Mesozoic Mind

Hello and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind. I've decided I'm going back to doing what I do best: obscure documentaries few have heard of. In this case, we once again return to the early 2000's with another Discovery Channel doc, titled  Mega Predators *.  * Just note I'm not sure if its 2001 (which I've seen given elsewhere) or 2004, which I've seen elsewhere, hence why no date is given here. If anyone could clarify which is which, that would be great. This documentary produced by one Rubin-Tarrat Productions focuses on predators of the Cenozoic and what made them deadly hunters. In many ways,  Mega Predators  feels like a predecessor to the much-reviled awesombro Discovery series  Monsters Resurrected . The focus on carnivores and how they hunt and kill prey. The random scenes of them in the present killing people. The hyperbolic treatment of them as monstrous killers and how they would hurt us: you will find them all there in Mega Predators , hell even a few spec...

It's quite common knowledge that birds are dinosaurs. While a lot of people are mistaken and think they are seperate or merely descend from dinosaurs, those are typically the older and more conservative generations, and younger generations who grew up reading about the palaeontological findings concerning the evolution of them accepy this scientific fact easily. It's also well known that raptor can refer to both dromaeosaurs and the carnivorous groups of birds, due to the claws that no doubt grip their prey for the beaks to get in more easily, the word coming from the Latin word for thief or to seieze, Rapare. Both groups from the same clade, dromaeosaurs and birds of prey inspire awe and terror throughout our minds' imaginations and artistic creations. I write all this because earlier this month on the Eighth I went somewhere that's quite relavent to the above paragraph, and boy was it gud. Earlier this month, I went to Mountsberg Conservation Area with my parents for ...

Hello and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind. Today, with winter bearing upon me where I live, we are reviewing a fitting filmthat has turned 20 this year from the age of the mythical format known as the VHS tape, a bulky and hardy format in plastic and celluloid, which was an endangered species in the early 2000's, as well as the subsequent film series that I followed (but got progressicely worse the further it wenr). If you haven't seen the movie like I have, Blue Sky's (RIP to them)   Ice Age  (2002) tells the story of three different stranger mammals, a Mammoth named Manny (Ray Ramano), a ground sloth named Sid ((John Leguizamo), and a Sabretooth cat named... Diego (Denis Leary). They are all brought together amidst a giant migration by a younng neanderthal baby (while not named in the film, is named Roshan) orphaned in a sabretooth cat attack on his tribe, and they agree to return it to them before they can leave, but have to dodge the pack who want to eliminate the humans...

Hello and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind . However, today we are not tackling dinosaurs or even the Mesozoic for the most part. rather, we are delving into a different group of fantastical creatures, one from our own imaginations. The name?   Fantastic Beasts™: The Wonder of Nature . On June 18 (after a week-long delay) I went to the Royal Ontario Museum for a temporary exhibit about mythical creatures and real ones and how they intersect, using Harry Po- sorry, the Wizarding World as inspiration, courtesy of  She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named-cuz-of-Issues-Beyond-Scope-Of-This . It's all told through both taxidermy specimens from the NHM, props from the movies, and replica models of the creatures. The basic layout of it the exhibit goes like this: the first section is about mythical creatures of European Mythology and their inspirations, like how trading Narwhal tusks created Unicorns, or how manatees inspired unicorns.  The second section is about various animal behaviours ...