Dinosaur nuts emerge!

Therizinosaurus would be a convenient addition to the Jurassic Park frachise - those massive claws can be played up as dangerous weapons. Some unlucky goon might get impaled on them.

Small tyrannosauroids like Proceratosaurus or Guanlong would also fit quite nicely. They’re like the Jurassic Park raptors, but T rex! Double cool.

Edited by IC1101 on Jan 29th 2022 at 5:14:34 PM

Well, they have Moros intrepidus appearing in the opening scene as part of the Cretaceous fauna. So I guess that counts?

At least they included a primitive tyrannosauroid. Also, since Dilophosaurus got included in Jurassic Park, why haven’t any Triassic dinosaurs(or dinosauromorphs, for that matter) been included?

Edited by IC1101 on Apr 10th 2022 at 11:51:55 AM

Since the thread has recently been de-extinctified, its about high time we talk about something all of the paleontology-related parts of the Internet have been buzzing over for the past while.

I presume you've all seen Prehistoric Planet's trailer? If not, imma just drop it here for you all.

Can you say "this generation's Walking With Dinosaurs"?

Edited by MagnusForce on Apr 10th 2022 at 11:29:31 AM

A tad late, but there's a new trailer for Prehistoric Planet, even bigger and badder than the previous one.

I cannot tell you how many times I have rewatched this. I have not been hyped for something like this in a very long time! And its not just the other dino-nerds that are hyped for this; it's got over 2 million views and 16k likes, and I've been watching tons of reaction videos to it from all kinds of people.

Edited by MagnusForce on Apr 22nd 2022 at 12:16:24 PM

Prehistoric Planet looks awesome! Top-notch visual effects, a combination of the most recent science and creative speculation, narration by David Attenborough, music by Hans Zimmer... it looks as perfect as it can get.

Here's a video of all 50 playable animals in Prehistoric Kingdom. It's 40 dinosaurs and 10 cenozoic mammals, and it looks marvelous! All animals come with 3, sometimes 4 different skins, which sometimes only represent different color morphs, but often different species within the same genus (yes, this is a game that there can be multiple species within a genus).

Between this game and Prehistoric Planet, this is a good year for those who like scientifically accurate dinosaurs.

Watched the first episode of Prehistoric Planet. Three words: Incredible. Beautiful. Amazing.

There were so many scenes where my face lit up seeing all the behaviors I'd never seen or thought of like the plesiosaurs spyhopping, the mosasaur cleaning station, and the bioluminescent ammonites. Heck, I also learned of a few new species names (all of the genera in the pterosaur sequence come to mind). Completely brilliant. And what makes it work so perfectly is that its basically the majesty of Planet Earth and Blue Planet applied to the very end of the Cretaceous period - everything that makes BBC Nature's modern animal documentaries amazing except applied to dinosaurs and other extinct Mesozoic reptiles.

This isn't merely Walking with Dinosaurs' successor. It's gonna be its outright replacement for future generations. And if WWD's influence and acclaim has taught me anything, its that a lot of the stuff we see in Prehistoric Planet (behaviors, species, environments, designs) are gonna become much more prominent in popular depictions of dinosaurs.

EDIT: Just watched the Uncovered bonus content too. Brilliant stuff. Its great to see the show also including some stuff to explain the science behind its sequences, namely some of the bits the general public might find preposterous (ever notice how T. rex is usually stereotyped as being unable to swim?). Incredibly enlightening too. I was not aware that there were fossilized footprints from swimming theropods!

Edited by MagnusForce on May 23rd 2022 at 1:57:42 AM

Hate to double post but with Prehistoric Planet's run now completed, I must ask what y'all thought of the show. For me, it was 10/10 series from start to finish. Here's to hoping for a Prehistoric Planet II someday!

Episode Rankings:

1. Forests

2. Coasts

3/4 Ice Worlds + Deserts (equal)

5. Freshwater

Edited by MagnusForce on May 27th 2022 at 5:53:26 AM

Prehistoric Planet is awesome, I enjoyed every moment of it from the beginning to the end. If I have any complaints about it, it's the lack of mammals (relegated to a brief cameo as troodontid prey) and crocodylians (despite an entire "freshwater" episode having plenty of opportunity to feature them).

