Is it just me or is the History Channel mutating? I guess they've covered just about everything there is to cover in human history as I keep seeing more announcements for programs about natural history, particularly involving extinct creatures. On July 29 the new series Evolve will premiere along with Jurassic Fight Club and Prehistoric Monsters Revealed; it seems like the whole day will be full of prehistory-themed documentaries. (And I hasten to add that Darren recently appeared on an episode of MonsterQuest, too.)
As I promised I'm holding back on the crankiness, but the History Channel really needs to run their program synopses past scientists (or at least someone who knows the research) before putting them out. Part of the summary for Prehistoric Monsters Revealed reads "Meet the nothronychus (a strange amalgam of bird and sloth) [and] the anomalocarus (a 7-foot shrimp)." The description of the therizinosaur Nothronychus is just confusing (if you have to make a comparison, why not call it a sloth-like dinosaur?) and Anomalocaris is misspelled, cited as being two times too big, and unfortunately called a jumbo prawn. These sort of errors seem to be a recurring theme with summaries put out by the channel, the mistake-laden pieces being ripped apart and then changed, and this is unfortunate because it gives the impression that the programmers don't care about accuracy. It's entirely possible to be accurate without turning a synopsis into a journal abstract and I hope that the History Channel does a better job summarizing its programming in the future.
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Have you seriously considered the possibility that they really just don't care about accuracy?
Still, anything's got to be an improvement on the "all Hitler, all the time" approach to history...
The thing is the History Channel is predominantly about entertainment rather than education so when they want to publicize their programs they want to epmphasize the "strange" by relating it to the familiar no matter whether it makes biological sense or not. I guess they figure that if they described Nothronychus as a therapod and Anomalocaris as a lobopod the intended audience would not know what they were talking about and thus would not tune into the program.
Dunc & Eric; True, but it seems like they don't particularly like being bad-mouthed on science blogs/have their summaries trashed because they have changed them when given criticisms. The kind of people who read this blog might be more inclined to tune in than the average viewer and making the program seem like a hashed-together mess isn't going to help them out.
I'm not suggesting that they start using technical terms, even ones as familiar as theropod, but I think they can do a little bit better. Like I wrote, you could call Nothronychus a sloth-like dinosaur and "sell" Anomalocaris as an ancient killer invertebrate. I think a balance can be struck between making the show sound fun and not making loads of errors, and from what I've seen it does seem like the channel reacts when people criticize their promotional material.
Their history content isn't particularly well researched (unless your view of history is consistent with that of Newt Gingrich then what you see on History Channel won't look particularly familiar. Even if you majored in History. Which I did.) so it's not surprising that their science content is lacking.
Laelaps:
This is what some of us were calling for in the earliest days of the fr*ming kerfuffle: specific examples of (a) descriptions done wrong and (b) ways to fix them. Trying to talk in broad, general terms about "balancing accuracy and audience appeal" or whatever is like, I dunno, trying to dance before you can walk.
Here's a funfact: This morning I recieved an email press release about a dinosaur...*sigh*...fighting game for the modern consoles. It is to be a "companion" to the upcoming show. Kind of like there was a video game "companion" to that marine reptile movie. I intend to blog about this later today.
Okay. It's not a console game. It's a game on the website called Turf Wars. It's still sad.
Hey, just be glad they're actually showing something about history instead of making more reality TV-esque shows like Ax Men or Ice Truckers or MonsterQuest. It's gone from the History Channel (or the long-standing Hitler Channel) to the History-when-we-feel-like-it Channel.
"The Hitler Channel" is so right! It even got to be a bit much for my best friend, who's something of a WWII buff.
Personally, I don't mind wall-to-wall dinos every so often. I think we're all overgrown kids to some degree who have never gotten over our fascination with them, and it gives me a lot of teachable moments with my friends who are never sure where plausibility leaves off and just plain silliness begins. And not infrequently, I learn something too. =grin=
BTW, I have no use for Ax Men, Ice Road Truckers, or Monster Quest either. But IMO, The Universe is terrific (and not only because Alex Filippenko, Michio Kaku, and Neil deGrasse Tyson are TEH TEWTALY HAWT, either...... now, if only they'd get Phil Plait the Bad Astronomer on there, my life would be complete =wink=).
BTW, while we're on the subject of TV dinos: Why do they always roar? For some strange reason, I find that notion extremely annoying (and have ever since I was a kid).
Modern reptiles (with a few possible exceptions that I don't know about) don't, and certainly modern birds don't. In fact, roaring animals are a tiny minority of modern species (big cats, bears, and what else?).
Is there any reason to think that dinos might have roared, or is that just another trick to make them "more exciting" to the audience (as if they weren't exciting enough already)?