Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and your family, alongside
you, are stuck right in the middle of it, and if you do not try to fight- do
not want to fight- then your life sucks – see before. Now onto the show?
Sadly, because real life sucks, we are all stuck inside, not
just because the weather was nasty all night and all morning, but because
COVID-19 continues… just continues. So, to do something about anything and to
stop the fighting, I got into the 2001 film, ‘When Dinosaurs Roamed America’,
and so, on this particular day, we will be talking about the Apatosaurus.
Why? Because of the Brontosaurus. The two names and the two
dinos had a very tangled relationship – first one name/species was on top, then
the other, until, finally, from 2015 onwards to the present it was described
that Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus were two different genera, albeit the ones
who were the closest relatives to each other, (with Diplodocus and the
diplodocids being the next closest). What next?
Well, what was WDRA? For the beginning of the 21st
century it was very impressive, a movie stitched together out of five segments,
something of a responsa to the BBC’s WWD, released in 1999. Only, whereas the
U.K. released a six-part mini-series, (re-released and re-edited a couple of
times in the future), the US released – in this case – a single film, each one
dealing with a separate time in the Mesozoic. The Apatosaurus appeared in the
Late Jurassic segment, (aka 150 MYA), and after the Tyrannosaurus, was perhaps
the movie’s biggest showpiece.
Here is the punchline: in each of the five segments, the
movie’s scriptwriters tried to make a coherent story, but it was a mixed bag;
the Early Jurassic bit was especially lackluster, but the Late Jurassic? It was
much better.
Well, for one thing, the Late Jurassic segment had much more
dinosaurs to work with than the Early Jurassic segment did. The latter only had
Dilophosaurus (yes, that one), Megapnosaurus, (another carnivore, which may
have been related to Dilophosaurus), and Anchisaurus – a prosauropod, a more
gracile and smaller version of Plateosaurus that appeared at the end of the
first episode of WWD, (‘New Blood’). And WDRA used the Anchisaurus as a
springboard to introduce its’ sauropods – the already-mentioned Apatosaurus and
the Camarasaurus.
…It is also worthwhile to mention that WDRA was good enough
to depict the two sauropods differently from each other – Apatosaurus might be
longer, but Camarasaurus is taller. Moreover, to be honest, sauropod dinosaurs came
in three main varieties: those that were long, such as Diplodocus and
Apatosaurus; those that were tall, such as Camarasaurus and Brachiosaurus; and
those that were just large, such as Argentinosaurus and the rest of the
titanosaur sauropods. …Ok, but what about WDRA?
Well, if we get back to WDRA and its’ Late Jurassic segment,
then it features more dinosaurs than just the two sauropods, including the
already mentioned dinosaurs – Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus – and the
much smaller Dryosaurus; Dryosaurus was a much smaller bird-hipped dinosaur,
one that get eaten by a Ceratosaurus, which got killed by an Allosaurus later.
Whether or not this happened in real life no one knows, but I suspect that this
was the inspiration behind one of JFC’s episode, where an Allosaurus fought and
killed a couple of Ceratosaurs. Another segment, one where an Allosaurus pack
harasses an Apatosaurus herd and eventually finishes off a hurt sauropod,
inspired – or influenced an episode in the ‘Dinosaur Planet’ mini-series, named
‘Alpha’s Egg’. It is all interactive, baby!..
That said, WDRA was a generally good movie, complete with ‘talking
scientist heads’ interrupting the dino action, and semi-interactive CGI
graphics, helping to get the point across. It was very impressive, truly,
especially for the year 2001. It had certainly lifted my spirits up, however
briefly as well, COVID-19 or not, and that is it.
…Well, this is it for now – see you all soon.
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