I have two questions for you all:

1: Are pterosaurs archosaurs?

2: Are mammals archosaurs?

Hopefully you said yes to the first and no to the second. Well, this website has the opposite ideas. The man who made it (David Peters) has some very odd views. For example, the aforementioned pterosaurs-being-archosaurs-but-he-thinks-they’re-lizards thing. He also believes that all herbivorous dinosaurs should be lumped together into “Phytodinosauria”. What a lunatic. He also says he came to these conclusions from a new method that supposedly allows him to see things others “missed”. That really just means “making all this 🦖💩 up”. I know it’s a rant, but that website is just so wrong!

Oh nanny. Not him. He used to be one of the great paleoartists of the 90s, you know. Then he went all fringe, and now this. His current reconstructions are some of the most unappealing and impractical-looking animals I've ever seen.

I've actually heard of Phytodinosauria elsewhere. Dr. Bob Bakker was actually the guy who came up with the idea, with the argument being somewhat based on the old idea that therizinosaurs/segnosaurs were a weird in-between of saurischian and ornithischian dinosaurs.

Speaking of alternative dinosaur classifications, what's everyone's thoughts regarding the idea of theropods and ornithischians forming ornithoscelida?

Personally, I'm skeptical to the idea (especially since it seems to have been broughtback solely for the purpose of giving a single very unusual dinosaur a proper place in the family tree - personally, I believe Chilesaurus is a highly aberrant theropod; it's the segnosauria shit of the 20th century all over again). BUT I won't deny the possibility of it, given the mystery surrounding the origins of ornithischians.

Edited by MagnusForce on Nov 9th 2022 at 6:10:08 AM

The less said about David Peters (unless it's exposing him as a hack), the better.

Honestly, I think Dinosaur Media is badly represented in Hollywood and it has been for more than a decade.

The only medium that is thriving when it comes to dinosaur content is documentaries, and while there are some great ones, it also sucks that documentaries aren't really popular in comparison to other mediums, meaning that the general public largely doesn't care about works like Prehistoric Planet.

Fiction-focused mediums like Films, Video Games, and Television Shows fare worse because the general public tends to discern this into only two sides; dinosaurs are for children, or dinosaurs are bloodthirsty monsters who want to devour mankind. Not to mention we've had a severe lack of dinosaur content in those three mediums for decades.

If I remember, Jurassic Park was the last film to challenge the public about the cultural depiction of dinosaurs. Yes, it was successful in that front and the film proved to be influential in more ways than one, but here's the problem; that was almost 30 years ago (as of writing this).

Since then, we have seen a number of works, some good, some bad, but never one that tried to challenge the status quo like Jurassic Park did. It doesn't help that paleontology is a fast-changing topic when it comes to prehistory. And speaking of, the Jurassic Park/World series still being the biggest Dino series has ended up inadvertently damaging the perception of dinosaurs during these past years.

For movies, the only ones I can recall are Disney's Dinosaur (2000), Land of the Lost (2009), Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, and The Good Dinosaur as as it turns out, none of them were good or popular in some way or another.

For games, there have been promises about multiple dinosaur games in the 10s, especially those with Kickstarter funding. Of them all, the only one that seems to have been successful is Prehistoric Kingdom. And the less said about the abominable disappointment that is Saurian, the better. It also doesn't help that Capcom has ignored Dino Crisis, having done nothing for it's 10th or 20th anniversaries, with the series still not getting any significant news since the release of its third game.

I think it's long overdue we got another big dinosaur work that is not Jurassic Park and that it challenges the public about how dinosaurs are thought of, but I dunno when or how that's going to be done. For all I know, it could take another decade for something like that to come out.

