember these books? It's easier if you were born and/or raised in the 90's or early 2000's, but to those born later then that, allow me to introduce them to you. These are the Looking At... Dinosaurs books . They are all illustrated by Tony Gibbons, and written by a body that included authors Heather Amery, Tamara Green, Frances Freedman, Mike Brown, and Jenny Vaughn. Finally, Cambridge's David Norman was the consultant for the book series, while Gareth Stevens Publishing published the books; they also did other series like it, covering topics like animal victims of the Anthropocene Extinction and arthropods. Each of the books follows a typical formula. There are a few deviations in order from book to book, but they mostly go: The introduction to the genus A size comparison spread A spread with the skeleton of the subject. An illustration of the dinosaur in its time. Two or three freespace pages that vary by subject, often seeming ...

Phew, sorry for the hiatus. I didn't go to college after all - yet. I'm back! Got another obscure palaeo -documentary at hand! No, this is not that book I reviewed  despite the prescence of both the American Museum of Natural History and Mark Norrell, nor a documentary calledd The Dinosaur Hunters from 2002 about Gideon Mantell and other 1800's palaeontologists based off a book, nor the utterly terrible Discovery Reality series Dino Hunters . Sheesh, National Geographic's Dinosaur Hunters is such a generic title you need to specify what you mean everytime. Anyway... Rather, it's the National Geographic documentary special from 1996, back before Nat Geo had its own channel and put out specials on other channels and VHS. It was made at the height of the Dinosaur Renaissance as new discoveries of theropods were coming out of Asia to reveal how birdlike and caring the smaller dinosaurs were rather then the lumbering idiots. That's what the doc is about: those very...

Ah, Computer graphic imagery. Before you became so commonplace and went too far in development so fast, you were a fascinating, bergeoning little world living on college campuses and inside basic computers, one of an optimistic future of 1980's Reaganite and Clinton's 90's America. Really, I have a nostalgia for early CG, as there is a genuine, endearing sense of care put into it and a fuzzy dreamlike feel to many of them, as well as growing up with many of these early CG projects.  Today we will be looking at two courtesy of one John C. Donkin, ananimator who worked at Ohio State University's Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design . I know nothing about him at the moment, but I do know he went on to work at Blue Sky Animation and worked on Ice Age . he created two works in a two-part project about the prehistoric creatures we know and love. Keep in mind, this was at the peak of the Dinosaur Renaissance when the image of dinosaurs as succesful and fast creatu...

Ah, Eyewitness . That 90's British natural history franchise I adore. In the libraries of the 2000's you flourished as both books and VHSs, narrated in the latter by Andrew Sachs*, and would inspire many young kid to love science and the natural world. * I will never accept the Martin Sheen Americanised versions, which I swear I didn't grow up with as a Canadian. While prehistoric life has been discussed throughout episodes (including season one's  Dinosaur , naturally), today we will focus on the season two episode  Prehistoric Life , about the evolution of animals throughout time and the study of them. The episode relays its information as a broad overview of life over Deep Time, going from: Calculating the age of the earth Stromatolites Cambrian Trilobites Dunkleosteus Carboniferous plants and insects Dinosaurs and Pterosaurs Mammals of the Cenozoic Human evolution And finally waxing about the creatures that may have never been preserved in the fossil record never to...

Hello and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind. Today, we're going to look at comics juggernaut Marvel, but rather then looking at their fictional saurian characters (like Devil Dinosaur ), we're gonna take a look at a limited 4-part series from 1992 an from defunct Epic Comics,  Dinosaurs: A Celebration . It was released at the height of the Dinosaur Renaissance just before Jurassic Park began, and in the Dark Age of Comic Books. Palaeo-artist Steve White serves as editor for the series (and insert J. Jonah Jameson joke here). ( Link for you to read series and the first issue ) The basics of the series is that each are divided between encyclopaedia-style paragraphs about groups of dinosaurs with basic illustrations and four comic sequences about dinosaurs (and occasionally otherprehistoriclife) based off each subject presented in previous paragraphs, each written by a Marvel writer and illustrator of the time (usually the british side). With that in mind, the format of this review wi...

Hoo boy, this is gonna be a toughie to sit through. Today, we are reviewing a very forgotten dinosaur documentary, a work not to be confused with a certain trading card series, generically named Dinosaur Attack . This is a very obscure doc, as while it itself has been uploaded online, albeit under a very dumb clickbait title*, there's next to nothing about it online. It's so obscure for the longest time I couldn't find even the date it was released, though eventually I did and apparently its 1999 (but even then I have my doubts). I gladly appreciate if anyone has more info. The basic premise of the documentary is about the Paluxy River trackway in Texas, which for those not in the know, dates back to the Early Cretaceous and preserves both sauropod and theropod tracks, each possibly made by the respective sauropod and theropod genera Sauroposeidon and Acrocanthosaurus . The neat thing is that based off the way each are arranged, it seems it preserves a hunt in progre...