Quarantine entry #10 - March 31

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and sometimes it sucks because of something that you have done – everything was more or less fine before, and then you do something stupid, and clog one of the sinks in your home. Idiot. Yeah, talking about dinosaurs is just what you need – not. End irony. Today I got to revisit another miniseries, called ‘Beast Legends’. It consisted of one six-episode season and was never rebooted. Why?

Well, for one thing, it was supposed to be a reboot by itself – of MonsterQuest, another show that ended a long time ago. MonsterQuest itself raises mixed feelings in my chest – it was a show about all sorts of cryptids; an episode would begin with a CGI depiction of the cryptid in question – an alien, a giant shark, Chupacabra, and beyond – and then for the next hour or so a group of experts would go someplace where the cryptid in question was seen most recently, and do everything in their power as to not to find anything at all that would upend the status quo. They would not just laze around, but everything they did was so perfunctory and minimal that it became evident eventually that they were just killing time there and making it look convincing.

By contrast, ‘River Monsters’, which also got cancelled, never had JW go for the minimal – rather, JW did his best to be, well, JW, and to sell his show as best as he could – which was pretty damn good. Sadly, in the latter seasons, ‘River Monsters’ jumped a shark that had little in common with real-life fish…and so I lost interest in it, sadly… Where do ‘Beast Legends’ fit?

They never did. Rather, each episode was dedicated to recreating one or another mythical monster – whether a potential cryptid, like the kraken or the Vietnamese analogue of a Yeti, or a pure myth, such as the gryphon episode. Why? Because it was the most well delivered. However, the reason as to why it was the most well-delivered was because the biggest part of the BL’s budget went into it, leaving the last two episodes, dedicated to the Native American thunderbird and a dragon, (eh, maybe more about it later), with much less cash. I am not saying that BL blew its’ budget on the gryphon episode, (named the ‘Winged Lion’, if I remember correctly), leaving the last two episodes with much less cash. Budget issues are important issues in production of TV series and movies, and it may be why BL vanished after a single season slash six episodes. It just never had a defined audience, a defined niche for itself. The gryphon episode was quite fun to watch though. Anything else?

Sadly, not. Unlike the dragon, which remains a popular mainstay in fantasy, the gryphon…also does, but is more secondary and less popular than the dragon is by far. Pity, because it is an impressive-looking mythical monster. And yes, part of the reason as to why I have watched the gryphon episode of BL is because we’ve talked about the Protoceratops in the past, and its’ fossils may’ve been a partial inspiration behind the gryphon myth, so I thought that I should mention this dino, (a distant cousin of the more famous Triceratops, remember?).

Another bit of trivia is that the gryphon was a primarily Middle Eastern s (Asian) mythical monster (yes, the Ancient Greeks and Romans had adopted it, but only slight), unlike the dragon, which was found on all continents, except for maybe Australia and New Zealand, and even there are some dragon-like creatures to be found in their myths… Gryphon and its relative the hippogriff could never top that.

…Yes, both gryphons and hippogriffs were featured in the MLP: FIM cartoon, but if the gryphons were depicted quite canonically, then the hippogriffs were shown to be shapeshifters of sorts, shifting between a bird-horse and a fish-horse mode, with the latter being named the hippocampus instead. 

Yeah, someone in MLP: FIM had hit the obscure mythical monsters quite hard, which brings us back to the gryphons – kind of. In one of the episodes, the viewers saw some sort of a one-eyed monster harassing the gryphons – it was supposedly an Arimaspian. In real life, the Arimaspians were a race of one-eyed humanoids who constantly fought with the gryphons over gold, which the gryphons hoarded just as the dragons did. Fair enough, though I do not know as to why the Arimaspians were not classified as just variant Cyclopes, but the MLP: FIM’s Arimaspian had distinctly goat- or ram-like features, especially the horns. This, again, implies, that the final season’s Discord-as-Grogar story arc was the result of some sort of a reboot, just a behind the scenes one. Well, fair enough, this cartoon incarnation of MLP: FIM is over now, and we just got the last bits to pick over in the form of various comics and what not. Anything else?

