Mesozoic Mind

If you haven't been paying attention in the last couple months in the palaeosphere, there's been buzz of a new palaeo-documentary, created by animator and CG palaeoartist Max Bellomio. It's an indie one, named  Forgotten Bloodlines: Agate , about life of denizens of Miocene North America 20 mya, in particular the chalicothere Moropus and the giant entelodont Daeodon . The kicker is that it narrated by none other then Nigel Marven, a hero to many in the palaeo-media community. I am very excited for it ever since I found out about it on the Discord sever I frequent and kept tabs on its pre-production, and have even helped promote it (as I'm doing right now). The Miocene is a very under-represented period in palaeo-media, always overshadowed by the Ice Age and the Mesozoic in spite of its diverse array of life, both from ancient lineages from earlier in the Cenozoic and ones just evolving, all as the world's climate cooled and grasslands spread across the Earth. Even W...

Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind! We're ending Walking with Dinovember (for realsies this time) with ideas of a trio of docs in the vein of Chased by Dinosaurs , and because stateside there's Thanksgiving weekend, a film appropriate for the holidays. These first two shows would be tributes to nature documentaries of yesteryear, specifically of the kind put out by Steve Irwin, Jeff Corwin, or Austin Stevens that typically aired on Animal Planet where the host goes on safari and interacts with the creatures, often by grabbing creatures and holding them up to the camera. The third... well, you can read it for yourself. Mesozoic Micro Monsters Much like Chased by Dinosaurs, Mesozoic Micro-Monsters focuses on a human host and camera crew traversing Mesozoic in search of a specific creature of interest, much like Chased by Dinosaurs . However, the main difference it as evidenced from the the title, it focuses more on the smaller creatures of the time and area. These are crea...

Welcome back to Mesozoic Mind, and we're concluding what I've dubbed Walking with Dinovember by finishing up the other half-erm, three fifths of the Chased by series, Chased by Sea Monsters *. Like the first two, CBSM features zoologist and TV presenter Nigel Marven and a film crew travelling though time in search of particular species. * Again, not called this back home in Britain, only officially so in US and Canada, where the two are just called "A Walking with Dinosaur Trilogy", but let's face it, the former is way more memorable (even if technically Nigel isn't actually chased by them that much here). This three-part series consists of them in a boat called the Ancient Mariner visiting the oceans of 7 points in time, each labelled as the Deadliest Seas of All Time thanks to the sea creatures which inhabit them. Episodes are " Dangerous Seas ", " Into the Jaws of Death ", " To Hell..... and Back? ". In order visited, the per...

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...