Mesozoic Mind

Happy Halloween to y'all! For the end of spooky season and Aquatober, here's a special treat! A new thing i here! My palaeontology-obsessed mind is always coming up with all sorts of ideas for documetaries, movies and other fiction works about all kinds of prehistory, so I'm writing down many of them whenever I want and posting them here for you to read and judge! So without further ado, I present.... Dragon Island: Prehistoric Wales ( Ynys y Ddraig: Cymru Cynhanesyddol for welsh speakers) Inspired by a relatively recent fossil find, this would be a documentary about Late Triassic Britain, specifically Wales and southeastern England and in particular the Pant-y-Ffynnon Quarry site. According to many studies (Whitside 2007), the area was an archipelago of limestone islands dominated by dry forests and limestone caves known as karst, hereby known as Gwaelod, after a mythical sunken kingdom in Celtic Welsh mythology. We'd follow the lives of its small but fascinating rept...

Oh, I'm gonna love this Hello, and welcome back to Aquatober here at Mesozoic Mind. Last time we looked at Sea Rex , a documentary for IMAX theatres in museums. Now we're gonna take a look at... basically the exact same thing. Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure . Released by National Geographic in 2007, this film is undoubtedly a familiar source of nostalgia, whether its the film, its video game, or the series of videos Nat Geo uploaded. The film chronicles life in the Western Interior Seaway of Late Cretaceous North America through the perspective of a female  Dolichorhynchops ; I believe many have taken to calling her Doly for short and henceforth I shall too. She encounters may other denizens of the sea, including the giant sea lizard the Tylosaurus . The film also has a framing device of scientists uncovering Doly's skeleton. The film to put it in one word, is breathtaking . The visuals are all excellent and top-notch. The animal designs are bright, vivid, and amazin...

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...