Muzman on 15/9/2010 at 01:10
Quote Posted by Vivian
The 'land of the dinosaurs' hyperbole that paints the mesozoic as some kind of ecological thunderdome is almost certainly bullshit. If you've been watching Clash of the Dinosaurs, its a prime example of that sort of rubbish, which is particularly unfortunate as I was a consultant on it - at least half the crew wanted to make a fully rounded doc on dinosaurs as actually functional biological creatures, so sexual behaviour, roosting, social interactions, birth, death, development etc, but they got overruled by the management who just wanted them depicted as literally running round screaming and killing the whole time because 'thats what sells'.
How do you rate
Walking with Dinosaurs or any others like that?. It's a bit dated now but that seemed to be more interested in fleshing out the daily life, from memory anyway.
Vivian on 16/9/2010 at 11:07
Yeah, it looks kinda shonky these days, but the original Walking with Dinosaurs is still pretty much the best dinosaur documentary ever made. It was made by the same studio that do all the (fucking amazing) Attenborough brand 'Life' shows, and they set their sights on doing something similarly classy, realistic and informative for dinosaurs. And then pretty much no-one else followed suite, and the 'walking with' series began a sad decline into the same kind of dreary series of CGI grudge matches the discovery channel funds. 'Walking with Beasts' was pretty good, but by the time you get to 'Walking with Monsters' its fucking hurts to watch. The nadir was when a giant millipede (which is a detrivore, or in standard english EATS DIRT AND DOES NOT HAVE WRESTLING MATCHES) had a wrestling match with a giant amphibian and got impaled on a tree branch. I felt like I was watching primeval.
But yeah, Walking with Dinosaurs is probably why I ended up messing around with dinosaurs as part of my job. 'The Ballad of Big Al' special, in particular, was really really good. Had some fighting, yes, but really tried to make it actually seem like a nature documentary featuring real animals and not hollywood villains. Tocky is far from alone is having the received impression that dinosaurs were twenty foot tall armour plated kiling machines and the entire mesozoic was some kind of blood-drenched carnage pit, and it's mostly down to the flamboyant treatment dinosaurs get in the popular media. Robert Bakker and his incessant hyperbole spewing is ultimately to blame, even if he did make some great contributions to the science once upon a time, bless his stupid fucking hat.
Muzman on 21/9/2010 at 04:14
To be fair, most of the books I had when I was kid were pretty much the same. Nothing but nicely done paintings of the big herbivores eating trees or Tyranosaurus fighting everyone (including dinos way outside its era, I later discovered). Based on some you'd be forgiven for thinking that the earth in the past was a big rocky desert and nothing else (possibly because it's easier to paint). With the dominance of quarries in sci-fi TV shows, desolate rocky places were just the places cool stuff happened it seemed.
Tocky on 22/9/2010 at 03:45
Plus of course the fact some dinos WERE 20 foot tall killing machines and some WERE armored. Sure they were much the same as lions or bears (and some were the same as herd animals) today in having a range of predation and fit into an ecosystem that supported them on thier scale (which was one hell of a lot of calories given the size of some of them) but that's not exactly a glowing example of peaceful harmony. One of the reasons there was an amazing array of defenses was the amazing array of offenses. Life has always been a battle of the fittest but I did not give due credit to reproduction in that battle.
kabatta on 22/9/2010 at 06:18
The sad part here is that the Romanian government won't spend a dime on excavations and that foreigners have to come and dig on their money. Maybe one day somebody will come and excavate the underwater houses in the Black Sea.