Nothing, save that I just might be turning back to DW after all this Middle East discussion that we did in regards to the gryphon. (Yes, the name can be spelled in several ways in the English language and all are correct. Live with it). Consequently, this is it for now, see you all soon!

Quarantine entry #9 - March 30

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and the weather only makes it worse. So, let us try to turn to something else – say, to the previously mentioned movie, ‘When Dinosaurs Roamed America’. This time, we will be talking about the Late Cretaceous segment, (66 MYA, no duh), though not really because of the T-Rex, but because of its’ most known arch nemesis, the Triceratops.

The good old ‘Three-Horned Face’ is, of course, almost as well established in popular mass media, as the Tyrannosaurus itself is. Its’ iconic, well, three-horned face is known even to absolute ignoramuses of the dino world, and justly so – it is just that well recognizable, with its’ three horns, (of various sizes), and its’ parrot-like beak.

A note on those horns, of course – Triceratops belonged to the branch of the ceratopsid family that had large brow horns and small nasal horns, such as the already mentioned Triceratops and Torosaurus. The second branch usually had large nasal horns, but their brow horns were small or even absent, as in case of Monoclonius or Styracosaurus. On top of this, there were other, more primitive ceratopsians, often completely hornless, such as the previously discussed Protoceratops – such dinosaurs had frills and beaks, but no horns – the horns were a later addition.

Just as the other iconic dinosaurs of the Cretaceous, the ceratopsids appeared during the Jurassic: they were small, bipedal dinosaurs with beaks rather than jaws and with small frills at the back of their heads – features that lasted until the end of the Mesozoic, becoming only more and more derived.

Did these frills, not to mention horns, help against such carnivores as Tyrannosaurus Rex and Dakotasaurus? No more so than the modern horns and antlers help against wolves, hyenas, big cats and/or bears. Many of the modern herbivores sport such headgear… but it works mostly in inner species’ conflicts, between the males in mating fights, and against the carnivores…it is a mixed bag.

If taken by itself, however, Triceratops appears to be a very formidable dinosaur, the Late Cretaceous’ answer to the rhinoceros, or at least the African buffalo – animals that can fight-off even the modern African lions, (sometimes), but not because of their horns, but because of their physical strength. Their horns, (or antlers, as in case of the moose and elk), are only extensions of their physical strength, in a manner of speaking.

Remember, when we discussed the two-part series called ‘The Truth about the Killer Dinosaurs’? The first episode was centered precisely on the T-Rex vs. Triceratops conflict, and during this episode, it was established that Triceratops could fight-off and even kill a T-Rex, if it was a fair fight. And if it wasn’t?

Well, both WDRA and WWD avoided the entire T-Rex vs. Triceratops conflict entirely – in WWD, we see a single Triceratops that is already dead, probably from the T-Rex in question, but there are always versions; and in WDRA, a Tyrannosaurus tried to harass a Triceratops herd, but failed. It probably happened back in the Cretaceous. Instead, in both WWD and WDRA, the Tyrannosaurs went after the duck-billed hadrosaurs instead, (i.e. the Anatotian), with much more success, and this is where we return to the modern period – in WDRA, Tyrannosaurs’ hunted in a family pack, not unlike how modern lions of Africa and Asia do. Did that happen?

Hard to say. JFC once claimed that Tyrannosaurus Rex was not quite as smart as a modern house cat is, but considering that the house cats have largely taken over our houses, this might be an underestimation of the house cats instead. On the other hand, not only tyrannosaurid dinosaurs were found in mass burials, but also the more basic carnosaurs, (such as Giganotosaurus and Mapusaurus), as well. Were they as smart as the modern lions are? Probably not, certainly mammalian and reptilian brains are wired different for all sorts of anatomical reasons- pause. Dinosaurs, especially theropod dinosaurs – tyrannosaurs, carnosaurs, raptors, etc. – were closer to birds than to snakes and lizards, for comparison.

