Mesozoic Mind

Ah, Eyewitness . That 90's British natural history franchise I adore. In the libraries of the 2000's you flourished as both books and VHSs, narrated in the latter by Andrew Sachs*, and would inspire many young kid to love science and the natural world. * I will never accept the Martin Sheen Americanised versions, which I swear I didn't grow up with as a Canadian. While prehistoric life has been discussed throughout episodes (including season one's  Dinosaur , naturally), today we will focus on the season two episode  Prehistoric Life , about the evolution of animals throughout time and the study of them. The episode relays its information as a broad overview of life over Deep Time, going from: Calculating the age of the earth Stromatolites Cambrian Trilobites Dunkleosteus Carboniferous plants and insects Dinosaurs and Pterosaurs Mammals of the Cenozoic Human evolution And finally waxing about the creatures that may have never been preserved in the fossil record never to...

Happy holidays to all of ya! Here are some ideas for all the support and views you gave me! Savage Lizards A film about a family which washes up on a Lost World inhabited by mesozoic life, including a race of highly intelligent raptors who take them in and give them sanctuary. However, one member doesn't appreciate it, an asshat teenager who buys into the awesomebro rhetoric of all dinosaurs being violent savage monsters who can't do anything but but fight and kill, and threats them accordingly, refusing to see otherwise, even though A) he acts very violent and bellicose himself, and strains his relationships with his family, and B) the raptors are fairly pacifistic outside of hunting and aren't all that violent, and as a whole the other dinosaurs would act as animals do and avoid conflict. Things get so heated between the three that a fight erupts between them, leading the family to leave the island for home, save the son, whose arrogant beliefs get him disowned and abando...

After a week-long delay, I finally went to the Royal Ontario Museum to visit a new exhibit, once on Dec. 12 and the next on 19th. While the museum already has galleries for fossil fauna of the Mesozoic era and the Cenozoic era, for the longest time it had no gallery for the Paleozoic before either of them. Shame, as the museum has a pretty good collection, especially from the Burgess Shale in BC, easily one of the most iconic fossil deposits ever. Fortunately, over the course of the last decade the ROM has worked to rectify this. Taking an old event space on the second floor, it has turned it into the Willner Madge Dawn of Life Gallery . this is what it was before The exhibit starts off with a round space introducing the concepts of the exhibit, with at its center a skull of the armoured fish Dunkleosteus  and other fossils along the walls, such as trilobites, ancient plants, and most notably on the wall a giant cast of the floor of Newfoundland's Mistaken Point, and highlighting t...