Mesozoic Mind

 Season's Greetings and Happy Holidays folks! As a christmas day gift, I'll give you all a follow up to last week's post, where I show you sonething made new fashioned out of something old: concepts for new episodes of Dinosaur Planet that fix the balance issues I voiced last time! I'm setting them on landmasses that weren't in the original series' lineup These two episode concepts were actually concieved in 2020 before I even got the idea to start the blog. I've decided to update them with what I know now. They're a what if? excersise, and I will write the episodes as if I were in 2003, using sources and information from at least before that year and nothing after, though there won't be much concern for budget from both Meteor Studios and Evergreen Films, as it is my imagination. Before we get started, I'd like to offer a special thanks to Deviantart user ThalassoAtrox , for inspiring me to write these after seeing a rundown of Dinosaur Planet ...

  With winter season in full swing, I think its as good as time as any to focus on a rising star in palaeo-media, the Prince Creek Formation of Alaska, which has been seen in quite a few documentaries over the last decade and even a movie (which I swear I am avoiding) as a snowy wonderland. Among the first is today's subject  March of the Dinosaurs  (2011), a feature-length documentary (with a name that references another certain documenary about (avian) dinosaaurs in arctic conditions) written by the Trilogy of Life's Jasper James, and directed by Matthew Thompson ( Dinosaurs: The Final Day with David Attenborough ).  The film is about a herd of the duck-bill giant Edmontosaurus and the hornless horned dino Pachyrhinosaurus migrating from the PCF in Alaska to Alberta across Laramidia for the winter, but run into much trouble along the way; occasionally we cut back to the PCF to follow a Troodon named Patch struggling to survive in the winter up there. However, the m...

When you mention dinosaurs and New Zealand, what's the first thing that comes to mind that combines both? Some would say director Peter Jackson and the criminally underrated beasts of his King Kong movie. Others would think of the so-called living fossils of the archipelago from plants to the Tuatara. Still others think of the avian kind of dinosaur from the Cenozoic and by extension the Maori people's time, from the iconic Kiwi to the extinct Moas and the Poukai Eagle . While al of those are valid to think, not many would associate New Zealand with the non-avian dinosaurs, since there aren't really that many fossil sites in the country preserving them. That brings us to this documentary,  The Lost Dinosaurs of New Zealand  from 2002. This Discovery Channel documentary chronicles one of the few major mesozoic fossil sites and the only only one preserving non-avian dinosaurs in the country however fragmentary they are, the people who discovered it, and the implications it ba...

We all have our memories of seeing palaeo-documentaries, whether in theatres on online. Today we review one such I was obsessed with seeing back in the day, Sea Rex: Journey to a Prehistoric World . We're reviewing it because around the time I wrote this I lately developed an oceanic obsession and watched both this, National Geographic's Sea Monsters (that hopefully will come up later), and listening to Moana songs. The film runs down the history of the Mesozoic's marine reptiles and touches upon the scientific history of them, in particular using Georges Cuvier and the famous Maastricht Mosasaurus hoffmani . Georges himself appears courtesy of Richard Rider in the film's framing device, where he co-hosts with Julie, a woman played by Chloe Hollings (the future voice of Widowmaker) in an aquarium as he explains things to her and audience. Its not clear if he's his ghost or a figment of her imagination, and the film doesn't seem to explain it either way. We get...