Donald R. Prothero & JP franchise - Sep 17

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. It sucks for various reasons, and when you try to escape it, say, by reading Donald R. Prothero’s collection of dinosaur-related essays, named THE STORY OF THE DINOSAURS IN 25 DISCOVERIES, it sucks even more. Why?

Well, to be different, let us look at the ‘final’, twenty-fifth, discovery – ‘Triceratops’. What is it composed of? The first section – a collection of anecdotes regarding Cope & Marsh and Triceratops’ misadventures with them: Cope called it Agathaumas and assumed that it was a hadrosaur; whereas Marsh at first assumed that it was a giant prehistoric bison at first, (even though bison horns and Triceratops horns are very different). Ha-Ha. How humorous. These days, Cope & Marsh seem to be hybrids of paleontology’s founding fathers and Lewis Carroll’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee from his ‘Alice’ duology. Everyone and their dog know something about Cope and Marsh, especially in their homeland of USA, mainly that they were the first paleontologists there ever, that they participated in ‘Bone Wars’ that were half-grand and half-ridiculous… and this is it. There is even a ‘Weird West’ novel where some Native American shamans begin to animate dinosaur bones slash bring dinosaurs back to life, because the dysfunctional duo and their entourage have intruded on a holy site of some sort or another, ho-ho. Groan. The problem is not about the respect/disrespect of those two deceased worthies, but about the fact that everyone in the US and their dog knows that much about them, and is not impressed about it.

…Except maybe for the current POTUS and the rest of the D.C. crowd. There is a political cartoon on the DA site that depicts the two parties as flies that crawl over a chop of meat that is the country of USA. Frankly, it speaks to me.

‘Triceratops’ the chapter’s opening salvo begins with reused and recycled material that is on par of AoS & MCU reusing and recycling Hydra no matter what. They seem to be replacing them with the Kree in Spider-Man II, but then real life happened, apparently, somebody got scared or something, and Hydra is coming back instead, just because. The Disney/Marvel juggernaut does not do explanations; it just does whatever it wants. This attitude has aggravated the SW fans, cough, and so now that faction of the juggernaut is trying to win them back by SW comics, that these days contain various mini-essays about this or that SW character. Sigh. In today’s Western society, what is sauce for the goose-comics may not be sauce for gander-movies; the SW comics themselves aren’t exactly selling like hot cakes; maybe the upcoming ‘Mandalorian’ series, set in the era of the rising First Order, may do a better job – we’ll have to wait and see.

After the Cope & Marsh anecdote of the chapter, Mr. Prothero went into the biography of another prominent paleontologist – Mr. Hatcher, John Bell. And immediately the Triceratops angle of the chapter began to suffer, as the deceased was not just about the old three-horned face, but went all over the place, including Patagonia, to dig for extinct mammal fossils there. Where is the Triceratops?

In the historical anecdotes and vignettes, of course! Marsh was trying to write a monography on Triceratops and died; Hatcher picked up the slack and also died; it was up to Mr. Swann Lull to finish it. How exciting! …If you did not know about any of this thing, of course, but… However, these days the Western society is becoming increasingly stratified, and in case of paleontology, you either have heard it all before and are not impressed because Mr. Prothero is recycling the same old chestnuts, or you have not heard this before because you do not care about this, and therefore are not impressed for that reason instead. You can hit an owl with a stump, you can hit a stump with an owl, the end result is all the same: the stump is unaffected, the owl definitely is. Mr. Prothero? Your actual readers are your owl. Your essay collections are the stump.

