Mesozoic Mind

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...

What if the dinosaurs never died out? Its a question we all have asked, with awsnsers ranging from comic scenarios to serious speculative evolution projects, and even documentaries have dipped into it.  My Pet Dinosaur is an episode of the long-running BBC science series Horizon  that answers exactly this question and how humans (if we'd even be around) would interact with them. It features palaeontologists like Don Lessem, Phil Currie, Kristie Currie Rogers, Larry Witmer, and Greg Erickson as talking heads, with one Mark Everest behind the camera. (Link; apologies for mirroring) * Not to be confused with a 2017 australian movie of the same fiom which I have intent on seeing let alone reviewing. The episode begins with a trip to Alberta's Dinosaur Park to determine how likely dinosaurs would survive given how they were doing at the time, which was very good. It also tackles the temperature of dinosaurs and the implication it would have for them to survive the ice age: but of ...