Mesozoic Mind

 Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind. Today, let's try something new and delve into the work of a particular palaeoartist. Specifically, one who you may not know by name but may know his artstyle.  Joe Tucciarone is not exactly well known as his contemporaries from the tail end of the Dinosaur Renaissance, but if you see his art anywhere, chances are you'll know it. I sure do, as my family used to have a placemat just like the one pictured above. Whether it was on other merchendise, books, or online in edgy tribute AMVs, Joe's dinosaurs were everywhere. Look at them on his (now-archived) website  and see how many you recognise. The man himself Joe himself (at least according to his website) is an Ohio resident born in 1953 (and likely Italian-American) who specialises in space art as much as palaeoart (he loves both), getting his start at the Memphis Museum's (presumably the Pink Palace Museum and Planetarium - is that right Memphians?) planeterium in 1978, and wh...

Hoo boy, this is gonna be a toughie to sit through. Today, we are reviewing a very forgotten dinosaur documentary, a work not to be confused with a certain trading card series, generically named Dinosaur Attack . This is a very obscure doc, as while it itself has been uploaded online, albeit under a very dumb clickbait title*, there's next to nothing about it online. It's so obscure for the longest time I couldn't find even the date it was released, though eventually I did and apparently its 1999 (but even then I have my doubts). I gladly appreciate if anyone has more info. The basic premise of the documentary is about the Paluxy River trackway in Texas, which for those not in the know, dates back to the Early Cretaceous and preserves both sauropod and theropod tracks, each possibly made by the respective sauropod and theropod genera Sauroposeidon and Acrocanthosaurus . The neat thing is that based off the way each are arranged, it seems it preserves a hunt in progre...

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...