I've already written something up about the infamous "Dinosauroid" previously, but it is funny how we're told that if the non-avian dinosaurs didn't become extinct 65 million years ago (preventing mammals as we know them from evolving, the clip says) humans would still have been around to take advantage of a warm Protoceratops omelettes, the dinosaurs themselves being essentially unchanged. Indeed, it seems that it's hard for us to imagine a world without something like ourselves in it, the dinosauroid being an extension of the somewhat teleological or vitalistic premise that humans are "meant to be."
At least the documentary does point out that dinosaurs did survive the end of the Cretaceous and many of us keep them as pets, Isaac Asimov's "A Statue for Father" (in which "dinachicken" is discovered and marketed) taking on a new meaning when we realize that a chicken is a living dinosaur descendant. All the same, it is fun to ponder what it would be like if living dinosaurs and our own species lived together, Robert Marsh's How to Keep Dinosaurs being one of the better books in this somewhat fantastical genre.
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My cats (not really my cats, we're just cat sitting) love to sit in the window and watch the dinosaurs feeding on the lawn.
Mmmm... dinachicken. I think I'll make that for dinner tonight.
Aaaargh! Another BBC documentary featuring unfeathered coelurosaurs. I understand that feathers were notoriously difficult to animate back in the nineties when WWD was made, and that the resulting cgi is trademarked and a valuable property, but I really think those plucked creatures should be taken behind the barn and put out of their misery.
Wow, somebody else who remembers "A Statue for Father".
It's funny you should bring this up. For the past week, I've been sketching pictures for an upcoming post about properly keeping a pet Prenocephale. Why a little Mongolian pachycephalosaur? Why not?
There was a recent documentary tracing the history of T.rex, ahowing people interacting with CGI'd versions of Charles Knight illustrations, WWD versions and at the end a feathered T.rex looking rather like a killer macaw.
Nice to see Robert Mash's book getting a plug- I still love the first edition with its William Rushton cartoons (especially the soldier holding the Deinonychus by the tail.)
Any chance we have another link to this video? I missed it, however I would like to see it.
I was shocked to see an article on polar dinosaurs with pictures, not a feather to be seen! The authors went on and on about warm blooded dinos in the frigid arctic and antarctic, without mentioning the absolute necessity of either subcutaneous blubbery fat or a thick coat of downy feathers to retain that heat. Personally, I don't think the now-polar regions were at the poles at that time, so I doubt the temps were so cold, but surely if any terrestrial dinos were in temperate-sub-arctic regions they wore a coat, no?
DDeden, I'm happy to say that when Alaska's dinosaurs lived on the North Slope, it was actually at a higher latitude than it is today. Much closer to the pole back then. However, given the overall warmer global climate during the Late Cretaceous, the weather up there was comparable to modern-day Washington state. There is some evidence of permafrost, but whether it snowed or not is anyone's guess.