Quarantine entry #60 - May 20

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. On top of whatever other issues I may have, I seem to have developed computer/Internet problems… hopefully, they will be resolved quickly enough. What else? Aside from the fact that the DA has switched and that is the end of that? What next?

So, yesterday, I have watched one of the ‘Monsters Resurrected’ episodes – the ‘Great American Predator’. It dealt with one of the more obscure North American dinosaurs – the Acrocanthosaurus. It existed during the early Cretaceous, millions of years before the T-Rex, and it was not really related to the Rex – rather, it was one of the carnosaurs, a cousin to both the Allosaurus of the Jurassic and the giants of the Cretaceous, such as the Carcharodontosaurus and Giganotosaurus, for example. Compared to them, the Acrocanthosaurus was smaller, more like the Allosaurus in size, but unlike Big Al and the rest of the carnosaurs in general, the Acrocanthosaurus had a ridge on its back. It was relatively short, nowhere as impressive as the sail of the Spinosaurus, for example, and when compared, the Acrocanthosaurus was the much more conventional theropod dinosaur out of the two, but it is still worth mentioning, because it is overlooked in favor of the T-Rex and the other latecomers.

…Speaking of T-Rex and the other latecomers, I found the ‘Great American Predator’ to be heavily influenced by Robert Bakker and his ‘Raptor Red’ novel, which depicted the life and times of an Utahraptor and her family in the early Cretaceous North America, with the Acrocanthosaurs’ being regular rivals to the Utahraptors in the first two thirds of the novel. Ergo-?

Ergo, my point is that the Utahraptor is the closest thing that real life had to the JP/JW franchise’s raptor, period, (which was initially based on the Deinonychus, also featured in ‘Raptor Red’). Proportionally, Deinonychus was smaller than the Utahraptor, (and the most obscure Dakotaraptor), but it was still the third largest raptor dinosaur in Earth’s history, and it appeared in the ‘Great American Predator’, while the Utahraptor did not. In particular, Deinonychus was shown harassing younger Acrocanthosaurs and eventually forcing this species into extinction, (though by middle to late Cretaceous, not just Acrocanthosaurus, but also Deinonychus and Utahraptor were extinct on the planet, it should be noted).

Other contributing factors to the Acrocanthosaurus’s extinction included the eventual extinction of large North American sauropods, such as Sauroposeidon/Paluxysaurus, and them being replaced by smaller, tougher prey, such as Sauropelta, a distant cousin to the better-known Ankylosaurus, for example. Whereas the jaws and teeth of the T-Rex and its cousins such as Tarbosaurus bataar and Daspletosaurus evolved precisely to crash through bony armor and skeletal bones of the other dinosaurs, the carnosaurs hadn’t evolved this sort of feature – their teeth were thin but sharp, designed to slice through flesh instead, and their jaws were longer and shallower than those of the tyrannosaurs, and so not as powerful as the latter. …The latter were the more derived theropods, I suppose, but now they are all gone, and how the kriff I am going to manage the new DA site, I have no idea. I am half-tempted to just destroy my pages there and all, and be done with them – I do not really have much of value on that site, so who knows?..

Getting back to theropods, let us talk about swans instead. No, not the extinct giants of the Mediterranean islands that used to harass the pygmy elephants that’d also lived there, but rather the modern species. The best-known species are the four northern ones, which belong to the genera Olor (aka the mute swan) and Cygnus, (the rest of the white swans of the Northern hemisphere), as they’d been immortalized in the various works of art and literature as symbols of purity, chastity, and the like, because appearance matters.

The other two swans, however, are quite different birds: the black swan of Australia, (Chenopis atratus), is all black, of course, but the oldest ‘true’ swan of them all, (Sthenelides melancoryphus), is the black-necked swan of South America, and it is white, with a black head and neck, giving it a rather odd appearance, and making one wonder, as to how the swan evolution has gone, color-wise at least.

