Mesozoic Mind

  The Hatchling premeired on October 17 last week from this mini-review's posting. I watched it the moment it came out, and here are my thoughts on it (if you haven't seen my Twitter tweet on it). I think it's excellent. First and foremost, the visuals for the dinosaurs done by Max Bellomio ( Forgotten Bloodlines fame) are excellent and highly accurate, provided by Max Bellomio. The short's runtime, while only 10 minutes, is still rather well paced, playing out like an excerpt from a feature length film, aided by great performances from the actors (I hope they go onto bigger things), and keeps the other dinosaurs in it only briefly to keep focus on the Deinocheirus . I also like how the characters actually do address that the dinosaurs showing up and making themselves at home would be bad for the eosystem no matter what (something I wish a certain Jurassic Park film did in detail, but enough of that). The music is also nice too, carrying the classic 80's and 90...

  Just wanted to give this little indie project attention, even more then it already has on other platforms. Concept art This is an animated series created by Ben Mulot and Floating Rock Studio, with a possible game coming too. Pretty ambitious stuff.  Kyōryū (after the Japanese word for dinosaur) is about a post-apocalyptic Japan where genetically ressurrected prehistoric life lives wild in the extinction of humanity, and battle among themselves for survival, like an improved version of Jurassic World Dominion , Tokyo Jungle , or Stray , depending on what you think it's most like out of the three. The CG is astounding, and this is just the teaser; imagine what the full series will do. The creatures move with visible weight and have excellent detailing. They are also stylised, yet still retain accurate designs (for the most part). The samurai-like armour on the Tyrannosaurus stands out, looking badass and fits how they apparently will be Shogun-esque leaders of the world ...

If you've seen compilations of early CGI films from the 1980's and 90's, you may have seen this. I previously mentioned it in my review of Donkin's Dinosaurs , but never got around to reviewing in full... as it were. This is Chromosaurus *, creating by a fledgeling Pacific Data Images, written by animator Don Venhaus (the director however is unknown as of this writing), and released in 1985, the bery fiest CG work to use dinosaurs in any capacity, albiet here robotic ones. It was quite a year for palaeomedia, as it included not just it (the first CG-animated work period), but also the CBS documentary Dinosaur!  with its stop motion dinos and no doubt many's introduction to the Dinosaur Renaissance's ideals, what is known as the Normanpedia that introduced the palaeoart world to John Sibbick, as well as the Disney movie  Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend . It seems to be the year that kicked off the hype for prehistory that led to Jurassc Park in the 90's, and...

Hello, everybody. I'm just here to add the latest RPWIOTD, and something I will be doing this weekend you'll findf very interesting. The River Styx This would be a horror/survival story about a palaeontology student visiting his rural family in Montana and goes fishing together, only to get into a time warp back in time, to (where else?) the Hell Creek Formation 66 million years ago - during a weat season and when the forests are flooded. Stuck on an island, they must find a way off and more importantly a way back to their time - but the local wildlife is going to make that very difficult, as they're mere appearence disturbs them and drives them nuts - though some of the humans aren't helping either. The major creatures in the story, and the subjects of each setpiece would be: The crocodilians  Borealosuchus ,  Brachychampsa , and  Thoracosaurus . They would be the main threat the characters face, as many of them choose to bask on the island and get into conflict with e...

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...

Happy holidays everyone! What better way to celebrate the festive season at Mesozoic Mind then a christmas film about prehistory? Well options are VERY limited, so the only thing I can find is something from the time-honoured tradition of crappy, cheap animated christmas specials,  The Christmas Dinosaur (2004). Created by the sadly now-defunct PorchLight Entertainment, it tells the story of a young dinosaur-obsessed kid named Jason Barnes who decides sneak into the Christmas presents gifted to him, only to discover the one for him isn't the toy he wanted, but a real egg that hatches into a Quetzalcoatlus . Which is you know, not a dinosaur? Even the target audience knew better, not to mention the film keeps flip-flopping on calling it a dinosaur versus (correctly) a pterosaur. Anyways, he adopts it as a pet, and has fun with it as it grows up while having to dodge his parents and his nosy, grumpy neighbour to keep them from finding out about the flapling, but when Spot gets lone...

Hello and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind. Today, with winter bearing upon me where I live, we are reviewing a fitting filmthat has turned 20 this year from the age of the mythical format known as the VHS tape, a bulky and hardy format in plastic and celluloid, which was an endangered species in the early 2000's, as well as the subsequent film series that I followed (but got progressicely worse the further it wenr). If you haven't seen the movie like I have, Blue Sky's (RIP to them)   Ice Age  (2002) tells the story of three different stranger mammals, a Mammoth named Manny (Ray Ramano), a ground sloth named Sid ((John Leguizamo), and a Sabretooth cat named... Diego (Denis Leary). They are all brought together amidst a giant migration by a younng neanderthal baby (while not named in the film, is named Roshan) orphaned in a sabretooth cat attack on his tribe, and they agree to return it to them before they can leave, but have to dodge the pack who want to eliminate the humans...

Hello, this is Mesozoic Mind. It's the first week of the spooky season, and what better way to celebrate then a horror work? Ambush A game can be summed up as  Alien: Isolation WITH RAPTORS. You play as ascintist who has arrived in a Lost World-type setting, but something happens that leads a pack of a Dakotaraptor  or Deinonychus -esque species to ambush you: perhaps you were in the wrong place at the wrong time as they were hunting, or disturbed them by entering their territory. You do manage to escape, and the pack goes away - except for one, who sees your escape as an insult to its pride, and goes rogue to hunt you down. What follows is a chase through the shadowy jungles to reach a rendevous point where you can escape as the raptor could appear anywhere and ambush you before eating you alive, and that's not without considering what other animals might attack you first as you run into their path. To survive the raptor, you must either put enough distance between it, or hi...

While humans have been digging up fossils of prehistoric life (not just dinosaurs alone) and interpreting them for literally thousands of years and interpreting them, it's only been relatively recently in the 1800's onwards that human societies have understood them for what they are, and have created works centred on them, known as Palaeo-Media, from art of them, to literature, to film and television, to video games. In the last 20 years it could be argued there have been more of them made then in the last 100 years combined. It is here I propose a list of the periods of palaeo-media has seen so far and how each of them relates to the social values and events of their era. Worth noting is that the stratigraphy presented here isn't understood in the way clearly (more or less) defined layers of rocks or periods of time are, but rather as boxes within one another a la cladistic charts (hence the lack of specific dates), and previous periods can still last decades if not centur...

Hello, and welcome to Mesozoic Mind! Today, we are making our first foray into pure fiction in months. Yesterday, a teaser trailer for the latest and [apparently] last Jurassic Park film was released, Jurassic World: Dominion , after a while with the fellow Universal film Fast and Furious 9 in select Imax theatres, but been known to the users of Paleo Media Central , a Discord server run by one  Kingrexy  I am part of. Let me start off that the last two films, Jurassic World and Fallen Kingdom , I don't like them too much, due to both the undercooked and bland story and how compared to the well made original trilogy's designs, theirs are very inaccurate in many ways, with FK's Baryonyx being an infamous offender with taking its "Dino-Croc" image way too far. However, from  what I can tell, Dominion will actually try for better accuracy, helped by having Stephen Brusatte as scientific advisor (way better then 2000's era Jack Horner), . The Prologue itself wi...