Mesozoic Mind

Happy New Year everyone! 2024 has fully begun, and admittedly i'm just waiting for it to end already. But that's not what we're here to discuss. Rather, we are doing something more fun and upbeat: looking at childhood memories! Last month, my parents were cleaning the basement, and they found stashed in a cat litter box, books we had put there years ago. What caught my attention were several books I had not read in years as I rummaged through it for fun. Surprise surprise, they were the ones about palaentology and dinosaurs, picture books and a magazine, and I immediately took them and reading them, even after the other books got donated to a thrift store. They came from the Paulian and Beebian ages of the 1990s and early 2000s when children-oriented books like them were all the rage and just about every book had something original to it So we're gonna take a look at some of them to start the year off, just as we look back on our lives and choices at the start of year. ...

Happy holidays! Today's article isn't by me, but an acquaintance of mine Mason Pierce, A.K.A Mr-Ultra, and I helped work on it. He's a guy who already posted this on his Tumblr , we agreed it would also be posted here with a few mods added (see if you can spot them). ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Prehistoric Planet Season Three Now, it should be no secret that I frankly adore Prehistoric Planet for what it is. I’ve already done a whole article going over what a possible 2nd season would be like, and now that it’s been months since the release of the actual Season 2, I’ve come to accept how it returned to the Maasrichtian of the Late Cretaceous. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for PHP to showcase animals and habitats from other time periods as much as the next guy, as I think a season based on the Oxfordian stage of the Late Jurassic would be great. However, with that said, I’m content with the show staying within the Maasrichtian for a...

Merry Chistmas and happy holidays everyone at Mesozoic Mind! Let me show you my holiday gift, which I was inspired by seeing on Twitter. The book is written by noted palaeoartist John Conway, who as you may or may not know, was one of the creators of the Naishian style with the seminal book  All Yesterdays  (10 years ago, no less!), depicting dinosaurs as way more muscular and speculative then the more conservative depictions of yesteryear. Painting with Dinosaurs proffesses to be the collection of an old art professor and collector Ernst Erstwesesn who sadly perished along with his collection of artwork of dinosaurs made by artists throughout history (suspiciously even before they were discovered, let alone so up to date). That last part is part of the joke of the book, a framing device. All of the artwork in question is nice, the way it homages and mimics classic art, from Rennaiscance, to Kahlo and O'Keefe, to Pollock and Warhol. Art lovers will get a kick out of recognisi...

Today's subject was watched a lot by me as a kid on the mythical format known as DVDs, an animated film with the rather generic title of Dinosaur Island , direcyed by Will Meugniot of Exo-Squad fame and released by defunct animation studio DiC. Dinosaur Island 's plot is about four teens being selected for a competitive reality show to win a million dollars, but the plane taking them to their destination crashes, and where they land is a lost world wehere dinosaurs still roa, ans must survive it. Sound familiar? Supposedly this is is an adaptation of The Lost World  by Arthur Conan Doyle, the Camp Cretaceous to the latter's Jurassic World if you will. Let's get the biggest problem out of the way with DI'02 : the animation is not very good. DiC was infamous from its stiff and flat animation and art style, especially towards the end of its lifetime, and here the animation is very reflective of that. Everything moves relatively jerky, and the backgrounds aren't...

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...