…True, but among the modern raptors, aka birds of prey, (which are a mixed bag themselves, but let us ignore this for now), only the Harris’ hawk of North America hunts in packs/family groups. The true social hunters among the modern birds are the corvids, mostly various crows and magpies, (the bigger ravens are more solitary instead). Were the tyrannosaurs, carnosaurs, raptors, etc. as smart as the modern crows and ravens, (which are among the smartest modern birds, period)? So far, no one has asked this question or answered it. Anything else?

And what about the Triceratops itself? Well, ‘The Truth’ established that Tyrannosaurus Rex was actually quite dumb, and Triceratops even dumber. Therefore, it is rather doubtful that Triceratops was able to launch defensive maneuvers in the manner of, say, modern wildebeest or reindeer…or that the Tyrannosaurus could launch offensive maneuvers as the modern lions, spotted hyenas, grey wolves and wild dogs do. Still, they probably had something, and not all fights were only one on one either. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, I would bet. Anything else?

Regrettably, yeah. These days, real life is not very condoning to long discussions, and I think that I have largely exhausted my interest in dinosaurs, at least for the next day or so. Therefore – this is it for now. I will see you all soon!

JW: Motion comics part 2 - Dec 7

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. The American government, true, seems to be putting their own spin on it with the impeachment that is authentically impotent; the best you can hope is that Pelosi never implemented it but for the plan that it will keep the Democratic party from turning upon each other and fracturing instead, but won’t know for quite a while yet. On with the show?

Rather, with the ‘motion comic’ – recently the JW franchise released the second installment of its’ motion comic. In it, we meet the rest of the journalist’s family – we are talking the same woman from part 1 – Rebecca Ryan – and learn that her husband, in particular, is working in the U.S. Wildlife department. What is so special about that? This is a good question, because as far as character development aspects of this motion comic go, they are weak. So far, this motion comic is an exposition dump, showing various interactions of humans with dinosaurs, sea reptiles and pterosaurs – nothing more. It is a variant on the closing scenes of both the second JW film and the BBR short feature – humans are interacting with the returned prehistoric beasts of the Mesozoic and so far, there is a national alert and what else have you. The mother of the family – Rebecca seems to be sceptical of this whole hysteria for some reason, but we never see it in this installment, because it focused on the still-nameless father of the family, and he encounters a couple of fighting dinosaurs on his own. (The rest of his family is elsewhere, on the route to school or wherever). I.e., it is less of an exposition dump and more of a shock-and-awe dump instead. Yay!

Ok, let us talk about dinosaurs. So far, from BBR onwards, humans are little more than cardboard features: the family in BBR did not even have names; as I said before, the cast certainly has names and you could see them in the credits, but the characters – nope. The first installment of the motion comic actually had named human characters – Rebecca Ryan, the journalist mother of the family – and Beau, the newspaperman from Hawaii – but here no go. That is somewhat weak and dehumanizing, so let us try to focus on dinosaurs instead. The news showed us a pteranodon harassing an airplane, (probably because it never seen one before back in Isla Nublar), a pack of compys’ running around someone’s backyard, and a pair of boy scouts encountering a stegosaurus. Again, we have seen variations of these encounters all over the franchise, so let us go for the main event: Mr. Ryan’s encounter with the battling dinos. There are two of them: a Triceratops and an Ankylosaurus, and-

And Ankylosaurus is depicted incorrectly. Sigh. Since there are no professional paleontologists in our audience, let us just go with the statement that there were two main groups of armored dinosaurs: the Jurassic stegosaurs and the Cretaceous ankylosaurs. Clear? If it is, let us move onto the team Cretaceous in particular. It was also divided into two main groups: one that had clubbed tails and one that does not.

Back in 1999, Impossible Pictures™ released the ‘Walking with Dinosaurs’ mini-series. The final episode featured an Ankylosaurus – several of them. It had a tail club, and its’ scuted armor was relatively smooth, almost like that of an armadillo, for example. However, in the fourth episode of WWD, there was another dinosaur – Polacanthus – that was more closely related to Ankylosaurus than to Stegosaurus, but it had no tail club, and its body armor was much less smooth and spikier. It belonged to the nodosaur branch of the Cretaceous armored dinosaurs.

