I was only a year old when BBC’s landmark series Walking with Dinosaurs first aired, but I have to imagine watching it in 1999 must have felt similar to the way I felt watching Prehistoric Planet this week. Not since then has the age of dinosaurs ever been portrayed so believably. For the first time in a big-budget media project we’re getting depictions of Mesozoic life that isn’t plagued by concessions and strange design choices. Feathers are commonplace. Multi-ton behemoths…
documentary
Dinosaur documentaries on TV don’t always enjoy the best of reputations. The BBC’s latest effort, The Real T. rex (deciding how to italicise that is giving me a headache), received some unfortunate early notoriety in online-palaeo-nerd circles when an image of a CG model from the programme did the rounds, depicting a rather goofy-looking, Jeremy Clarkson-haired, Simpsons-overbite weirdo. This prompted a ‘remodel’ by Fred Wierum aka ‘Fred the Dinosaurman’, as shown below, which received its own share of criticism (dangly…