Mesozoic Mind

It's the third anniversary of Mesozoic Mind. It's been a long three years so far, but I'm doing well, and I promise I will post more (or at least go back to just two per month ata minimum - without burning myself out). What better way to celebrate the oocassion then where I got the inspiration for this very blog's title: Dinosaurs: A Fun-Filed Trip Back in Time . This 1987 VHS short that's actually an extension of a 1980 short produced by the great Will Vinton, simply titled "Dinosaur". Both of them are made in the midst of the Dinosaur Rennaisance and the renewed interest in the subject . Land Before Time was in theatres that year for just one example of 80's dino-mania, the kind that gave rise to Jurassic Park . The doc starts with a young kid named Phillip, played by Fred Savage, struggling to get an idea for his science report but can't, and his mother is nagging him about it. However, a song comes up on his boombox, and it leads into the ve...

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...

Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind for the new year! Today's subject of Mesozoic Mind, the oldest work featured so far, may trigger nostalgic flashbacks, whether your a British person growing up in the 80's or worldwide in the 2000's via Youtube. It's Dinosaurs: Fun, Fact and Fantasy , a 1982 Direct to Video documentary oriented at children, courtesy of Pickwick Video. It aired at a time when palaeontology was in the middle of re-evaluating dinosaurs not as sluggish, slow, evolutionary failures but a successful clade, yet the public hadn't yet quite caught on. Also, please excuse the low quality screengrabs. The video ain't even HD. After a montage of dinosaur related B-rolls (and featuring the OG King Kong from 1933), we begin with a stop motion short on life in Mesozoic England, most notably a stooped-over Megalosaurus  on the prowl and eventually felling an Iguanodon , because really, what else is it gonna eat? Cetiosaurus or anything it actually lived...