Yes, actually, the Polacanthus is a bad example of a nodosaur – the nodosaur branch of the Cretaceous armored dinosaurs were studied, and are known, much less than their ankylosaur cousins were, but basically? Ankylosaurs had tail clubs and small spikes on their body armor, if any. Nodosaurs had no tail clubs, but their body armor was much more formidable looking. The armored dinosaur that featured in JW’s second motion comic had both notable body spikes and a tail club, making it a chimera.

Pause. Yes, Dr. Wu admitted directly in the first JW film that none of their dinosaurs were authentic; they were homunculi, concocted in the labs by Dr. Wu and his fellows. That is fair, but it also rather undercuts JW’s intended messages – that life finds a way and that people now have to co-exist with the Mesozoic animals. They do not and it does not. Since all of the dinosaurs were initially created in labs, they could have been made incapable of surviving on their own in the wild – in fact, the first JP novel made them so, supposedly: they were incapable of manifesting Lysol and had to take it as a dietary supplement instead. The novel ended with Costa Rica possibly being invaded by a force of animals that needed supply of foods rich in Lysol – beans and chickens – but which were quite independent of surviving on their regardless. Of course, they were raptors too – but we digress. The point is that the rebooted JW franchise could’ve made its’ dinosaurs like this within its’ canon – artificial homunculi that gained independence of their own and which now run amok like a bunch of Frankenstein monsters… period. Instead, we still got a horde of artificial dinosaur-shaped homunculi running the world and no one is acknowledging it.

Is this distinction important? Yes, even though it really should not. The truth is, test-tube animals are still seen as inauthentic, especially within sci-fi genre, and are treated very differently from ‘authentic’ or ‘real life’ animals. TLK, for example, is not a sci-fi movie, even though it features talking animals, for example. The online game ‘Jurassic World Evolution’ actually features official hybrid dinosaurs, made by Dr. Wu, so artificial dinosaurs are JW canon even beyond the I-Rex and the Indoraptor, so why haven’t the American military and/or government try to use someone like Dr. Wu to create some sort of a virus that would target those ‘artificial’ dinosaurs, (all of them, really) and rid the world of them?

…Yes, this probably will not happen – wherever the JW-3 movie will take the narrative for the conclusion, this will not be this, most likely, and for good reasons: artificial viruses are bad. Natural viruses are not much better, but still. That said, given how stupid the American government (and its’ military) are running USA in real life, it would not be too surprising either if they were to make or to do something just as stupid in the upcoming JW-3 movie, (2021). As it is, we will just have to wait for both its’ release and the release of the next JW motion comic installments. Considering that right now we got human characters that are as developed as cardboard cut-outs and dinosaurs that are completely unrealistic, (come on, Ankylosaurus is not obscure, it is almost as well known as the Tricerotops and the T-Rex are), and are executing something that seems to be somewhat reminiscent of 'The Day that the Dinosaurs Died' documentary from the Discovery channel (2010), I'm not keeping my hopes are. ('The Day' has its own flaws, but we'll talk about it some other time).

This is it for now. See you all soon!

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!

Truth about Killer Dinosaurs II - July 13

Now, to conclude the matter on ‘TTAKD’. As it was written in the previous installment, the program already broke the canon by depicting Tyrannosaurs as not being invulnerable and unbeatable – it could be defeated…especially if you were a Triceratops. Other dinosaurs…who knows?

However, the Tyrannosaurus-Triceratops conflict was small fry compared to what the program did to the other ‘killer dinosaur’ – the Velociraptor. Yes, by now, it is accepted that the raptors from ‘JP’ franchise are not ‘real’ but fictional, make-believe animals that just look realistic, like their real-life counterparts could’ve looked like, but back in 2005 this knowledge wasn’t as widespread as it is now; back then the epiphany that the Velociraptors were feathered and were the size of a small turkey – not as big or scaly as they were in the JP franchise.

Later on, by 2010, other raptor species were discovered, especially the Deinonychus and the Utahraptor – more ancient species of raptors, who were much bigger than the Velociraptor was, and less feathered than it, too, (probably).

