Mesozoic Mind

Couple days ago I went to Ripley's Aquarium og Toronto. It is a pretty good aquarium with some rare species, though a bit on the small side, and it being in one direction means backtracking is difficult. It also has a few fossils in it, might I add. First, is a hanging skeleton of the fish  Xiphactinus , which is cool to see, as is the whale behind it, really shows . And being an aquarium, it make sense to have a fossil fish on full display. Nearby on on the wall is a cast of the mosasaur Clidastes , another Xiph head, and a trilobite in there. The Julian Johnson art from Sea Monsters are a nice touch too, even if presumably it wasn't liscenced. Further down is an exhibit called Dragons, about creatures behind the myth of dragons. It's pretty nice, highlight rarely represented fauna like the Siren (my fiest time seeing one), and even has the chad classic Dragonology in there, but also these model of two certain varanids. It also has both a little Archeopteryx and a Pachy-s...

Yeah, despite college, this blog is still planned to resume. Here's a quicky to start things up again and get back my mojo as it were. So back a few weeks ago, me and a friend of mine were gonna got to Heart Lake Conservation Area in Brampton only for it to be closed for the season, so we went to Chingacousy Park instead. We thought it was nice, with iys petting zoo and library within it, and we has just finished making a round about it. But then we saw a banner with a stock model of a  Triceratops on it (one of the better ones anatomically and aesthetically, in my personal opinion). Sure enough, as we went up and passed it, we saw an entire miniature minigolf course of animatronic dinosaurs, many of whom seem to be repurposed into statues, apparently first opened this year. It's name is a cheeky and obvious reference to you know what. Most of the animatronics are of the usual Jurassic Park-aping Awesomebro era with all that entails. I can recognise a few, like Amargasaurus and...

This is just a way to get a post in this month before its too late. Closed Exhibits at the Royal Ontario Musum In March I saw two temporary exhibits at the Royal Ontario Museum that have since left the building.  First, there is Zuul . You may have heard of the Zuul exhibit back in 2017 (it was great), but for aa few months the holotype of the ankylosaur named after the Ghostbusters monster was brought back, the specimen placed against a wall, with a skull cast in a seperate cabinent. It isn't much, but its cool to see again. It just so happemns to be right next to another temp exhibit now closed, the Field Museum's Death: Life's Greatest Mystery , about well, death. It uses both models and specimens to tell the scientific processes of death, how it woeks and nature, and cultural perceptions and practives of moueni Death only features a few fossils in it. The first are a bonebed of the basal camelid  Leptomeryx , part of the section about the processes of death to the body....

I apologise for the nearly-month hiatus at Mesozoic Mind. I had other projects to work on. But don't worry, this blog is still active, so welcome back everyone. And I've been to a new place today (well kind of, as you shall learn) that's on my my mind today - my Mesozoic mind. Today as part of an excersise walk with my personal trainer, I went along the waterfront of Toronto and eventually went to Budapest Park, located on the west side of Toronto on its Lakeshore. It wasn't planned, and I have never set foot thewre, but we did so. Budapest Park itself is a smalk lakeside park not unlike others out there, save for one thing I came for now that it was in walking distance for me: it has dinosaur statues. The statues consist of two ornithischians, Chasmosaurus and a Stegosaurus . They are made of concrete and are small, at the very least as tall as me. Apparently they came from a now-closed park open in the 1960's and 70's in Huntsville, Muskoka Dinosaur Land, that...

  The Hatchling premeired on October 17 last week from this mini-review's posting. I watched it the moment it came out, and here are my thoughts on it (if you haven't seen my Twitter tweet on it). I think it's excellent. First and foremost, the visuals for the dinosaurs done by Max Bellomio ( Forgotten Bloodlines fame) are excellent and highly accurate, provided by Max Bellomio. The short's runtime, while only 10 minutes, is still rather well paced, playing out like an excerpt from a feature length film, aided by great performances from the actors (I hope they go onto bigger things), and keeps the other dinosaurs in it only briefly to keep focus on the Deinocheirus . I also like how the characters actually do address that the dinosaurs showing up and making themselves at home would be bad for the eosystem no matter what (something I wish a certain Jurassic Park film did in detail, but enough of that). The music is also nice too, carrying the classic 80's and 90...

If you've seen compilations of early CGI films from the 1980's and 90's, you may have seen this. I previously mentioned it in my review of Donkin's Dinosaurs , but never got around to reviewing in full... as it were. This is Chromosaurus *, creating by a fledgeling Pacific Data Images, written by animator Don Venhaus (the director however is unknown as of this writing), and released in 1985, the bery fiest CG work to use dinosaurs in any capacity, albiet here robotic ones. It was quite a year for palaeomedia, as it included not just it (the first CG-animated work period), but also the CBS documentary Dinosaur!  with its stop motion dinos and no doubt many's introduction to the Dinosaur Renaissance's ideals, what is known as the Normanpedia that introduced the palaeoart world to John Sibbick, as well as the Disney movie  Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend . It seems to be the year that kicked off the hype for prehistory that led to Jurassc Park in the 90's, and...

