Mesozoic Mind

Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind. Today we will be looking at the very first palaeodoc of 2024, and the third work by the great David Attenborough featured here,  Attenborough and the Giant Sea Monster . It's one of the many both the BBC and David's put out over the last couple years about fossil finds, all titled "Attenborough and the X", wich include Attenborough and the Sea Dragon , about Temnodontosaurus , Giant Dinosaur, about the sauropod  Patagotitan , and Giant Egg , about the Elephant Bird. In this case, it's about a fossil specimen of the plesiosaur  Pliosaurus  found a couple years ago and the efforts to understand it, airing on both New Years Day and Valentines in the US. ( Link to the documentary ) Let's get something out of the way however: the doc does not ever say the name of the fossil's discoverer, Phillip Jacobs. The crew should be ashamed of such, and . There's even a Change.org petition that demands compensation by having ...

What if the dinosaurs never died out? Its a question we all have asked, with awsnsers ranging from comic scenarios to serious speculative evolution projects, and even documentaries have dipped into it.  My Pet Dinosaur is an episode of the long-running BBC science series Horizon  that answers exactly this question and how humans (if we'd even be around) would interact with them. It features palaeontologists like Don Lessem, Phil Currie, Kristie Currie Rogers, Larry Witmer, and Greg Erickson as talking heads, with one Mark Everest behind the camera. (Link; apologies for mirroring) * Not to be confused with a 2017 australian movie of the same fiom which I have intent on seeing let alone reviewing. The episode begins with a trip to Alberta's Dinosaur Park to determine how likely dinosaurs would survive given how they were doing at the time, which was very good. It also tackles the temperature of dinosaurs and the implication it would have for them to survive the ice age: but of ...

Yesterday I have just learnt there is another recut of Walking with Dinosaurs out there thanks to the ever-reliable (sarcastic) TV Tropes. This was a recut that cut each episode down, just as the other  Prehistoric Planet did, to focus on the subject species of each episode (naming the episodes after them), trimming out a lot to a ten minute slot (for comparsion, the other PHP cut episodes doen to 20 minutes). For instance, in the episode corresponding to Cruel Sea , Ramphorhynchus  is gone, and Eustreoptospondylus  only appears at the begining and the very end and goes unnamed, its beachcombing scenes removed entirely, while in the second episode, Brachiosaurus and Stegosaurus are removed, and in the fourth, the same goes for  Iberomesornis and its sequence entire, implying he went straight to the mating grounds entirely from North America. Kenneth Branagh does not return for this bite-sized cut of the series, instead replaced by british actor Sean Barrett. Unlike...

So on April 16, I watched a feature-length (87 minutes!) dinosaur documentary hosted by the legendary David Attenborough. No, its not the upcoming Prehistoric Planet , as it hasn't come out yet. Rather, it's  Dinosaurs: The Final Day , about the extinction of the dinosaurs via an asteroid impact, and studies of the North Dakota fossil site Tanis , which actually preserves a very close time right up to the asteroid impact. Now I admit the extinction of the dinosaurs never really interests me and I usually prefer to skip it when it comes up, out a mixture of just being talked about too much and being to tear-inducing for me, instead preferring what celebrates their success and diversity, birds included. I presumed it would be like the previous palaeo-docs David has been in, with mostly talking heads with a few short CG reconstruction sequences here and there, but nothing much to it, and would viewed as minor compared to Discovery Channel's Last Day of the Dinosaurs (which is ...

( Link to episode itself ) Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind. Today, the work we're looking at actually isn't Mesozoic in nature (only at the very,  very start), instead being the era we apes live in, the Cenozoic. I admit as amazing the Cenozoic was/is, my heart is always going to be more interested in the Mesozoic and all works associated with it, but nevertheless, will do my best to take interest in this one. After the monumental success of Walking with Dinosaurs , Tim Haines and Jasper James were working on a next instalment of the series, one focusing on the Cenozoic era and all it's bizarre mammalian life. In fact, their very first idea of the Trilogies of Life was to start off with it, but a mix of the CG of the time being unable to render the CG fur of mammals properly and their general lack of popularity versus dinosaurs led to the first series, but after 2 to 3 years, they were able to, and so they made Walking With Beasts , this year celebrating its 20th a...

Welcome back to Mesozoic Mind, and we're concluding what I've dubbed Walking with Dinovember by finishing up the other half-erm, three fifths of the Chased by series, Chased by Sea Monsters *. Like the first two, CBSM features zoologist and TV presenter Nigel Marven and a film crew travelling though time in search of particular species. * Again, not called this back home in Britain, only officially so in US and Canada, where the two are just called "A Walking with Dinosaur Trilogy", but let's face it, the former is way more memorable (even if technically Nigel isn't actually chased by them that much here). This three-part series consists of them in a boat called the Ancient Mariner visiting the oceans of 7 points in time, each labelled as the Deadliest Seas of All Time thanks to the sea creatures which inhabit them. Episodes are " Dangerous Seas ", " Into the Jaws of Death ", " To Hell..... and Back? ". In order visited, the per...

Welcome back to Mesozoic Mind ! We're continuing the Trilogies of Life this month with another instalment of it: 2002's Chased by Dinosaurs * and 2003's Sea Monsters . I remember watching them as a kid and being obsessed with them. Even today I can practically quote the whole scripts from memory. * Note that they're not called this back home in Britain, only officially so in US and Canada, where the two are just called "Walking with Dinosaur Specials" The biggest difference from the rest of the franchise is that there's a human onscreen hosting it and interacting with the prehistoric life: british naturalist Nigel Marven (who if your like me, is no stranger to this kind of thing ). In many regards, its in the vein of Animal Planet's nature documentaries put out by Steve Irwin (RIP) and Jeff Corwin put out at the time. At the time (and still is), this was pretty novel: on one hand you had a typical documentary with plenty of humans in our time being int...