Now, the feathers and dinosaurs… Yes, birds are dinosaurs and are feathered; yes, the odds that at least some of the non-avian dinosaurs – the raptors, the troodontids, the alvarezsaurids – were also feathered are good; but nowadays paleontologists and paleoartists tend to stick feathers on most of the dinosaurs regardless of any other evidence.

Just compare the skeletons of a Velociraptor and a Tyrannosaurus, for example. Yes, the Velociraptor’s bones are very light, almost bird-like: this was a predator built for speed, not physical power…but Tyrannosaurus was. Built for power, that is. There is no sensible reason to depict it as feathered…yet some scientific programs do just that, (via CGI). God knows why,

Again, birds are dinosaurs – well, theropod dinosaurs, to be more precise. Yet, as the existence of Archaeopteryx shows, the family trees of birds and non-avian theropods (from Composognathus to Tyrannosaurus and co.) have begun to split during the Jurassic, and by the early Cretaceous there already were birds on Earth, just not modern ones. Raptors and their relatives had feathers; some even had wings and could glide (think flying squirrels rather than bats or birds), but they were not birds. Many therapods – spinosaurs, carnosaurs, abelisaurs – were not very bird-like, (including the tyrannosaurs, likely), and this goes double for sauropods and the bird-hipped dinosaurs (whether or not we are talking about a Triceratops or an Ankylosaurus, for example).

End rant, return to the ‘TTAKD’-related discussion. The second part of the program put a Velociraptor against an ankylosaur: not an Ankylosaurus itself, just a general armored dinosaur. For the greater percentage of time, the second part of the program went rather like the first, comparing two dinosaurs…with guest stars: Tarbosaurus and Protoceratops. Tarbosaurus was the Asian version of Tyrannosaurus (in the program – Tyrannosaurus with a different skin color), while Protoceratops was an older, and much smaller, relative of Triceratops (without any brow horns).

Okay, this alone made the second part of ‘TTAKD’ more interesting (and sort-of diverse) than the first. However, the decisive factor were the raptors’ killer claws – according to the program, the raptors did not slice with them – just stabbed, as if they were some strange rapiers (rather than swords). They did not have a cutting edge – just a sharp point, and as such, they were not dangerous to adult ankylosaurs – just to their young.

Okay, this sounds rather anthropomorphic – for all of its flaws, AFO was never anthropomorphic – but compared to the JP franchise, for example, or the JFC show, this is not a really severe case. Yet ‘TTAKD’ was buried…because it broke through the clichés and depicted raptors from a different P.O.V. – not slicers but stabbers. Paleontologists, (and paleoartists), don’t like apocrypha, and while they couldn’t renounce ‘TTAKD’ (you don’t mess with BBC), they probably made sure that ‘TTAKD’ never became mainstream and remained on periphery, replaced by more canonical programs and shows, like JFC. Of course, JFC itself did not last for too long…but that is another story.

For now, let us just say good-bye to ‘TTAKD’, which tried to take over where AFO left and failed, because by the times that the Velociraptor and the ankylosaurs came onto the screen, the AFO format was too tight for the new program, and go and talk about something else.

Truth about Killer Dinosaurs I - July 12

After the entire ‘lion vs. tiger’ debacle, I grew tired of AFO for a while, and decided to look at another classic – ‘The Truth about Killer Dinosaurs’ (TTAKD). It was a two-part TV program of BBC’s, aired back in 2005. In some cases it was known as ‘Dinosaur Face-off’ instead – yeah, the connotations and connections to AFO are not obvious, but they are there.

What was TTAKD about, (if someone has forgotten)? Well, in the first part of the program, the narrator – Bill Oddie – compared and contrasted Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops in a very AFO-like manner too, complete with biomechanical models of the two dinosaurs, and a CGI stimulation of what would, or could, have happened if a Tyrannosaurus and a Triceratops have fought each other. In the more recent dinosaur-related programs (Jurassic Fight Club comes to mind), Tyrannosaurus is often depicted as invincible as it is in the movies (Jurassic Park/Jurassic World franchise), a creature that cannot be stopped by anything else (except for the main hero of the movie, for example).

