Mesozoic Mind

Happy holidays, folks! We're bringing out the big guns for this holiday special with a celebration of a great palaeo-documentary close to my heart and has turned 20 years old this month, Discovery Channel's Dinosaur Planet , from 2003! Dinosaur Planet is one of my all time favourite palaeo-documentary, and for good reasons. They were some of the first docs I saw as a kid, seen via Youtube and while I didn't watch them in full until much later, I loved the introes alone. Also, I had much fun with the Dino Viewer on Discovery's website, seeing both the run cycles and the "dun-dun" sound switching tabs on it made. Oh what joy it brought me, now lost to to mists of time as many a species through time were, an ironic fate considering the subject matter. As for the series itself, it's in the WWD-style format of being a nature documentrary presentation which I always love, building off the formula When Dinosaurs Roamed America did. The designs of the fauna crea...

Hello, to start off July at Mesozoic Mind, here's an idea I had in my head for a bit but never got around to writing - until now. Troodont Imagine this game... but with a different kind of parave. The game would be set in the Late Cretaceous and you play as a troodont* living in Campanian North America**. You use the maniraptor's famously big brain and wits to live - but also cause trouble for the heck of it. Just a few of what you can do in the game include: Cause stampedes of hadrosaurs or ceratopsids. Trap predators after you ( Daspletosaurus and Gorgosaurus , raptors, azhdarchids, and crocodilians) in humiliating spots and escape. Catching prey. And of course, just loudly pestering other dinosaurs and smaller creatures for fun. The tone would be inspired by Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote and other "Chase" cartoons, as well as  Dinosaur Planet and Dinosaur Revolution and their comical quasi-anthropomorphic presentation. The artstyle would be cartoony and cel-shade...

Remember my post on May the second ? How I said I was going to Chicago? The one place I've wanted to go for a long long time? I indeed visited the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago earlier this month for a wedding vacation, on the 6th, and although it was not my first visit, I hadn't had a chance to visit in years. the very first exhibit I headed to? The Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet  on the second floor, it's palaeontology gallery, first opened in 2006 after the museum closed a very 90's gallery "Life After Time". I LOVED IT. EVERY BLOODY SECOND OF IT. I was like a kid in a candy store seeing one of the most impressive array of fossils I've ever seen and excellent exhibitry. Not even a full bladder could stop my enthusiasm.  Admittedly I was so caught up in the rapture I wasn't really paying specifics and went too fast for my liking, so I'm not going to remember all the details of the exhibit. Forgive me for such and potentially missi...

Ah, T. rex. It needs no introduction, and even the youngest nor laypeople not familiar with all but the basics of palaeontology know what it is. It has easily solidified itself as THE dinosaur by default, and has studied countlessly more then arguably any other fossil lifeform on Earth. Ironically, being so well known has meant it's been taken for granted, even called overrated versus other dinosaurs, and many, many misconceptions about it, from like merely a scavenger that couldn't even hunt live prey. This is a shame, as Tyrannosaurus is a pretty cool dino on its own, able to crush bone like no other theropods couldn't and had one of the more fascinating growth stages of any of them. T. rex: The Ultimate Predator , organised by NYC's renowned American Museum of Natural History, which came to the Royal Ontario Museum this month and intends to educate visitors on what is known about the dinosaur, from how it evolved from other dinosaurs to how it lived, and bust those m...

Happy holidays! Here's what I got for y'all this Christmas day, two very similar but different stories of prehistoric survival. Swampland Remember the book Hatchet ? No not the slasher film, the book about a teen who gets stranded in the Canadian wilderness and must survive the elements until rescued. Swampland would be a story (ideally a YA novel) like it, or perhaps Yellowjackets , where a group of teens at a gathering wake up to find themselves back 76 million years ago, and naturally must survive both the local fauna of the time. Other teen stuff ensues, like romance, love triangles, bonding, and feuding. So basically Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous . Accuracy would be a given, though it might be because I cannot write let alone picture believable teens for $#!+, and I'd rather focus on that. Yes, there would be an antagonistic tyrannosaur against the group, a male Albertosaurus . His main  reason for constantly going after the humans would be a mix of wanting to elimin...

Hello, and we're back to Mesozoic Mind! For a weekend vacation to Ottawa, I visited the  Canadian Museum of Nature , a museum that serves as one of the national museums of Canada. It was pretty good, if fairly smaller then I expected and able to be seen in under two hours. Naturally, I capped off the visit with the museum's fossil gallery, where the vast majority of them are. (And you can too, with a museum's Matterport virtual tour they provide for free!) I admit my own experience was hampered by my own excitement and dealing with others, and I kind of rushed it. I'll still try to do my best here. The Fossil Gallery starts off with horizontal one hall that' fairly open but has a lengthwise dividing wall in the centre, while next is s vertical hall divided into both a walkthrough diorama and a section for cenozoic life. This is where things get interesting: the majority of it is on a raised platform accessible by stairs, overlooking the other half. The first galler...