This series for this month is back, if a bit rushed. I apologise in advance. A Dinosaur Story (2008) Here is a story by  about a baby t. rex who finds an egg and knocks it down the side of the hill its on, but pushes it back up. It hatches into a baby  Brachiosaurus , the implication he has made a friend. The thing I note the most was created by alumni from Sheridan College, which is in my hometown of Mississauga, just down the street from where I live. I do admit I like the Tyrannosaurus model here, in spite of the blatant Jurassic Park influences. Maybe it's how the thin frame and short head evoke the real growth cycle tyrannosaurs had, based off fossil evidence. That said, A Dinosaur Story is another short student film, and there isn't much else to it; the CG don't even leave marks on the live action backgrounds nor has any music, and there aren't even much jokes in it. Its story is so short and simple its basically something you'd tell a toddler. If you watche...

Hello. I came up with this idea just a couple days ago, though I swear my mind created it even earlier. Hopefullt it'll tide you over until the next short review coming soon. Streched Necks and Horns: How the Giraffe got its Neck A would be documentary about the evolution of the giraffe and it's long neck, and the factors that played into it, like sexual selection, fighting, and feeding opprotunities, as well as how evolution in general works and theorires on it, like Lamarck's own theorum oft-represented with giraffes' necks. Species that would appear in potential CG reconstruction sequences are: Prolibytherium Sivatherium Discokeryx , naturally headbutting Palaeotragus Bohlinia I'm surprised there has never been a full documentary on giraffe evolution, even though its one of the most famous scenarios used when explaining how evolution and passing on genetic traits works.

It's February, and with only 28 days in it, why not use the time for short stuff? I declare February Short Month = Short Reviews month, and mostly be about various prehistory-themed short form works this month I can find around the internet or remember, mostly animations, though maybe a book or two will be featured. Let's start off with a handful from the golden age of YouTube that was the 2000's and the time I grew up in, when it actually gave a damn about its users and didn't sellout to other corporations. T. rex in the Atrium (2010) There isn’t much to the Welsh short created by students of the University of South Wales. At a Welsh college campus, students find themselces terrorised by a Tyrannosaurus that bursts in and eats people. Where did it come from? We never find out. It's only 1:34 minutes long. The design for the T. rex seems to be the standard "Jurassic Park clone" design with all that entails, with nothing too different then the rest of them...

The  Tampa Bay Times  published an article I just had to comment on because it piqued my interest, and it will pique yours too. The basics: Florida Man donates contraband dinosaur to glorified soft play. Concept art from the press release Long story more long, two years ago, the world's largest known specimen of Triceratops (first found by a private group in 2014) was put up for auction in Paris after display in Trieste, Italy for a while, then sold for a whopping 7.7 million and attracted a large outrage from paleontological circles, not wanting a valuable specimen to be lost to science. Now, it has resurfaced as its owner have come forward as Floridian entrepenuer Sidd Pagidipati, and he's apparently going to loan it to the small Glazer Children's Museum in Tampa, FL for three years (or more), now renovating an entire floor and education centre to help accommodate it. I'm quite mixed on the news. On one hand, I'm glad such a magnificent specimen got into a museum ...

Yesterday I have just learnt there is another recut of Walking with Dinosaurs out there thanks to the ever-reliable (sarcastic) TV Tropes. This was a recut that cut each episode down, just as the other  Prehistoric Planet did, to focus on the subject species of each episode (naming the episodes after them), trimming out a lot to a ten minute slot (for comparsion, the other PHP cut episodes doen to 20 minutes). For instance, in the episode corresponding to Cruel Sea , Ramphorhynchus  is gone, and Eustreoptospondylus  only appears at the begining and the very end and goes unnamed, its beachcombing scenes removed entirely, while in the second episode, Brachiosaurus and Stegosaurus are removed, and in the fourth, the same goes for  Iberomesornis and its sequence entire, implying he went straight to the mating grounds entirely from North America. Kenneth Branagh does not return for this bite-sized cut of the series, instead replaced by british actor Sean Barrett. Unlike...

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind! While the next proper review is still being written, we're gonna be tided over with a fairly short documentary from 1988 and San Francisco-based Harbinger Films, A Whopping Small Dinosaur! ( Link at Internet Archive  - watch it while you still can!) This 26-minute documentary made at the height of the Dinosaur Renaissance documents the discovery and excavation of the Triassic dinosaur  Chindesaurus  at Petrified Forest National Park, albeit 9 years before it was even given a name as Robert Long and other alumni of the University of California Museum of Palaeontology in Berkley study it, while relevant info is also talked about, like the environment it was from and previous expeditions the UCMP has done, like with Annie Alexander . Fin fact: the specimen is nicknamed Gertie, after the saurian cartoon character from 1914, though the name appears nowhere here. While there isn't really all that much to AWSD information or cr...