…From the biography of Hatcher, where the Triceratops came and went, we go onto the third part of the chapter, which describes the Triceratops in general, from a biological/paleontological P.O.V., and again, it is all generic, it is basically a lite paraphrase of Wikipedia info. When in the 1970s USSR Nikolai Plavilshchikov released his book ‘Homunculus’, which was a collection of biographies of various scientists from the 17^th century to pre-revolutionary (and WWI) Europe and Russia, it was basically the same thing. Just with the emphasis not on dinosaurs, but on life sciences and scientists, and it is a more coherent book because it doesn’t try to combine dinosaurs with life histories of people in a medium of vignettes and anecdotes released as essays – no, it’s just a collection of vignettes and anecdotes, released at a time when Wikipedia and the Internet didn’t exist, (especially in the USSR), and as such ‘Homunculus’ came across, at least initially, as more original, even though the lay-out was the same – minimum text with maximum illustrations. Just no Wikimedia commons unlike the ’25 Discoveries’… because they did not exist of course, but we are not talking about Plavilshchikov here, but about Mr. Prothero. Did he skim on the Wikipedia? Oh yes he did, with ‘skim’ being the key word: as he is talking about Triceratops on the recent media, he talks about such pieces as – Walking with Dinosaurs. The horned dinosaurs in WWD were actually Torosaurus. In ’25 Discoveries’ you get the feeling that Mr. Prothero adheres to the theory that states that Torosaurus and Triceratops are two different dinosaurs, so why the conflation and confusion regarding the horned dinosaurs in WWD? There’s even ‘The Complete Guide…’ made by Impossible Pictures, the same company that made WWD, that succinctly describes Torosaurus and shows several photo stills of this bull lizard.

…Oh wait, there was a single dead Triceratops in WWD, as opposed to all the live Torosaurus. Nice eyes, Legolas, great generalization! What is next?

Mentions of the Jurassic Park franchise in all of its’ incarnations. The problem is that in JP3 there were no horned dinosaurs, especially in main roles, and neither were they in the first JW movie. Why did Mr. Prothero include those two movies? Because he was just skimming through the Wiki looking for Triceratops info and got complacent? Because just as Marsh (in the ‘Triceratops’ chapter) was putting his name onto his assistants’ work, so does Prothero have the ghost writers do all the work for him, and one of them decided ‘to stick it to the man’? Because Mr. Prothero knows that in the modern Western, (especially American and Canadian) society books aren’t really bought and/or read anymore, and his publication of ’25 discoveries’ and other books is just to stoke his own ego and to demonstrate to his friends, enemies, rivals and so on that he can afford to do this on his salary of ‘a paleontology and geology researcher, teacher and author’? Who knows… Which is where ‘Jurassic World Evolution’ comes in. Several weeks ago, it released the Nasutoceratops species profile, and began to look around for information sources beyond the Wikipedia about this dinosaur, and ’25 discoveries’ supposedly had it.

Only they do not. The only mention of the dinosaur in question is the author’s photo of the ‘family tree of ceratopsians at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City’. I have no idea what Mr. Prothero, his publisher, and the rest of the team were sinking, but the photo isn’t just black-and-white, isn’t just ‘meh’ in quality, but also made at such an angle that it is even harder to see and distinguish all of the skulls in the photo, let alone see what number goes with what skull. Did Mr. Prothero even get permission to photograph this ‘family tree’ or did he just photoshoot it once on the sly and got the hell out of there?.. However, we digress. What was the point, again?

…That JW: BBR, at its’ 8 to 9 minutes in length is precisely the dinosaur movie we deserve. Let us break it into acts. Act I – we meet the Motorhouse family. The actors are credited post-movie, aye, but their roles have no names, they are functions rather than people, apparently. They are shown to be your typical American family, racially diverse and woke, and yes, it is a double-edged sword of itself: when the movie is good, such as ‘Spider-Man II’, being woke makes it better; when the movie is bad, as it was in ‘Dark Phoenix 2019’, then wokeness will only make it worse. In BBR, the plot is so brief – the feature film itself is under 10 minutes, remember? – that it doesn’t matter whether or not this family is nuclear, composite, are its’ members WASPs or POCs – all it matters is that they saw a struggle of dinosaurs, then a carnivorous dinosaur attacked them, and they survived. The end. BBR has all the main characters of a JP franchise movie: dinosaurs & humans, and all the main themes of a JP franchise movie: dinosaur attack, human survival of the dinosaur attack, and human family issues. The only theme missing is the human corporate greed, (but then again, the JP3 film lacked it too), and the entire human mad science creating dinosaurs. JP3 film did not have it either, so JW: BBR actually does not stand out there either. What was the main message of the JP novels, especially the initial one? Life finds a way. This is what the novel version of Ian Malcolm, especially in the first novel, was talking about, however long-windedly and roundaboutedly. Everything else was just dressing, and the BBR post-credits scenes show precisely that. …The final scenes of JW: FK do that too, so no ground-breaking new achieves here in BBR either. The JP franchise goes round and round in circles, as does MCU’s AoS, for comparison, only AoS was doing it for longer and more continuously, proportionally speaking, therefore it is more obvious.

