Mesozoic Mind

Well, Walking with Dinosaurs 2025 came and went. The reboot to the icon of palaeodocumentaries, promising a new take that would appeal to audiences not versed in the nitty gritty by showing dig sites in action to show how palaeontology works alongside the usual nature doc-style life reconstruction sequences. It .... was .... Not very good. While no one ws expecting it to surpass the original, so much seems to conspire to make it subpar. There's a reduced budget compared to the original, so there aren't that many species, and to choose active dig sites only limited the sites, meaning half the series is Cretaceous North America. Conbine that with being made in the fog of COVID and at a time when nature docs are bing underfunded by a society caring only for sating the rich, and you thus get a series which feel thin and empty, not really a succesor to the classic. But which reaches the heights of what came before it and which plunged deeper then even the movie? Let's find out....

It's the third anniversary of Mesozoic Mind. It's been a long three years so far, but I'm doing well, and I promise I will post more (or at least go back to just two per month ata minimum - without burning myself out). What better way to celebrate the oocassion then where I got the inspiration for this very blog's title: Dinosaurs: A Fun-Filed Trip Back in Time . This 1987 VHS short that's actually an extension of a 1980 short produced by the great Will Vinton, simply titled "Dinosaur". Both of them are made in the midst of the Dinosaur Rennaisance and the renewed interest in the subject . Land Before Time was in theatres that year for just one example of 80's dino-mania, the kind that gave rise to Jurassic Park . The doc starts with a young kid named Phillip, played by Fred Savage, struggling to get an idea for his science report but can't, and his mother is nagging him about it. However, a song comes up on his boombox, and it leads into the ve...

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 ...

Hello everyone and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind. Day, who here remembers this video back in the day? If you do, you know what I mean. If not (or even if you do)... lemme introduce you to  Dinosaurs: Giants of Patagonia , yet another palaeo-documentary released for IMAX theatres during the 2000's (notably came out alongside Dinosaurs Alive ), during the early stages of the Awesomebro period when the Trilogy of Life was done and edgy tributes were coming in, and I adored the trailer alone for it.  80 million years ago, they ruled the earth. Come and see for the first time: real life sized dinosaurs... on the world's largest screen . Oh, man, that's still cool 17 years on. Also, I thought from how the trailer was edited the humans were gonna interact with the dinosaurs by travelling back in time to study the dinosaurs, Nigel Marven-style. That would have been amazing... Anyway, this creation of Quebecois creative Marc Fafard documents the Cenomanian dinosaurs of South America...