Mesozoic Mind

Happy halloween season, reader! Say, remember these books? It's easier if you were born and/or raised in the 90's or early 2000's, but to those born later then that, allow me to introduce them to you. These are the Looking At... Dinosaurs books . They are all illustrated by Tony Gibbons, and written by a body that included authors Heather Amery, Tamara Green, Frances Freedman, Mike Brown, and Jenny Vaughn. Finally, Cambridge's David Norman was the consultant for the book series, while Gareth Stevens Publishing published the books; they also did other series like it, covering topics like animal victims of the Anthropocene Extinction and arthropods. Each of the books follows a typical formula. There are a few deviations in order from book to book, but they mostly go: The introduction to the genus A size comparison spread A spread with the skeleton of the subject. An illustration of the dinosaur in its time. Two or three freespace pages that vary by subject, often seeming ...

Phew, sorry for the hiatus. I didn't go to college after all - yet. I'm back! Got another obscure palaeo -documentary at hand! No, this is not that book I reviewed  despite the prescence of both the American Museum of Natural History and Mark Norrell, nor a documentary calledd The Dinosaur Hunters from 2002 about Gideon Mantell and other 1800's palaeontologists based off a book, nor the utterly terrible Discovery Reality series Dino Hunters . Sheesh, National Geographic's Dinosaur Hunters is such a generic title you need to specify what you mean everytime. Anyway... Rather, it's the National Geographic documentary special from 1996, back before Nat Geo had its own channel and put out specials on other channels and VHS. It was made at the height of the Dinosaur Renaissance as new discoveries of theropods were coming out of Asia to reveal how birdlike and caring the smaller dinosaurs were rather then the lumbering idiots. That's what the doc is about: those very...