…And then we come to the Nasutoceratops. Whereas ‘Big Al’ had been a fan favorite of the American public for a long time, for a while it was second only to the Tyrannosaurus Rex as the best and most known North American carnivorous dinosaur, Nasutoceratops has been introduced to the general populace by the paleontologists only in 2013. Right now, it’s fall 2019, so let assume that people have known about the Nasutoceratops under 7 years. That’s not that long, so the fact that this dinosaur received several minutes of pure film footage is remarkable; yes, it’s a feature film of JP franchise and the Nasutoceratops’ role could’ve been taken over by any of its’ featured cousins, such as the aforementioned Triceratops or Sinoceratops – but it didn’t. JW: BBR and the rest of the JP franchise actually did something new, whereas Mr. Prothero in his ’25 discoveries’ went with the tried, tested, and old – Triceratops and Protoceratops, for example. Yes, Protoceratops fossils were possibly one source of inspiration for the griffin myth, this was acknowledged at least from the 1990s, if not earlier – is Mr. Prothero putting a brand new image for that story? No, not really – the bigger half of the 24^th chapter is about the Protoceratops and its’ discovery, and the rest is about Psittacosaurus, both tried and true dinosaurs, well known to the public. Unlike the JP franchise, Mr. Prothero is not about to talk about the brand new, but about the really old and well known – and in the last part of the 25^th chapter, Einiosaurus supposedly had a thick bony boss instead of a horn, just as Pachyrhinosaurus did.

…Einiosaurus – and this was established for a while – had a nasal horn and it jutting upwards and forwards like a horizontal hook or a sickle, whereas most horned dinosaurs had a horn that jutted either straight upwards, as in case of Monoclonius and Styracosaurus, or at an angle, as in case of Triceratops and Torosaurus. It is Nasutoceratops that actually lacks a nasal horn, and it is an established fact by now, so either Mr. Prothero has confused it and Einiosaurus, or there is some other gaffe. Ouch.

Let me start to wind down my rant. In the introduction to his ’25 discoveries’, Mr. Prothero may wax poetic about us living in the dinosaur renaissance. He is echoing the language used in the intro to Planet Dinosaur mini-series, (aired in 2011), but that is not the point. The point is that he, and the rest of the official paleontological world, are going around in circles, not unlike the rest of the Western/American society, going for old reliable while presenting them as brand new with nary an effort – and what effort there is, echoes directly back to 1970s and 80s, when the ‘dinosaur renaissance’ truly began in the first main mass media – printed books. These days printed media is decreasing in popularity, but officially, it is still going strong, and Mr. Prothero, at least, is trying to get his piece of happiness by publishing all sort of essay collections – but this is not the point. The point is that the entertainment sector of the Western/American mass media is being the pioneer here, with the official science lagging behind. That is just a sad state of affairs, people!

…And this is it for now; see you all soon!

Battle of Big Rock - Sep 16

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, just ask the Saudis and the US allies, given how they have just lived through possibly one of the worst attacks on their oil fields…since WWII, maybe. So far, the suspect is supposedly Iran, which raises the question: are we at the start of WWIII? Just like the RF, Iran has had enough of the US hegemony, which grows steadily weaker ever since the US failure in Libya, (and now there are supposedly Russian mercenaries too – double ouch), while its’ European allies squabble with each other over the Brexit. Seriously, people, flip a coin – if it lands on one side, U.K. leaves, period, if it lands on the other – it stays, the end. Kind of like the end of the US/Israel hegemony in Middle East, apparently, as Iran isn’t backing down from a fight with the US and its’ allies anymore. When the G7 meeting took place earlier this year, everybody in the West (and their pro-West allies elsewhere) were extremely happy that Putin had not been there, but a certain high-ranking political representative of Iran was. Where are they now, those wise men and women of statecraft? Clearly, Tehran is just as hostile towards the West as Moscow is, if not more, so where does it leave the leaders of G7 and their allies?

