Mesozoic Mind

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...

Hello, everyone (and boy there's little chance of topping the previous Stratigraphy post for a long time, like holy $#!+). Today, we're gonna do our second instalment of Palaeo-Redo. Specifically, we're gonna give a makeover to the 2007 Imax documentary Dinosaurs Alive!  by Giant Screen Films, also the source of the roaring dinosaur so many use on the internet. While I haven't reviewed  Dinosaurs Alive yet, I will tell you there isn't much in the way of Dinosaurs being alive in the film through CG sequences, which are fairly short and few, with most of the doc focusing on palaeontologists of the American Museum of Natural History. While not a bad idea on paper, the fact that there isn't all that much dinosaurs (what people pretty much come for) in it makes it in my opinion a bit of a letdown, not helped by a sluggish pace that makes it hard to get through. This is a shame, as the models for the prehistoric life are all pretty good. But what if things had gone a...

Oh, I'm gonna love this Hello, and welcome back to Aquatober here at Mesozoic Mind. Last time we looked at Sea Rex , a documentary for IMAX theatres in museums. Now we're gonna take a look at... basically the exact same thing. Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure . Released by National Geographic in 2007, this film is undoubtedly a familiar source of nostalgia, whether its the film, its video game, or the series of videos Nat Geo uploaded. The film chronicles life in the Western Interior Seaway of Late Cretaceous North America through the perspective of a female  Dolichorhynchops ; I believe many have taken to calling her Doly for short and henceforth I shall too. She encounters may other denizens of the sea, including the giant sea lizard the Tylosaurus . The film also has a framing device of scientists uncovering Doly's skeleton. The film to put it in one word, is breathtaking . The visuals are all excellent and top-notch. The animal designs are bright, vivid, and amazin...

We all have our memories of seeing palaeo-documentaries, whether in theatres on online. Today we review one such I was obsessed with seeing back in the day, Sea Rex: Journey to a Prehistoric World . We're reviewing it because around the time I wrote this I lately developed an oceanic obsession and watched both this, National Geographic's Sea Monsters (that hopefully will come up later), and listening to Moana songs. The film runs down the history of the Mesozoic's marine reptiles and touches upon the scientific history of them, in particular using Georges Cuvier and the famous Maastricht Mosasaurus hoffmani . Georges himself appears courtesy of Richard Rider in the film's framing device, where he co-hosts with Julie, a woman played by Chloe Hollings (the future voice of Widowmaker) in an aquarium as he explains things to her and audience. Its not clear if he's his ghost or a figment of her imagination, and the film doesn't seem to explain it either way. We get...