…The continent of South America is also home to the so-called coscoroba swan, (Coscoroba coscoroba), which is solid white in color instead, but is considered to be more closely related to geese and shelducks, (especially to the Cape Barren goose of southern Australia), rather than to the true swans, appearances be damned…but we’ve talked about geese (and ducks) before, and right now I don’t want to get back to them.

Well, this is it for now. Real life sucks, and the new DA site is worse, but it doesn’t matter; see you all soon instead!

JW trailer 2 - Feb 5

The second JW trailer was aired. What did we learn?

That this is the official parting of the ways with the original novel duology. As one of the characters tells another one in the trailer, ‘the dinosaurs are old news’, they’re gone – and they most certainly are, as we get a proper glimpse of the Indoraptor this time.

It is decisively anthropomorphic, the proportions are all wrong. The I-Rex was a carnosaur, a RL dinosaur with some supernatural skills, cough, technically speaking. The Indoraptor is thoroughly anthropomorphised, on the other hand, a genuine D&D troll with some reptilian traits on top of everything and anything else.

Here is the thing. The dinosaurs of the JP franchise grew clearly more and more anthropomorphic since, well, the beginning. In the initial JP novel, the dinosaurs were animals, RL animals; science might have returned them back to life, but they were still animals. Crichton’s raptors were reminiscent of tigers, the dilophosaurs – of leopards, and so on. They were intelligent – but then again, RL modern animals are themselves can be quite intelligent, cognizant even – but they had no human DNA in them, period. Frog, (or some other amphibian) DNA – sure, but human? No.

Then came the JP3 film, and while in the first two JP movies the dinosaurs were animals, (though there were some dodgy moments with the tyrannosaurs), in JP3 anthropomorphic traits were appearing, especially in the raptors.

A brief aside about the raptors: part of the reason why they had such… incorrect PR in RL may be in part because of Crichton and his JP novels. You see, in those novels, he officially and publically conflated the generic term of ‘raptor’, (now known scientifically as dromeosaurid dinosaurs…which isn’t much of an improvement, because one of the ‘raptors’ is known specifically as ‘Dromeosaurus’…never mind), with specifically Velociraptor – only it wasn’t the dinosaur that we call the Velociraptor in these modern times, but its’ bigger cousin called Deinonychus. Deinonychus was just as big as the raptors in the first JP movie – at 4 m in length, it was the third-largest raptor in RL, with only the Utahraptor and the more recently discovered Dakotaraptor, being bigger – and it was the star of the JP movies, albeit under an incorrect name…though even in the late 1980s Deinonychus and Velociraptor were scientific synonyms…science can be confusing, in short.

Back to JP3. There, the raptors were decisively anthropomorphic, not only able to deduce that them pesky humans have stolen their precious eggs, but open to communication, literally. Dr. Grant directly communicated with the raptors in JP3, bargaining their safety in return for the return of the dinosaurs’ eggs. RL animals do not behave like that, (unlike fictional ones, as the ones described in medieval bestiaries, for example), but-

But already in the previous JW movie Dr. Wu, (who apparently didn’t die back in the first JP film – maybe S.H.I.E.L.D., or Hydra, or some other shadowy organization saved him back then), admitted/confessed/exposed to the viewers that these dinosaurs aren’t ‘real’, (i.e. realistic), they’re ‘hybrids’, (i.e. chimeras), fictional, artificial creatures.

