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!

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!

Borealopelta, Zuul and NG - Aug 3

And so, it came to my attention that there is yet another new dinosaur discovered in RL – Borealopelta, aka ‘northern shield’. It was an armored dinosaur, and a nodosaur, and… it was related… to Zuul, however distantly.

Wait, to whom?

Zuul, the armored dinosaur, described – and depicted – in the June 2017 issue of NG. It was an armored dinosaur, but unlike, say, Ankylosaurus, (featured in JP franchise and etc.), Zuul did not have a tail club, but it had shoulder spikes – as does Borealopelta. Again, this isn’t a problem, nor a surprise – another armored dinosaurs used to have it, as did other reptiles, like Desmatosuchus, a denizen of the Triassic time period, a distant cousin to the dinosaurs, but a closer cousin to the crocodilians, (although Desmatosuchus itself was a plant-eater, to add further incredulity, just as the armored dinosaurs did). Considering that the two dinosaurs were related, (how closely the paleontologists will figure out in due time), it is not very surprising that the two dinosaurs were physically similar; they did occupy similar econiches, after all. What bothers me is how NG handled them – let us discuss.

As I have written back in June 2017, that issue of NG did not give Zuul the same respect as it did to Spinosaurus in a much earlier issue, and I discussed this issue at length. Now, after reading the online NG article about Borealopelta, I see that NG has added insult to injury – the text of the online article is very similar to the text of the printed (and/or electronic) June 2017 magazine’s article on Zuul. And what is more, the depictions of new Borealopelta dinosaur are exactly that of Zuul (the dinosaur, not the first original Ghostbusters’ movie villain) – NG just recycled them from June 2017 time period and that’s that. Given that right now it is just early August 2017, this means that just about two months passed at most, nowhere near enough time for people to forget about NG descriptive article of Zuul, which makes NG’s decision kind of stupid, not just as in ‘foolish’ and ‘unoriginal’, but also as in ‘unimaginative’ and ‘disrespectful’. Seriously, check out ‘The Making of a Most Extraordinary Fossil’ special feature online, (on NG site), and then seek out the June 2017 issue of NG. The two pieces are similar enough in content and depiction that if anyone else did this sort of thing, NG would be full within its’ right to sue them for copyright infringement; yet when they do it to themselves, it’s fine?

End rant, or at least – put it on hold. NG has and will do ‘bloopers’ in the future; the last was probably in July 2017, when that month’s issue had an article – ‘THE MAKING OF A MASSACRE’. It was written together with ProPublica, ‘an independent, non-profit, investigative newsroom’, and it talked about a massacre in Allende, Mexico. Briefly, DEA got the goods on two drug kingpins, the Trevino brothers – and promptly shared this info with the Mexican police, even though their Mexican counterparts could not be trusted. Sure enough, the Trevinos learned immediately after this that they were sold out – and started the titular massacre.

Honestly, I feel sorry for the people of Allende, and am not impressed by the actions of the Mexican police or the DEA; I don’t know, who there was bribed, and who was just too naïve and idealistic for their own good, but this brings us to NG, who published the article both in paper and online – and then did their best to bury it, metaphorically speaking: the article was quickly made hard-to-access online, (even if one does have an online subscription to the magazine), and the magazine itself was quickly removed from many places where it was sold, (convenience stores, DrugMart, etc.). The online version of the article promised some sort of a supplementary video material to be released online in July – it never did. I do not know what went wrong here, but since the U.S. politics were involved, conspiracy theorists are welcome to make their own theories, of course.

However, as for Zuul and Borealopelta… I think that it was an honest blooper, which is still hard to excuse, as NG is usually a solid and respectful magazine and organisation. Was it really hard to figure out which material belongs to which dinosaur species, and just what the magazine was presenting the first time around (June 2017)? Moreover, once it was done, (the figuring out part), once the initial mistake was realized, how hard would it be to depict Borealopelta anew, from scratch, rather than reuse Zuul’s depictions directly? Apparently too hard, since this is what happened here.

That is it for NG (at the moment); as for Borealopelta itself… Ecologically, it was just like Zuul – a medium to large herbivore that used shoulder spikes to protect itself from various carnivorous dinosaurs; in the Early Cretaceous this meant early raptors (such as Deinonychus and Utahraptor) and carnosaurs, (such as Acrocanthosaurus), carnivores that were more similar to Allosaurus than to T-Rex. Neither group was well-suited to handle an armored dinosaur, as I wrote earlier, (in June 2017), so neither Zuul nor Borealopelta needed a tail club – not yet. Later armored dinosaurs, from the Late Cretaceous, will evolve it, because their top predators will be the tyrannosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus Rex itself…

The point that I am trying to make here is about the camouflage – supposedly, Borealopelta had critical countershading in its coloration; its’ back was darker than its’ belly. I let you in on a secret – many animals have it, from all over the tree of life. The most typical example are fish from the open seas, both bony fish and sharks like the mako and the great white, and somehow no one makes a big deal about this. The land animals too have it, just look at the wild horses and donkeys and their African cousins, the zebras. Their backs are darker than their bellies are, so there is no reason to assume that the dinosaurs did not have the same coloration scheme, but rather than they did.

Well, that is it for now; see you all later!

PS: And as for Killjoys? Let us talk about it for some other time…

Zuul the dinosaur

…And so, it is fifth of June already. Yay! In real life, my sister has graduated, and within the summer of 2017, she will have her new job. The two of us do not really get along, and this is all I am going to be talking about her here and now – not in the mood, not at all.

