Mesozoic Mind

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 ...

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...

( Link to episode itself ) Hello, and welcome back to Mesozoic Mind. Today, the work we're looking at actually isn't Mesozoic in nature (only at the very,  very start), instead being the era we apes live in, the Cenozoic. I admit as amazing the Cenozoic was/is, my heart is always going to be more interested in the Mesozoic and all works associated with it, but nevertheless, will do my best to take interest in this one. After the monumental success of Walking with Dinosaurs , Tim Haines and Jasper James were working on a next instalment of the series, one focusing on the Cenozoic era and all it's bizarre mammalian life. In fact, their very first idea of the Trilogies of Life was to start off with it, but a mix of the CG of the time being unable to render the CG fur of mammals properly and their general lack of popularity versus dinosaurs led to the first series, but after 2 to 3 years, they were able to, and so they made Walking With Beasts , this year celebrating its 20th a...

Welcome back to Mesozoic Mind, and we're concluding what I've dubbed Walking with Dinovember by finishing up the other half-erm, three fifths of the Chased by series, Chased by Sea Monsters *. Like the first two, CBSM features zoologist and TV presenter Nigel Marven and a film crew travelling though time in search of particular species. * Again, not called this back home in Britain, only officially so in US and Canada, where the two are just called "A Walking with Dinosaur Trilogy", but let's face it, the former is way more memorable (even if technically Nigel isn't actually chased by them that much here). This three-part series consists of them in a boat called the Ancient Mariner visiting the oceans of 7 points in time, each labelled as the Deadliest Seas of All Time thanks to the sea creatures which inhabit them. Episodes are " Dangerous Seas ", " Into the Jaws of Death ", " To Hell..... and Back? ". In order visited, the per...

(link for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6KolH0LekY&list=PLzV6yGh6hXDbaa0SvKxy3cywqM--SnWBR&index=1&t=5s&ab_channel=GabrielM.R ) While Walking with Dinosaurs is undeniably a british show, it was not made by them lone: the American Discovery Channel also helped make it. Naturally they aired it stateside, albeit as a single special narrated by Avery Brooks.  However, we're not discussing it. We’re discussing Prehistoric Planet . This was a recut of the series made for younger audiences that aired on Discovery Kids (back when it was just Discovery Channel aimed at kids and not a Hasbro channel) shortened the episodes into roughly 21 minute episodes. There was a season two that did Walking with Beasts , and narrated by Christian Slater (making it the closest to a cenozoic sequel to Dinosaur Planet , but its Lost Media save for the intro ). This was undoubtedly many an american and canadian's introduction to it, but I am not one of them. I discovered the orig...

Welcome back to Mesozoic Mind ! We're continuing the Trilogies of Life this month with another instalment of it: 2002's Chased by Dinosaurs * and 2003's Sea Monsters . I remember watching them as a kid and being obsessed with them. Even today I can practically quote the whole scripts from memory. * Note that they're not called this back home in Britain, only officially so in US and Canada, where the two are just called "Walking with Dinosaur Specials" The biggest difference from the rest of the franchise is that there's a human onscreen hosting it and interacting with the prehistoric life: british naturalist Nigel Marven (who if your like me, is no stranger to this kind of thing ). In many regards, its in the vein of Animal Planet's nature documentaries put out by Steve Irwin (RIP) and Jeff Corwin put out at the time. At the time (and still is), this was pretty novel: on one hand you had a typical documentary with plenty of humans in our time being int...