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 ...

It is done. I have finished Prehistoric Planet . While I had some difficulties setting it up and thus had the hype deflated a bit for me, I loved it through and through, and its certainly one of the best documentaries I've seen in a while. SPOILERS AHEAD. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. 5. Freshwater By no means is Freshwater a bad episode. As I have wrote before , it's merely the least good of the series: not many of the sequences take place within lakes, wetlands, and rivers, so we don't get any fun swimming scenes and none of the cool fish or crocodilians of the time (ignoring they're practically mundane conpared to other mesozoic ones). A T. rex scene is completely superfluous, only having one wade in river as a connection, and for got knows what reason they stuck Quetzalcoatlus  in Madagascar of all places (even if it was just for breeding). It doesn't help it barely has its own identity in technical side: the colour palates of each segments, or even segments themselves,...

 Okay, I lied about not doing another thing like it. Sorry. Deserts If you think its cool, watch the ep and see it in motion. The second episode is definitely one of if not the best in the series so far. Ever The Dreadnoughtus sequence that starts the episode is where it peaks. As befits one of the largest of them, the sequence conveys the huge size and power of them excellently through wide shots and boomiong music. The rest of the episode is also great. The mongolian scenes are stellar, a segment about Barbaridactylus is good (and even delves into gender), and there's a nice one at the end about South American hadrosaurs braving harsh conditions. All are excellently shot and scored, However, its not all ups for the episode. I'm not a fan of the watering hole scene. Even with the breathtaking cinematography, it feels a bit too much like a video game cutscene for my tastes, leaves Therizinosaurus , my favourite dinosaur completely unmentioned, same for many other dinosaurs. The...

I saw the first episode of Apple TV+'s  Prehistoric Planet   last night, focusing on marine life along the coasts of the time. WAS. EXCELLENT. From the visuals, cinematography, to the accuracy, it was everything I hoped for and more. Without getting into spoiler territory, a basic overview of the ep is something like this: A father T. rex (which the palaeosphere has all but named Hank) goes for a swim with his babies to show them how to hunt. Pterosaurs in Morocco fly to survive and escape one another. The kiwi plesiosaur  Tuarangisaurus  living a social life together. Mosasaurus hoffmani in Europe prepare to mate, by both getting a skin treatment from fish and fighting. Ammonites in the Western Seaway court with bioluminescent light shows. The visual effects are utterly astounding: the CG is incredibly detailed, and . There's even a few puppets here for some particular baby pterosaurs known as Alcione , or at least I think so: CG's so good I can't tell. The cinemato...

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 ...