Mesozoic Mind

Happy holidays, folks! We're bringing out the big guns for this holiday special with a celebration of a great palaeo-documentary close to my heart and has turned 20 years old this month, Discovery Channel's Dinosaur Planet , from 2003! Dinosaur Planet is one of my all time favourite palaeo-documentary, and for good reasons. They were some of the first docs I saw as a kid, seen via Youtube and while I didn't watch them in full until much later, I loved the introes alone. Also, I had much fun with the Dino Viewer on Discovery's website, seeing both the run cycles and the "dun-dun" sound switching tabs on it made. Oh what joy it brought me, now lost to to mists of time as many a species through time were, an ironic fate considering the subject matter. As for the series itself, it's in the WWD-style format of being a nature documentrary presentation which I always love, building off the formula When Dinosaurs Roamed America did. The designs of the fauna crea...

It is in this very week/on this very day that one of the finest documentaries about dinosaurs and put out by the Discovery Channel premiered. For those not in the know, When Dinosaurs Roamed America is a 2001 documentary special depicting a certain country during the Mesozoic era. Much like a certain BBC documentary from two years prior with the initials WWD, its shot as though it were an actual nature doc, focusing on following dinosaurs' daily lives. Its interspersed with cutaways to talking heads discussing crucial context and fossil finds about american dinosaurs and palaeontology. I have many fond memories of the show, seeing it first on Youtube back when you could and not get copyright claimed, whether its the musical score, the memorable and unique sounds, or hilarious . There are five total segments in the show across its 91-minute runtime. There are in order: Triassic New York, where we follow a Coelophysis as it looks for food and nearly avoids becoming food for a rutio...

(Note: video provided may have stuff missing from original cut) In 2005 and 2009, two specials aired on the Discovery Channel, back when it was actually about science and documentaries. These were both called called Dino Lab , and they had a rather novel premise: instead of simply being a doc of talking heads with occasional vignettes of prehistoric life or a nature documentary-style presentation with the occasional talking head, the show has a laboratory in which dinosaurs are brought into and put through experiments for scientists to study. Such a premise is pretty interesting, if an unusual one that invites more questions (where did the dinosaurs come from? Why is the T. rex first not at the lab?). The first special, from 2005,had a special place to me, as the first one was one of the first docs I saw as a kid on TV, when I was very young. I remember seeing both a T. rex on a treadmill and a plesiosaur splashing a guy with water. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll start off with it's ...