Quarantine entry #4 - March 25

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and yes, I have written about the STVI episode earlier in my blog’s history, and roughly in the same vein. Yes, that is my bad, and no, you cannot really invent my themes and plots about DW episodes, especially if you are talking about them one at a time. So, let us put DW aside, and talk about another blast from the past – ‘Jurassic Fight Club’.

This was a weird one. It was like AFO, but with (mostly) dinosaurs and some other prehistoric animals as well. Not unlike AFO, it authentically tried not just to entertain, but also to educate, or at least – to inform, via CGI, true, but all of AFO’s showdowns were done in CGI too, so you cannot blame JFC for CGI, (aside from the obvious reasons, of course).

What can JFC be blamed for? Good question and part of it is the amateur plot – literally. Somehow, all of JFC’s episodes came down to two CIG dinosaurs, (generally speaking), fighting each other. There was variation too, as it was in the fourth episode, where there were four dino species, rather than the usual two.

As it was, the episode began with a Stegosaurus mother and child going down to a semi-dry lake to drink during a drought and became stuck in the mud. Pause. Here is my true subject for today’s entry:

Stegosaurus. It was a remarkable dinosaur. It is one of the thyreophores, dinosaurs with armored backs and armed tails, and Stegosaurus was the best of the Jurassic variety – the stegosaurids, (duh!). The intriguing part here is that most of the stegosaurids were Asian dinosaurs; there were quite a few dinosaur families that did originate in Asia during the Jurassic, but then moved to North America in the early Cretaceous and flourished there instead. Not so the stegosaurids, however – none of them really made it into Cretaceous, as they were outcompeted by their ankylosaur cousins and died-out… The point is that aside from Stegosaurus, Kentrosaurus, and the much more obscure Hesperosaurus, all of the stegosaurids remained in Asia.

…Yes, technically speaking, during the Jurassic, Eurasia and North America belonged to a single continent – Laurasia, while Africa and South America and Australia formed the second continent – Gondwana. Nevertheless, not only did Stegosaurus was practically the only stegosaurid dinosaur to end up in North America rather than Asia, but its’ cousin Kentrosaurus was also pretty much the only stegosaurid dinosaur that ended up in both Europe and Africa rather than Asia. Weird, eh?

Speaking of Kentrosaurus and Stegosaurus, the two were not too closely related to each other, and they even looked differently: Stegosaurus had more of its’ trademark diamond-shaped plates on its back, while Kentrosaurus had more spikes, and on average was smaller than Stegosaurus was; Stegosaurus wasn’t only one of the last stegosaurids, but it was the biggest – about 9 m in length. Kentrosaurus was notably smaller than that. Pause.

…While the stegosaurid species differed from each other by having differently shaped plates and spikes on their backs, all of them had thagomizers – tail spikes, very large and sharp ones. They were their primary weapons, though unlike the dinosaur Fantasia segment, Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus never met – Stegosaurus lived in the end of the Jurassic, while T-Rex – at the very end of the Cretaceous, just before all the non-avian dinosaurs died out. What next?

Well, who would have won if T-Rex went against Stegosaurus? Hard to tell. Unlike the theropods that co-existed with Stegosaurus, namely Allosaurus and Ceratosaurus, Tyrannosaurus’ teeth and jaws evolved not to slice flesh, but to crash bone, it evolved to go against such dinosaurs as Ankylosaurus, whose arms and armor were superior to Stegosaurus, but on the other hand, Tyrannosaurus and its relatives (such as Tarbosaurus) did die after fighting Ankylosaurus and its relatives, (such as Tarchia).

Now, Ankylosaurus’, Tarchia’s and co. tails were designed to smash bone rather than to pierce flesh, as Stegosaurus’, Kentrosaurus’ and co.’s tails did, but that is something of a semantics issue – which sort of damage would be worse? My point exactly, so Fantasia is unrealistic because of that angle too – after a couple of slaps in the face, Tyrannosaurus would lose enthusiasm, as well as blood and other parts, and back down. Of course, if it did get a good grip with its’ deadly jaws and teeth, Stegosaurus was dead for certain, but in Fantasia we had a long, drawn-out fight, which is a different situation.

And back in ‘JFC’, the situation was different once more: Ma Stegosaurus and her offspring, (there’s no indication whatsoever, that Stegosaurus had parent-child bond; other dinosaur species did, but not Stegosaurus and its’ closest relatives) became stuck in the mud, where a Ceratosaurus ate them, and an Allosaurus stepped on them, and then they died from bloodloss and dehydration, but not before killing one of the Allosaurus with its’ tail spikes.

…And how do we know all of this to be true? We do not; it is all speculation. Dinosaur George Blasing seemed honest enough in his enthusiasm in the show, but apparently, this was not enough – ‘JFC’ ended after one season and twelve episodes, but that is another story…

This is it for now – see you all soon!