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Telling it How It Was

caldrail

Entry posted by caldrail

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I was fascinated by a documentary aired a couple of nights ago. A teenager in 1997 discovered a fossil in North Dakota, which turned out to be an extremely important find, because the creature was mummified and soft tissue had survived. It was a hadrosaur, a common grazing animal living in wetlands (the area found was once a wide river near the inland sea that once split north america in two during the cretaceous period).

 

The reamins were not complete, and a large portion had gone missing (eaten?), and a further suprise was the discovery of an unlucky crocodile lodged in the carcass. Unfortunately, the main body could not be succesfully scanned with x-rays because the rock was too dense, so work continues, but its noticeable that the amount of soft tissue meant that modern reconstructions of dinosaur skeletons are incorrect - the vertebrae need to be spaced out more and the length of these animals needs to be increased by around 5%. Colour does appear to important to dinosaurs - the relative sizes of scales on their bodies suggest different patches of colour as modern reptiles do.

 

What annoyed me though was the typical modern documentary style. After every commercial break, the voice-over re-introduced the program saying exactly the same things - and we saw the same computer generated imagery repeatedly. Please - tell me something.... Anything.... I know the teenager found it, you said five times already.... Please... Aww no, not the 'falling over dead' sequence again.... I won't mind if you prove they smoked cigarettes and became extinct because of lung cancer.... Just for something original....

 

This program suffered from one major flaw - they didn't have enough to say to fill an hour.

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Gaius Octavius

"What annoyed me though was the typical modern documentary style. After every commercial break, the voice-over re-introduced the program saying exactly the same things - and we saw the same computer generated imagery repeatedly. Please - tell me something.... Anything.... I know the teenager found it, you said five times already.... Please... Aww no, not the 'falling over dead' sequence again.... I won't mind if you prove they smoked cigarettes and became extinct because of lung cancer.... Just for something original....

 

This program suffered from one major flaw - they didn't have enough to say to fill an hour."

 

Amen! Amen! Five minutes worth of info; the rest twaddle. Sometimes the info is twaddle. I would also add that I wonder if the historians and archaeologists ever peek at the programs that they bloviate in.

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Maladict

This is why I don't have a remote. I get annoyed by the time the first commercial starts, and since I have to get up anyway, I might as well switch it off. Problem solved. smokeing1xf6.gif

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caldrail

I also wonder if the modern fad for computer animations is swallowing up the budget previously spent on expert talking heads. Personally, I think the program could have taken the opportunity to say more about the late cretaceous enviroment of north america (the creature died about two million years before the K/T Even). I admit they did touch on this - they mentioned the 'mississipee sea', the river in the fossil location (that isn't there any more), some speculation about herds of these things running away from T-Rex (who apparently wasn't fast enough to catch them according to the research on the remains locomotion).

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Gaius Octavius
I also wonder if the modern fad for computer animations is swallowing up the budget previously spent on expert talking heads.

 

How about the 'slow' - 'fast'; in - out; 'music'. Then there is the translator whose accent one couldn't cut with an axe. It's a conspiracy! :thumbsup:

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caldrail

Translator? Most of the guys filmed doing the work of studying the remains in america had british accents.

 

Correct GO - the british are taking over dinosaur research in a fiendish plot to prove that dinosaurs did not speak english with an american accent :thumbsup:

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Gaius Octavius
Translator? Most of the guys filmed doing the work of studying the remains in america had british accents.

 

Correct GO - the british are taking over dinosaur research in a fiendish plot to prove that dinosaurs did not speak english with an american accent :thumbsup:

 

Gaius! Be good!

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