Mesozoic Mind

  With winter season in full swing, I think its as good as time as any to focus on a rising star in palaeo-media, the Prince Creek Formation of Alaska, which has been seen in quite a few documentaries over the last decade and even a movie (which I swear I am avoiding) as a snowy wonderland. Among the first is today's subject  March of the Dinosaurs  (2011), a feature-length documentary (with a name that references another certain documenary about (avian) dinosaaurs in arctic conditions) written by the Trilogy of Life's Jasper James, and directed by Matthew Thompson ( Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough ).  The film is about a herd of the duck-bill giant Edmontosaurus and the hornless horned dino Pachyrhinosaurus migrating from the PCF in Alaska to Alberta across Laramidia for the winter, but run into much trouble along the way; occasionally we cut back to the PCF to follow a Troodon named Patch struggling to survive in the winter up there. However, the m...

( Link to episode itself ) Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind. Today, the work we're looking at actually isn't Mesozoic in nature (only at the very,  very start), instead being the era we apes live in, the Cenozoic. I admit as amazing the Cenozoic was/is, my heart is always going to be more interested in the Mesozoic and all works associated with it, but nevertheless, will do my best to take interest in this one. After the monumental success of Walking with Dinosaurs , Tim Haines and Jasper James were working on a next instalment of the series, one focusing on the Cenozoic era and all it's bizarre mammalian life. In fact, their very first idea of the Trilogies of Life was to start off with it, but a mix of the CG of the time being unable to render the CG fur of mammals properly and their general lack of popularity versus dinosaurs led to the first series, but after 2 to 3 years, they were able to, and so they made Walking With Beasts , this year celebrating its 20th a...

Welcome back to Mesozoic Mind ! We're continuing the Trilogies of Life this month with another instalment of it: 2002's Chased by Dinosaurs * and 2003's Sea Monsters . I remember watching them as a kid and being obsessed with them. Even today I can practically quote the whole scripts from memory. * Note that they're not called this back home in Britain, only officially so in US and Canada, where the two are just called "Walking with Dinosaur Specials" The biggest difference from the rest of the franchise is that there's a human onscreen hosting it and interacting with the prehistoric life: british naturalist Nigel Marven (who if your like me, is no stranger to this kind of thing ). In many regards, its in the vein of Animal Planet's nature documentaries put out by Steve Irwin (RIP) and Jeff Corwin put out at the time. At the time (and still is), this was pretty novel: on one hand you had a typical documentary with plenty of humans in our time being int...

22 years ago in 1999, in the cultural age of Jurassic Park , the BBC would air a seminal work: it revolutionized how so many people thought about dinosaurs, computer animation, and the genre itself: Walking with Dinosaurs . Across six episodes, we got 28 minutes each of dinosaurs acting as animals in real life do and not as monsters too many of us perceive them as, with not a single cutaway to humanity (unless its the american cut on Discovery Channel, but that's beside point) like the nature documentaries also put out by the beeb's Natural History Unit, all stately narrated by thespian Kenneth Branagh. It even spawned several follow ups that if anything improved on the things that made it good, from sequel series Beasts and Monsters  that showcased the other eras of Earth, Nigel Marvin's Chased by Dinosaurs and Sea Monsters  that gave the show the Steve Irwin treatment with an onscreen human host, and Robert Winston's Walking with Cavemen . But one must ask: which epi...