Anyway, I apologize if this feels too long. I happen to be very passionate about dinosaurs, but I'm also very jaded about the current state of things regarding them as a focal piece in media. Plus I want to vent my frustration out in some way

Prehistoric Planet, confirmedly, gets a second season coming out this May! I find it weird they kept it secret until now. Apparently, it's still going to focus on the Late Cretaceous, with the first promo picture showing a close-up of the ankylosaur Tarchia (that already appeared in a cameo as one of the animals at the watering hole in "Deserts").

Hopefully, we'll see more of some of the underused animals from Season 1 (such as the Hateg Island and Madagascar fauna, as well as mammals and birds), along with groups that were completely missing from Season 1, like pachycephalosaurs and crocodylians. I personally really hope for Simosuchus making an appearance, I love the chonky croco-pug.

While it is great news that we’re getting a Season 2 of Prehistoric Planet, I can’t help but be concerned it’ll be little more than just sloppy seconds in terms of content, with the confirmation that it’ll recycle a lot of stuff from Season 1 and how soon we’re getting it. At the very least, I hope they’ll get the chance to use some of the scrapped material from S1, like Rajasaurus and Pachycephalosaurus. Still hoping for the best though!

People were disappointed in Saurian? That's new to me.

Also, I feel like dinosaurs are oversaturated. How many outright works of fiction are set in the Palaeozoic, for example?

Check the reviews section of this page and you'll probably understand why Saurian is seen as a disappointment by me and many others.

While I understand your point that dinosaurs are oversaturated, the point I'm trying to make is that there really hasn't been any mainstream work about them that's even been almost as good as Jurassic Park outside of documentaries and considering JP itself has been in a slump for years, its been a worrying sight.

Glad to see that Prehistoric Planet is getting a second season, though the lack of a Jurassic Period focus is a bit iffy if you ask me.

I'm reminded of when Jurassic World came out, I saw a Tumblr user complain that it could have changed public perceptions of dinosaurs again, but decided to play it safe instead.

At least there is one upcoming project, Forgotten Bloodlines: Agate, taking place 20 million years ago in the seldom-shown Miocene epoch, with its two focus species being Daeodon and Moropus.

On the flip side, we're getting 65, which seems to fully embrace the Prehistoric Monster trope with zero regard to scientific accuracy, starting with the very title - in 2013, radiometric dating showed that the K-Pg extinction event happened 66 million years ago, so the biggest dinosaurs 65 mya, a million years after the extinction, were the ancestors of ducks and penguins.

Good news, everyone! The trailer for Season 2 of Prehistoric Planet has dropped! Because it seems to have trouble embedding, imma just link it here.

There's also an article confirming two of the new critters appearing in the series are Isisaurus and Pectinodon. I've also seen some images and clips going around confirming Pachycephalosaurus will be appearing.

Edited by MagnusForce on Apr 18th 2023 at 9:55:32 AM

Update!

Official episode guide for Season 2 has been released! Check it out here!

Kinda weird that with the last episode, they're just suddenly switching the theme from environments to continents. Wonder if they plan on continuing that in a potential Season 3 (Asia, South America, etc.)?

Also seen a sneak peek image floating around depicting a trio of Triceratops and the individual variation between them.

Hate to post thrice in a row, but Apple TV+ just revealed a ton of new critters and photos, some of which confirm speculated species from the trailer and elsewhere.

Check em out here! We're getting a lot of new non-dinos alongside the gamut of new and returning dinosaurs!

Personally, I'm holding out for some Cretaceous sharks (ginsu sharks, crow sharks, and maybe even eagle sharks) and Sanajeh, the snake from India that scientists found raiding a titanosaur nest.

Edit: Oh, and since I forgot to do this last time, here's the full trailer for Season 2.

Edited by MagnusForce on May 5th 2023 at 6:31:02 AM

I'm super excited already! All the animals look amazing... except for Austroraptor, which looks weirdly fake, plastic-like, compared to the rest.

I'm really happy that Simosuchus makes an appearance, the little pug-croc is one of my favorite Late Cretaceous non-dinosaurs. I'm also glad that more avian dinosaurs appear - both Hesperornis and some anseriform bird that Pectinodon hunts.