An aside regarding the chimera. Initially, in ancient Greece and Rome, it was a mythical monster; it was part lion, part goat and part snake, and it breathed fire. It was dragon-like, but also composite, so not even the ancient Greeks and Romans themselves believed it to be real…

In later times, the chimera lost, in part, its’ specific features, and became a composite, generically vague-looking monster instead. Some of the gargoyles on various basilicas and cathedrals were probably considered to be chimeras instead in the older times – but in modern times, while the ‘classical chimera’ is once more a feature of the fantasy genre, in sci-fi the term ‘chimera’ is used to describe various hybrid creatures, whether composite animals, or human-animal hybrids, (and there were some in various sci-fi novels and TV shows over the last few decades). Thus, the ‘new’ dinosaurs of the JW films are not really dinosaurs at all, not even by Crichton’s standards – they are chimeras. The I-Rex supposedly had human DNA, and the Indoraptor certainly has it; even the vague shots of it in the new trailer show it, it even behaves like a human – a stalker, maniac, mad killer, but a human nonetheless. Thus, with the Indoraptor being probably the main villain of the new JW movie, it is safe to suppose that the next JW movie will only loosely be a dinosaur-associated movie, and more of a generic sci-fi one – but we’ll have to wait and see until its’ release properly for further assessment.

That’s it for today; 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…

P:NW, ep 1x01 - Oct 29

Last night I watched the first episode of Primeval: New World and so far I am of a more or less ambiguous attitude towards it.

First, the good. The technology/CGI side of the show was done very well, as always. IP always knew how to create realistic images of prehistoric/imaginary beasts, etc. As computer creations, the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and anything else that the new team will encounter will be top notch.

The team itself, however, is something else. Basically, P:NW scriptwriters took the concept of the last season of "Primeval" – a six-person team and run with it. Connor Temple, the only character of the previous show to appear on P:NW up-to-date may be taking the role of Lester, or perhaps a senior team member who'll keep all the youngsters in check. And speaking of Connor, I admit that he has grown noticeably more competent than before and also sneakier – I'm not so sure that I like it. He also may be the ARC agent who had saved Evan from a dinosaur attack in the past, dying in the process, but until there is more information about that event, I'm not drawing any specific conclusions.

What about the new characters? As I said before, they have begun to form a 6-person team, just as in the last season of "Primeval", and Evan Cross, in particular, appears to be a younger version of Philip from the last season of "Primeval" as well, or at least that's how Connor sees him. In reality, Evan is probably more like Tony Stark (aka the Iron Man of Marvel comics©), an eccentric millionaire/inventor, who is also a superhero and a man of action. Just like so many other comic heroes, he is driven by his past, when a carnivorous dinosaur ate his wife when Evan and her snuck into a building and found a time anomaly. (More about the dinosaur later.)

If Evan is Tony, then Angelika Finch is Pepper Potts: she's the CFO of Evan's company, and is somewhat of a big sister to him, too: she keeps Evan grounded when he appears to be carried away – just as Pepper did with Tony, though with a slightly higher level of success. When in the beginning of the premier Evan tries to use Mac Randall to get away from a meeting with Angelika (Ange) – that was definitely a sibling interaction, sort of.

Angelika is also something of a neat freak, I suspect, and that is why she's going to be paired up with Lt. Ken Leeds – a Mulder-like character, who may be great at researching, but also really likes his things messy: maybe it drives his creative urges or something like that. His character didn't have much screen time in the first episode: so far he appears to be a tie to the Canadian government for Ange and Evan, and nothing more. He also has a big file on Evan and his company, Cross Photonics, so he may end up being Nick Fury (or at least agent Coulson) to Evan's Stark.

If Angelika is being paired with Lt. Leeds, then Evan is paired with Dylan Weir, an environmental activist and a police officer of some sort. The scene when Dylan and Evan fall through the time anomaly into the Cretaceous, and Dylan ends up on top of Evan (Dylan is a woman, though her name is manly – couldn't they go with Sarah, or Tanya, or something like that?), is pretty straightforward: Dylan is going to help Evan get over the loss of his wife (killed in part by his recklessness, BTW), and probably end up the next Mrs. Cross, though IP shows aren't big on weddings, I should note.

I also note that Dylan appears to be more laid back and accepting than Claudia Brown/Jenny Lewis was: she just accepted that there are radiomagnetic time anomalies in their uni-verse/dimension and went with the flow. Well, I don't see why not.

