Mesozoic Mind

Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind. To cap off Juneseums month, here are the exhibits for extinct life I've visited in life, worst if not least good to absolute best. Do be aware that 1) I'm focusing on permanent exhibits, and 2) I haven't visited most of these in years if not months, so I don't have the most accurate memories at the time of writing, and I made have forgotten a few exhibits and a lot of the details over the years. #5 - Ripley's Believe it or Not, Niagara Falls This may seem like a weird place to list, but this franchise of the famous "museum" at the Tourist Trap that is Clifton Hill, Niagara Falls, does have a dinosaur skeleton and a few other fossils on display, specifically  Monolophosaurus , an ichthyosaur, and a proboschidean skull, and not a whole lot else (though I do remember a tuft of mammoth fur somewhere here). A further gallery also has an Allosaurus skull, which in total is a quota y. I am certain they're all casts an...

Hello, everyone (and boy there's little chance of topping the previous Stratigraphy post for a long time, like holy $#!+). Today, we're gonna do our second instalment of Palaeo-Redo. Specifically, we're gonna give a makeover to the 2007 Imax documentary Dinosaurs Alive!  by Giant Screen Films, also the source of the roaring dinosaur so many use on the internet. While I haven't reviewed  Dinosaurs Alive yet, I will tell you there isn't much in the way of Dinosaurs being alive in the film through CG sequences, which are fairly short and few, with most of the doc focusing on palaeontologists of the American Museum of Natural History. While not a bad idea on paper, the fact that there isn't all that much dinosaurs (what people pretty much come for) in it makes it in my opinion a bit of a letdown, not helped by a sluggish pace that makes it hard to get through. This is a shame, as the models for the prehistoric life are all pretty good. But what if things had gone a...

For my birthday (well weekend afterwards) in 2021, me and my mother went to the Royal Ontario Museum, and several times afterwards. I loved all of it, but me being me, I looked most forward to the museum's dinosaur gallery, the James and Louise Temerty Galleries of the Age of Dinosaurs. They were good, but I did feel they could be better, and with some of if not a lot of the info and exhibit design outdated to the 2000's, it's due for a renovation. Now today we're doing something new: Palaeo-Redo , where I reimagine works of palaeo-media, both as I would have done or could be improved. And without further ado, I present... The Ahmed Family Gallery of Dinosaurs ! The new gallery will be themed around the jaws and teeth of dinosaurs and their diets and evolution. In one direction, if you arrive from the Dawn of Life Gallery, the axis would be the latter and how environmental change impacted them. In the other direction, is the anatomical differences between clades of dino...

For the weekend of my birthday (despite really wanting it on my birthday), me and my wonderful mother headed to my stomping grounds, the Royal Ontario Museum in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The whole museum encompasses a whole lot of subjects, from ancient and world cultures, canadian history and Indigenous Cultures of it, ecosystems and animals (they have a cool walkthrough bat cave diorama for instance), and geology. However, what we're here to discuss is its palaeontology galleries. Respectively known as the James and Louise Temerty Galleries of the Age of Dinosaurs and Reed Gallery of the Age of Mammals, these two opened as part of a 2007 renovation that added the iconic "crystals" that look out onto the streets. Anytime I passed by them being driven by since I was a kid, I always tried to get a glimpse of the dinosaur skeletons through the glass, and begged my parents for a visit. But enough nostalgic waxing. Let's walk through the ROM's prehistoric gal...