…Yeah, with the Donald in the role of POTUS and a rising crescendo of political hysteria in general in the US, as the elections are coming closer, D.C. party lines are further apart than ever, and no idea of where to go next. If the Saudi Arabia falls before Iran, things will be very bad; the relationship between the two nations had been strained ever since the prophet Muhammed arose in the desert, united the formerly divided Arabian tribes and they conquered… yes, eventually, the Byzantine Christian empire, (what was left of it, eventually), despite the West’s interference, cough, but also the Persian empire of Zoroastrians, the nation that would in modern times become Iran. Now, it seems, the descendants of them Persians are about to unleash some karmic whoop-ass on the descendants of Muhammed’s devotees at last. Oh dear. Moreover, no one can blame it on Putin and the rest of RF either. Ouch.

…Well, this is depressing, so let us try to talk about something – JW ‘Battle of Big Rock’, perhaps? First, though, an honorary mention of AoS and MCU: they are bringing Hydra back officially. And to quote Ambroise Bierce, author and major in the US army (we are talking the American Civil War here of the 19^th century), ‘Why’? In the CA: CW movie Hydra was supposedly gone for good; yes, it came almost on every season of AoS, but AoS’ own relationship with MCU had plenty of problems; and moreover, the second Spider-Man movie seemed to be setting up the Kree as MCU’s next main villains, not Hydra, (which had been mostly human in the MCU so far).

If Hydra is coming back to MCU, this is going to be bad – the first time around it caused a rather nasty split between MCU’s fanbase – whether it was Nazi, or ‘only’ evil. Considering that this version of Hydra is a fictional organization, (rather than a mythical monster, for example), the argument was ridiculous, but there were many bad feelings generated by it until MCU ended Hydra in the CA: CW film. If it brings Hydra back in Phase 4, already burdened with the fallout from Spider-Man’s departure from MCU, as well as the acquiring of the X-Men and the Fantastic Four, then MCU might develop new problems on top of the old ones and that is bad, again.

…There are at least two probable reasons regarding this development. The first is that MCU was going to use the Kree in place of Hydra during Phase 4, as set up by the final scenes of Spider-Man II, (remember?), when Spider-Man left, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four came in, and suddenly MCU got shook up by all the new changes, and people in charge decided to scrap the Kree, go back to the tested and true Hydra just because. Too many changes too soon and Disney/Marvel may not control them. As said above, Hydra was more controversial in MCU than it was assumed, so bringing it back in place of the Kree completely might make the MCU situation even worse, so let’s go for the better option: MCU is going to conflate Hydra with the Kree, and then replace Hydra by the Kree as the Phase 4 unfolds, so the AoS S7 will be the final nail in the Hydra coffin…at least in the mainline MCU. What Disney/Marvel will bring out in place of AoS, (probably the Falcon & Bucky show on Disney plus), and whether it will feature Hydra, is another story. What is next?

The ‘Battle at Big Rock’ JW short movie. About 8 to 9 minutes long, it featured a diverse American family in California as they go on a camping trip in some fictional American national park in California, and get involved with the imported wildlife, as an Allosaurus fights it out with a Nasutoceratops family and then turns upon them. Hit the stop button.

Where to begin? First, in that perfect 20/20 hindsight, the Nasutoceratops profile was released by the Jurassic World Evolution game several weeks before today; if any’s interested, a Nasutoceratops is a cousin of Triceratops, but without the nasal horn and with a notable different muzzle from its’ much more famous cousin. Allosaurus, on the other hand, is a well-established dinosaur among paleontologists, dinosaur fans, and ordinary people; for a while, it was second only to Tyrannosaurus in its’ popularity in the West, but now it has been pushed back in favor of its’ cousins, dinosaurs like Carcharodontosaurus and Giganotosaurus, but it is still prominent. In BBR, however, it was hopelessly outmatched; no offense to all of the Big Al fans out there, but unlike Tyrannosaurus, who had evolved precisely for this sort of thing – to bite through bone and crush the reinforced skulls and frills of horned dinosaurs, (among other things), Allosaurus’ teeth and jaws were designed for shearing flesh of giant sauropods – just look at ‘Ballad of Big Al’, for example of the “Walking with…” series. When facing a dinosaur like the Nasutoceratops, Big Al was out of his depths.

