Mesozoic Mind

It's baaack! I finally got to finish this Marvel-created Dinosaur Rennaisance-era series, or at least the third issue.  The lineup for this book, titled  Bone-Heads and Duck-Bills , goes this time: Ornithopods Hadrosaurs Pachycephalosaurs Mammals The Cretaceous period A soneone who actually likes ornithopods, I'm going to like this book. I'm just not going to cover the informational segments today. They're boring to read for me, and they drag. I may do them seperately instead. Starting with - Oh damn! The colours on this art! Colourist Euan Peters really deserves props here for the bold ones of the lava in the otherwise dark setting, and the same goes for artist Steve Hambridge. Meanwhile, the textboxes really do a great job of conveying an apocalyptic feel and the desperation the creatures face. I wouldn't expect anything less from the esteemed Dan Abnett, best known for his own tales of apocalyptic fiction elsewhere. Anyways, this segment takes place in Mid-Cretac...

With the 30th anniversary of Jurassic Park having come in June, I had to celebrate, first by watching the film itself, but the day after that, I went with my father on June 12 to another befitting attraction: Jurassic World: The Exhibition , a travelling walkthrough attraction organised by Neon Global, which came to my fair city of Mississaga in May, specifically a former sporting good store now used for travelling. JWTE themes itself to travelling to the namesake park of the recent trilogy. It's actually the latest of many tie ins to the frsnchise, from The Dinosaurs of Jurassic Park back in the 1990's, to the Japenese-exclusive Jurassic Park Institute Tour , which I eagerly watched as a kid and wanted to go to. But enough of building up and let's begin our tour, shall we? The exhibit begins with a themed pre-show about boarding a boat to Isla Nublar, as video screens of ocean simulate the ride there. It's a nice start to the attraction if I say so myself. Neat post...

Remember my post on May the second ? How I said I was going to Chicago? The one place I've wanted to go for a long long time? I indeed visited the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago earlier this month for a wedding vacation, on the 6th, and although it was not my first visit, I hadn't had a chance to visit in years. the very first exhibit I headed to? The Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet  on the second floor, it's palaeontology gallery, first opened in 2006 after the museum closed a very 90's gallery "Life After Time". I LOVED IT. EVERY BLOODY SECOND OF IT. I was like a kid in a candy store seeing one of the most impressive array of fossils I've ever seen and excellent exhibitry. Not even a full bladder could stop my enthusiasm.  Admittedly I was so caught up in the rapture I wasn't really paying specifics and went too fast for my liking, so I'm not going to remember all the details of the exhibit. Forgive me for such and potentially missi...

It was on this day a year ago I started writing Mesozoic Mind, everybody. Its means a lot to me, helping me give meaning in the Age of COVID. What better way to celebrate this blog about so much that's Mesozoic (and build up to Jurassic World: Dominion ) then the daddy of all Palaeo-Media, the Jurassic Park franchise! While I'm saving the Jurassic World films for later (spoilers they're bad), lets for now look at the OG trilogy from the 1990's and early 2000's, which practically redefined dinosaurs and palaeo-media for every generation that followed. All of which I loved, especially on VHS, and naturally it fed my love of all things prehistoric and mesozoic and eating up every JP-related thing on the internet. I even had a JP3 Tapejara toy for a while. Okay, enough nostalgically waxing, let's get to what we came for: ranking all of the films to see how they stack up after 25 years and counting. (Note: Originally I was gonna do the VHS short Dinosaurs: Fun Fac...

For my birthday (well weekend afterwards) in 2021, me and my mother went to the Royal Ontario Museum, and several times afterwards. I loved all of it, but me being me, I looked most forward to the museum's dinosaur gallery, the James and Louise Temerty Galleries of the Age of Dinosaurs. They were good, but I did feel they could be better, and with some of if not a lot of the info and exhibit design outdated to the 2000's, it's due for a renovation. Now today we're doing something new: Palaeo-Redo , where I reimagine works of palaeo-media, both as I would have done or could be improved. And without further ado, I present... The Ahmed Family Gallery of Dinosaurs ! The new gallery will be themed around the jaws and teeth of dinosaurs and their diets and evolution. In one direction, if you arrive from the Dawn of Life Gallery, the axis would be the latter and how environmental change impacted them. In the other direction, is the anatomical differences between clades of dino...

If you haven't noticed, a certain dinosaur skeleton from the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Ontario, Canada has become the blog's background mascot. Its name has been designated as ROM 768. ROM 768 has long been (literally) overshadowed by Gordo the Barosaurus just metres away from it, yet it has an equally fascinating history and arguably greater impact on the world. It it the holotype specimen of Parasaurolophus  and more specifically the type species P. walkeri , arguably the famous and recognisable of the hadrosaur dinosaurs. It’s the most complete specimen of it ever found so far, and indeed very few other specimens have been found. Casts of it have been featured in other museums and attractions worldwide. With its discovery and description, we were led to breakthroughs in the study of communication habits of dinosaurs. Meanwhile, for the last 100 years, most reconstructions of it have borrowed much from it, most notably as a notch over its haunches once thought to be a...