Mesozoic Mind

Fifty posts and 5000 views, everyone! It's been a year with my ADHD complicating schedule, but I made it! What better way to celebrate this blog about prehistory then with what I prefer best? Obscure as heck Palaeomedia I'm quite sure no one has reviewed before. Question: What's everyone's favourite National Geographic palaeo-documentary... that isn't Sea Monsters or Prehistoric Predators ? I'll let you wait, but that's quite emblematic of how little National Geographic Channel has put out such content versus Discovery Channel or BBC. This especially applies to the 2010's, as there only a few specials about T. rex to note. The 2000's meanwhile features a lot more palaeodocs, but these are all of the talking head kind (with the exception of the theatrical Sea Monsters ) which are 80% talking heads  and fieldwork with scientists and 20% CG in situ reconstructions, which tend to last shorter in consciousness then narratives like BBC and DC have put ou...

We all have our memories of seeing palaeo-documentaries, whether in theatres on online. Today we review one such I was obsessed with seeing back in the day, Sea Rex: Journey to a Prehistoric World . We're reviewing it because around the time I wrote this I lately developed an oceanic obsession and watched both this, National Geographic's Sea Monsters (that hopefully will come up later), and listening to Moana songs. The film runs down the history of the Mesozoic's marine reptiles and touches upon the scientific history of them, in particular using Georges Cuvier and the famous Maastricht Mosasaurus hoffmani . Georges himself appears courtesy of Richard Rider in the film's framing device, where he co-hosts with Julie, a woman played by Chloe Hollings (the future voice of Widowmaker) in an aquarium as he explains things to her and audience. Its not clear if he's his ghost or a figment of her imagination, and the film doesn't seem to explain it either way. We get...

(Note: video provided may have stuff missing from original cut) In 2005 and 2009, two specials aired on the Discovery Channel, back when it was actually about science and documentaries. These were both called called Dino Lab , and they had a rather novel premise: instead of simply being a doc of talking heads with occasional vignettes of prehistoric life or a nature documentary-style presentation with the occasional talking head, the show has a laboratory in which dinosaurs are brought into and put through experiments for scientists to study. Such a premise is pretty interesting, if an unusual one that invites more questions (where did the dinosaurs come from? Why is the T. rex first not at the lab?). The first special, from 2005,had a special place to me, as the first one was one of the first docs I saw as a kid on TV, when I was very young. I remember seeing both a T. rex on a treadmill and a plesiosaur splashing a guy with water. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll start off with it's ...