…Yes, the Nasutoceratops was most certainly not in any of the franchise’s movies so far; in the last JW movie it was the Sinoceratops instead, a different Triceratops cousin. It had no brow horns, but a prominent nasal horn instead – essentially, a reversal of the Nasutoceratops’ arrangement. In the last JW movie, it fought a Carnotaurus; why the people of the JP franchise decided to use an Allosaurus this time is anyone’s guess. Maybe they were trying to change the dressings on what was basically a rehash of the JW: FK Carnotaurus vs. Sinoceratops fight? It is still anyone’s guess…

As for the human element, here we come to the second JP movie, ‘The Lost World’. This is the film in the franchise that the BBR resembles the most. Primarily, its’ second act, when Big Al goes for the family in the trailer is reminiscent of the scene in ‘The Lost World’, where Ian Malcolm and Sarah Harding are treating the juvenile Tyrannosaurus in their trailer, and its’ parents begin to object. As it happens in those movies, some of Malcolm and Harding’s entourage got eaten, but they and Malcolm’s daughter, who’s an Afro-American herself, just like the father and daughter in BBR – making, her, Malcolm and Sarah something of a mixed family themselves – survive.

Again, both Tyrannosaurus and Carnotaurus make much better dinosaurs for this sort of smash and grab attack – they both evolved for strength, in two different ways but along similar evolutionary lines, whereas Big Al was proportionally a more gracile hunter among the giant dinosaurs. (Plus, at 9 m in length on average, it was smaller than the Tyrannosaurus was, even if still bigger than the Carnotaurus). It really was not designed for this sort of punishment – being gored and tossed by the Nasutoceratops’ parents, and then being shocked, stabbed, shot and so on by the humans. No wonder that it had enough and just left in the end – and this brings us back to people: where did they go?

The obvious answer would be that they got eaten, but this is wrong: a solitary Allosaurus is precisely the wrong theropod dinosaur to eat several families of humans without making a noise. This dinosaur – and the rest of its’ carnosaur cousins – were pack hunters, working together to bring down giant sauropods, such as Diplodocus and Argentinosaurus, (to use the Impossible Pictures’ examples). When faced with several smaller prey items, an Allosaurus just did not have the mental hardware to deal with them – remember ‘The Ballad of Big Al’? The titular character’s downfall came when he tried to attack a herd of smaller, human-sized dinosaurs – Dryosaurs’ or Othnielias: Big Al chased them, they scattered, Big Al didn’t catch anyone, and actually broke one of his toes, and the fracture eventually got infested and he died. His relative in BBR did better – he didn’t die at the end of this short feature film, but he wasn’t doing very well either… but what about the humans? What happened to them, Greg and co.? The better option is that they got swallowed by a plot hole, but let us go with the other possibility: the Nasutoceratops family scared them away, and the main characters – actually, the only characters, you can say – just did not hear it due to their own noise. Ok, and this brings us to the ‘credit scenes’ and ‘The Lost World’.

Sure, one of the scenes featured a pterosaur eating a white dove released at a wedding and another one the Mosasaur eating a great white shark. Both of those animals escaped from the island and the Lockwood manor in the last movie, (though does it mean that the Mosasaur has reached South Africa or Australia by now, because that is where great white sharks and sea lions live these days; they also live in California, but the island was not off the American west coast, I think, so South Africa & Australia are more realistic here, ironically, but we digress). However, the other two short scenes featured, firstly, a girl chased and attacked by several compys. The same thing happened in the opening of ‘The Lost World’ film, which, in turn, were inspired by the opening scenes of the JP novel. (Read it). And secondly, we have a Stegosaurus attacking a car – again, we are talking ‘The Lost World’ here, where a different Stegosaurus attacked Sarah Harding. What does it all add up to, I have no idea, except that it is evidence that the franchise has lost steam: BBR is a rehash of ‘The Lost World’, the second JP movie, with some ‘Fallen Kingdom’ elements thrown into the mix. Put otherwise, and this is a rehash equal to some of the worst AoS/MCU rehashes, such as the return of Hydra, talked above. Where will this old rotten chestnut take MCU, (AoS is ending in 2020 for good now), is unknown, but proportionally, MCU is much more durable than the JP franchise; it is more likely to survive its’ bad decisions than the JP franchise – its’. Yes, the next JW movie is supposed to end this trilogy, but if it goes out with a whimper, it might be the end of the JP franchise for good, and I hope that that never happens…

…Well, this is it for now; see you all soon!