With RL off the table, what else is left there? Okay, there is the new nodosaur dinosaur that was (is?) talked about in May, and now June, of 2017. It is RL, actually, thus-

Thus the thing is that the official NG magazine article (June 2017) is almost downplaying the original excitement about the dinosaur from May. Take a look at the NG magazine archive, and find the October 2014 volume – it deals with Spinosaurus.

…Okay, no. We will actually try to avoid the JP franchise, movie or otherwise – as 2014-present showed, the RL Spinosaurus was a different animal from the one depicted in JP3, which is somewhat ironic, since I talked only last month about it – the RL Spinosaurus – fighting Tyrannosaurus and/or some Cretaceous carnosaur. Right. Here the thing is that back in October 2014 Spinosaurus got front-page coverage, it was the titular article of the volume, and now, in June 2017, this is not the case. The nodosaur is not the focus of the volume, the issue of why people lie is.

Again, so what? In addition, the NG has a point – nodosaurs are not as well-known as the theropod dinosaurs are. The article explains that they are cousins to Ankylosaurus (‘Walking with Dinosaurs’) and the like, but unlike the ankylosaurs in general (think Euoplocephalus, etc.) they had no tail club, but were more often spiked, as Sauropelta from ‘Monsters Resurrected’ was.

…Actually, things are slightly more complex than the lay people believe; apparently, aside from Stegosaurus and its part of the family, the armored dinosaurs consisted of three groups, not two – the ankylosaurs, the nodosaurs, and the polacantines. Polacanthus, from the already mentioned WWD, was a polacantine, not a nodosaur…and this is being disputed, the entire issue of ankylosaurs vs. nodosaurs vs polacantines. So far, scientists still do not know for sure which armored dinosaur belongs in which group, not 100%...

Back to Zuul. Yes, it was the name of one of the monsters in the initial original Ghostbusters movie, and it is the name of the new dinosaur. Only the article avoids this completely for reasons that are not obvious to the readers. Why? No, seriously, why? Has something gone wrong with the dinosaur study and now NG (and co?) are trying to downplay it? Is it something else? Curious minds want to know!

Speaking of minds, ‘River Monsters’ (RM) is over. For good. JW is done with the show and AP. This is seriously depressing. Now AP seems to be left with mainly such shows as ‘My Cat from Hell’ and ‘Tanked’. Such pet shows are not bad, but RM was better, period.

In other news – speaking of AP – I have re-watched the AFO episode ‘Croc vs. Shark’ again, and re-watched the DW episodes ‘Aztec Jaguar vs. Zande Warrior’ and ‘Vlad the Impaler vs. Sun Tzu’. Upon seeing them, I concluded that DW was a more complex show, simply because the human warfare was more complex than anything that animals – especially other vertebrate animals (as opposed to such invertebrates as ants, wasps and/or termites) – can come up with. That said, until the human warfare in question began to involve firearms for real, raw physical strength, dexterity, and endurance (‘toughness’) were even more crucial than how they are now – but that is another story.

Getting back to animals, their physical strength, dexterity and toughness…yes, this brings us back to Spinosaurus and Zuul/not Zuul. Yes, in many ways Spinosaurus was the more impressive dinosaur, but most of these ways were physical; behavior-wise I doubt that Spinosaurus was that more advanced in behaviour than a nodosaur – or a modern crocodile – was (is); Tyrannosaurus, it was implied once, wasn’t as intelligent as a domestic cat, but that’s an unfair comparison; cats are very clever, conniving creatures, and now that my own cat has died, (well, it died a while back, but still), we all miss it…

Back to the dinosaurs. Sorry about rumbling in the last paragraph; the truth is, as a semi-aquatic animal, Spinosaurus was probably one of the more intelligent theropods, relatively speaking. It had to be in order to survive in a complex, 3-D, aquatic lifestyle. By contrast, the armored dinosaurs did not live more complex lives than the modern rhinoceroses or buffalos do – they were strong, large, (relatively so), well-armored, capable of defence and attack, as ‘Jurassic Fight Club’ and ‘Monsters Resurrected’ showed in the past, but these shows, and especially JFC, are somewhat suspect when it comes to facts, but they have a point – Zuul (let’s call it this for now) would’ve had to deal with such carnivores as Acrocanthosaurus, which is a carnosaur, (remember?), meaning that while it was huge and strong, it just wasn’t evolved in the right way to deal with a proportionally small and tough and spiky dinosaur as Zuul or Sauropelta, (when compared to a sauropod like Paluxysaurus/Sauroposeidon, for example). Carnosaurs just did not have the right bite power to tackle ankylosaurs and nodosaurs, unlike the last of the tyrannosaurs – Tyrannosaurus and its’ Asian counterpart, Tarbosaurus – but that was another story.

As for the raptors, Zuul possibly had to deal not just with Deinonychus, but also with the biggest raptor known to scientists (for now) – Utahraptor. They were not as powerful as Acrocanthosaurus or the other carnosaurs, but they were intelligent. In addition, they hunted in packs. This made them dangerous to Zuul and its’ relatives, especially if the armored dinosaurs were young, or old, or sick, or wounded or weakened in some other way – just look at some of the footage from the modern African safaris for comparison…

Well, that’s for Zuul so far. Until next time!

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.