Mesozoic Mind

Raptor Red (1995) Yes, I did indeed purchase Bob Bakker's legendary book and finished it after the 14th. For those not in the know,  Raptor Red is a fiction novel by the paaeontologist and godfather of the Dinosaur renaissance about a female Utahraptor forced on the move. It should come as no suprise the book has aged like milk, like the utahraptors being scaley, or it and Deinonychus , Astrodon , and Acrocanthosaurus living in the same time and place (reasonable when it was thought Utah lived 125 mya, not 140). Also, the episodic plot of the story results in a feew interesting things being forgotten. All that said, the writing is generally excellent weaving in and around all sorts of of prehistoric denizens in poetic prose that elevates them, anthromorphising them without being over the top or obnoxious. All without ever making the dinosaurs talk. Likewise, I love how Bakker draws all sorts of attention to other creatures and how they fit into Red's story, like symbiosis betw...

Well, Walking with Dinosaurs 2025 came and went. The reboot to the icon of palaeodocumentaries, promising a new take that would appeal to audiences not versed in the nitty gritty by showing dig sites in action to show how palaeontology works alongside the usual nature doc-style life reconstruction sequences. It .... was .... Not very good. While no one ws expecting it to surpass the original, so much seems to conspire to make it subpar. There's a reduced budget compared to the original, so there aren't that many species, and to choose active dig sites only limited the sites, meaning half the series is Cretaceous North America. Conbine that with being made in the fog of COVID and at a time when nature docs are bing underfunded by a society caring only for sating the rich, and you thus get a series which feel thin and empty, not really a succesor to the classic. But which reaches the heights of what came before it and which plunged deeper then even the movie? Let's find out....

Hello everyone. Just gonna drop this idea I've had for days, if not months. Land of the Raptor A three-part documentary following the life of the iconic giant dromaeosaur Utahraptor of Early Cretaceous North America 135 million years ago. We would follow the lives of two of them from the same clutch, one female and one male, respectively named Streak and Whitesnout. The story’s told from their birth to adulthood, trying to survive predators, weather, each other, and of course hunt the massive prey they live with. Each episode would be around 48 minutes long. While I haven't really fleshed the story out, and I don't have any plans on doing so, the story would end with Whitesnout, now a leader of a pack, leading it after a herd of  Hippodraco into a mud pit where they will become trapped and become the infamous Utahraptor Megablock , while Streak has also formed her own pack and has hatched her own chicks as they walk away into a sunset. The final scene is in our time with an...