TTAKD showed that that was not necessarily so; it showed that a Triceratops had a chance to defeat a Tyrannosaurus, especially in a fair fight – so far so good. In fact, this was BBC beating AFO, (an American program) at its own game – it had everything that AFO did: biomechanical models, CGI fight, scientists to consult with and to root for ‘their’ character – everything but the live footage, because now-a-days the only dinosaurs around are birds, and the crocodilians are close cousins of the extinct dinosaurs instead – not dinosaurs proper.

Of course, if you look at a Tyrannosaurus’ skull, the family traits with the crocodiles and the caimans will be very obvious: not unlike them, Tyrannosaurus was built for power – not just in its skull (odds are, being bitten by a Tyrannosaurus was one of the worst things to happen to anyone or anything), but in its entire body. Unlike a similarly sized dinosaur, such as an Allosaurus (or any other carnosaur), a Tyrannosaurus (and its close cousins – Tarbosaurus, Daspletosaurus, even Albertosaurus and Gorgosaurus) was much more robust and built for power: a lion, or even a bear, as opposed to a tiger (or even a leopard). The alternate predator – one that is built for speed and/or finesse is a raptor; not so much ‘just’ a velociraptor, but its’ entire family…

Back to Tyrannosaurus. It was a great, powerful predator, but was it unbeatable? No more so than the modern lions and bears are: just think back to AFO’s ‘polar bear vs. walrus’ or ‘African lion vs. Nile crocodile’ episodes – there is always someone bigger and stronger lurking in the shadows, alas!

This is especially true for carnivore vs. herbivore interactions – whether we are talking about modern times or the Mesozoic, or any other time period. There is proof of buffalos successfully fighting-off lions, and if the lions are smaller than the buffalos are, it still does not stop them from having that buffalo meal fairly regularly. Of course, as we have talked about the ‘polar bear vs. walrus’ episode of AFO, it is the same old story all over: the predator is usually ‘just’ fighting for its’ lunch, the prey – for its’ life. Of course, if the predator really needs a good meal to go on living, things will be different, but usually the herbivore has a good chance of escaping…or not. It is a case-by-case scenario, especially in real life.

However, in dinosaur documentaries, the carnivores are usually depicted winning – or just fighting each other instead. Yes, this goes great over in fiction, but in real life? It is unrealistic, which is why something like JFC (Jurassic Fight Club) is also unrealistic. Of course, JFC has plenty of other reasons why it was unrealistic, and in the end, cancelled after a single season (apparently cancelled, or maybe it was initially designed to be a single-season show), but it still had 12 episodes in it. TTAKD was largely a single-shot, (two-parter or not), and while it became fairly popular on YouTube and the rest of Internet, it never got to be aired very often…at least in Canada. AFO, for comparison, also really flourished even in its original run of 2004, but various episodes got to be aired in the future years, (during Shark Week and similar tripe, but still). TTAKD? Not really. Why?

Because it did not go for the stereotypes. JFC did. Tyrannosaurus is supposed to be invincible, especially in fiction, and so it is – on screen. The movie ‘Jurassic World’ has certainly delivered it, and while Tyrannosaurus was tougher than a carnosaur was, (which is what the Indominus was, period), a fictional Tyrannosaurus is something else. People expect a certain something when the ‘tyrant lizard king’ comes on air, and it has nothing to do with facts. It is slightly like the case with the lion – everyone expects a lion, (at least a fictional one) to be a hero rather than a villain, and so it happens! As a rule…

Yet back in 2005 TTAKD actually ‘measured’ a Tyrannosaurus and a Triceratops against each other, fair and square, very much in the vein of AFO, and proved to the audience that a Tyrannosaurus was not invincible after all. Perhaps this is why TTAKD has not made much of a return?..

Perhaps. Yet ‘The Truth’s’ take on Tyrannosaurus, (and Triceratops), is nothing compared to the second part of the program, which focused on Velociraptor – but that is a story for another time…