The last two main characters are Toby Nance (another woman with a manly name) and Mac Rendell. Mac Rendell is a daredevil and Evan's right-hand man: sort of a cross between Stephen Hart and Matt Anderson, I suppose. Toby is more like Jess, save that she isn't anywhere as fashion-conscious: guess the show's scriptwriters did their best of trying to differentiate P:NW's characters from their predecessors.

Sadly, that is probably P:NW's weakest part – the script. The actors, let's say it now, did a good job of sounding out their characters and to make them look real. The characters themselves are flat, though: Evan was the only one who's got some sort of a personal story behind him so far – probably because he's the central character (Buffy to Connor's Angel, if you would), and a personal story for the central character is a must. The rest of the P:NW characters (the supporting cast) have to go without it.

The second script flaw is the lack of a villain. "Primeval" had plenty of villains: Oliver Leek, Christine Johnson, Ethan Dombrowski, Philip Burton, and, of course, Helen Cutter made formidable opponents to the original ARC team. Because, let's be fair, modern humans, especially on their home turf (the 21st century) can outthink and outmaneuver any dinosaur or other prehistoric reptile, if given enough time. P:NW cast really needs a human opponent to test their mettle; otherwise the show will remain inferior to its predecessor.

Finally, there's the scientific angle, or rather – the lack of it. Ever since IP parted from BBC, it was steadily moving away from pseudo-documentaries ("Walking with" series) to true drama ("Primeval", P:NW, "Sinbad"). That said, they can still create more documentary-like shows, like "March of the Dinosaurs" (2011) movie, but they clearly are moving into more fictive shows instead. Maybe BBC, Discovery Channel, etc., are squeezing them out of the documentary niche, who knows?

That said, the lack of paleontological knowledge in P:NW is glaring. Pteranodon is depicted as man-eating bird of prey, literally: it has killed at least one person before it died. There were carnivorous and semi-terrestrial pterosaurs by the end of the Cretaceous, the azhdarchids, like Quetzalcoatlus and Hatzegopteryx, but Pteranodon belongs to a different family, the pteradontids, and it behaved more like a gull or a pelican, hunting for fish in the inland seas. Considering that IP was working with Pteranodon for a long time, since 2002 in "Chased by the Dinosaurs", they clearly know this, so why did they make it into a monster? If they needed a killer bird, why not use a teratorn instead? (Basically, a giant condor from the Ice Age.) Now that would be a giant bird of prey – literally and figuratively.

Then, the raptors. Evan calls them Utahraptors, but IP had problems with their identity from the time of "Primeval": influenced by the Jurassic Park movie franchise, their raptors are just generic sickle-clawed dinosaurs without any allegiance to any specific dromaeosaurid species; here the problem is that Utahraptor lived and died out just before Pteranodon appears on Earth, so they couldn't co-exist. Either that, or P:NW is doing something new with the time anomalies, which is another possibility.

Finally, the big dinosaur that ate Evan's wife, Albertosaurus (as identified on the official site). A smaller, more gracile relative of the T-Rex, Albertosaurus appeared several times in IP productions, but this version is mostly based on the aforementioned "March of the Dinosaurs" movie, except that it lacks feathers ("March" therapods were all feathered instead), and has one of its front claws bitten off. Odds that it will be P:NW's "villain" for this season at least quite good, since Albertosaurus had plenty of strength and speed, a nasty disposition and a decent amount of intelligence. If so, then P:NW can quickly devolve to a "man vs. beast" kind of a plot, and its characters lack "Moby Dick's" complexity to accomplish that sufficiently well to keep P:NW afloat for consecutive seasons. (Most of IP series, not counting "Primeval", are one-season hits.)

So. Good CGI and technology, decent actors and a flawed script. Right now, P:NW can go anywhere, and I will eagerly look over its journey.