Mesozoic Mind

It was on this day a year ago I started writing Mesozoic Mind, everybody. Its means a lot to me, helping me give meaning in the Age of COVID. What better way to celebrate this blog about so much that's Mesozoic (and build up to Jurassic World: Dominion ) then the daddy of all Palaeo-Media, the Jurassic Park franchise! While I'm saving the Jurassic World films for later (spoilers they're bad), lets for now look at the OG trilogy from the 1990's and early 2000's, which practically redefined dinosaurs and palaeo-media for every generation that followed. All of which I loved, especially on VHS, and naturally it fed my love of all things prehistoric and mesozoic and eating up every JP-related thing on the internet. I even had a JP3 Tapejara toy for a while. Okay, enough nostalgically waxing, let's get to what we came for: ranking all of the films to see how they stack up after 25 years and counting. (Note: Originally I was gonna do the VHS short Dinosaurs: Fun Fac...

Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind! We're ending Walking with Dinovember (for realsies this time) with ideas of a trio of docs in the vein of Chased by Dinosaurs , and because stateside there's Thanksgiving weekend, a film appropriate for the holidays. These first two shows would be tributes to nature documentaries of yesteryear, specifically of the kind put out by Steve Irwin, Jeff Corwin, or Austin Stevens that typically aired on Animal Planet where the host goes on safari and interacts with the creatures, often by grabbing creatures and holding them up to the camera. The third... well, you can read it for yourself. Mesozoic Micro Monsters Much like Chased by Dinosaurs, Mesozoic Micro-Monsters focuses on a human host and camera crew traversing Mesozoic in search of a specific creature of interest, much like Chased by Dinosaurs . However, the main difference it as evidenced from the the title, it focuses more on the smaller creatures of the time and area. These are crea...

It is in this very week/on this very day that one of the finest documentaries about dinosaurs and put out by the Discovery Channel premiered. For those not in the know, When Dinosaurs Roamed America is a 2001 documentary special depicting a certain country during the Mesozoic era. Much like a certain BBC documentary from two years prior with the initials WWD, its shot as though it were an actual nature doc, focusing on following dinosaurs' daily lives. Its interspersed with cutaways to talking heads discussing crucial context and fossil finds about american dinosaurs and palaeontology. I have many fond memories of the show, seeing it first on Youtube back when you could and not get copyright claimed, whether its the musical score, the memorable and unique sounds, or hilarious . There are five total segments in the show across its 91-minute runtime. There are in order: Triassic New York, where we follow a Coelophysis as it looks for food and nearly avoids becoming food for a rutio...