Paleofest Report 2017

It’s time for my annual report of Paleofest in the Burpee Museum in Rockford. Last year I skipped the report considering the high amount of unreleased data as part of it, which is a shame since it was quite good. This year there are fewer spoilers, but I did wait a month after the event. For more on Paleofest itself, please check out my first report here: http://davidsamateurpalaeo.blogspot.com/2015/04/paleofest-2015-report.html

Top 10 Dinosaur fights in fiction

Everyone loves dinosaur fights. All the best dinosaur films have them. What’s better than big, bizarre prehistoric creatures? When they duke it out! They can be violent, they can be bloody, but they’re always exciting.  The very first would be the Ghost of Slumber mountain, where two Triceratops duel and one of them is then killed by a Tyrannosaurus in a fight. The last would be the Pachyrhinosaurus-Gorgosaurus brawl at the climax of Walking With Dinosaurs.  Hopefully this year’s Jurassic World will have the decency of giving us one.  Most of these fights are wildly anachronistic between supersized versions, and some of them involve animals that are not dinosaurs or even real animals, but it gives that element of fantasy that dinosaurs invoke by their very prescence. This list is entirely subjective, so I’ll leave a long list of runners up first-

An overview of Dinosaur Exhibits part 6: Denver Museum of Nature and Science

Colorado is what you can consider a rich state for fossils.  Marine reptiles, prehistoric mammals, ice age megafauna, Jurassic dinosaurs and Cretaceous dinosaurs can all be found on both sides of the Rockies.  On the west side are the Museum of Western Colorado in Grand Junction and the Royal Gorge Regional Museum and History Center in Canyon City.  On the other are  the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center in Woodland Park and the subject of today’s article, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

An Overview of Dinosaur Exhibits Part 4: The Carnegie Museum

Most times in which I hear about museums are in the context of a book or documentary. This week’s museum, however, I first learned from a series of toys.  I remember my first dinosaur toys being from the Funrise series of animal figures, and the Imperial Toys large toys. The best, however, I encountered in first grade. The classroom has a display of them, with an accompanying poster. The name was distinctive-“The Carnegie Collection”.  They were big enough to be detailed but not too big enough to effect play. They were beautiful, sculpted, and sturdy. They ranged from familiar animals like Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops to more obscure animals like Maiasaura. 

An Overview of Dinosaur Exhibits Part Three: The Field Museum

I think everyone has their favorite place in the world, a place that just restores their life, a place tied up with countless memories. It can be a house or a park, or a stadium, or a school.  For me it was the Field Museum of Natural History on the East Side of Chicago near Grant Park. I can’t remember when I first went. It might have been in 1991, or even as a baby.  You see, when I lived in Chicago, you could go to the library and get passes for the Field Museum, Art Institute, Shedd Aquarium or the Adler Planetarium. My mother didn’t have a job at the time, so she would take me, my mother, and our two cousins to the museums and zoos of Chicago. 

Documentary Review: Clash of the Dinosaurs

Paleontologists usually don’t get furious, at least not at their job. Yeah, there are arguments and disagreements and the natural reaction to creationists and other forms of pseudoscience and anti-science, but personal offense isn’t usually part of the day. This makes such incidents very notable and significant. You see, the media is both the ally and nemesis of scientists; most of the time they help each other out, but when the deals go bad, things can be very messy. Today I’m going to talk about Matt Wedel and Clash of the Dinosaurs.

An overview of dinosaur exhibits, part 2: American Museum of Natural History, New York

I haven’t seen every dinosaur museum in the country. I haven’t seen every dinosaur museum in the world. I’ve only seen a dozen or so. Still, I would still argue that the American Museum of Natural History in New York City sets the standard. New York has always been about bigger, better, shinier and more expensive in everything, and the museum is no exception.  New York is full of beautiful attractions: Central Park, the Met, the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, the Bronx zoo, and so on, but the one I insisted on seeing when I was in the area was the American Museum.

The museum is fairly distinctive-part brick, part glass, part neoclassical, with a statue of Theodore Roosevelt adorning one entrance. The interior is well lit and absolutely huge. There are 4 levels, not counting the basement with a parking lot and food court. The top floor is the one we’re looking at today-yes, the entire floor is dedicated to over a century of fossil finding. Since New York has always been a playground for the rich, the museum has been able to afford many an expedition, and many of the world’s top paleontologists. 

Documentary Review: Walking With Dinosaurs 1999

Today’s review should be compared with the previous documentary review. Of course, this television program was made 10 years later. In the late 90s, with the dinosaur enthusiasm produced by Jurassic Park still strong, documentary producer Tim Haines wanted to make a cinematic style documentary about prehistoric mammals. Dinosaurs proved to be more popular, however, and Haines was told he could make a mammal program if and only if he could make a dinosaur program first. In 1999, the BBC produced a high concept, highly expensive, ambitious 6-part miniseries: Walking With Dinosaurs. Suffice to say, it was a hit. Its imaginative style of prehistoric drama with overlaying narration, based on nature documentaries, set the paradigm for all paleontology documentaries since.  So today, I’m going to cover all 6 episodes, and see how they compare today. Why? Well,  this winter the BBC’s nature film company will release a dinosaur epic under the same title, continuing the legacy of their megahit 14 years before.

Movie Review: Fantasia (1940)

It’s Friday, and time for another film review! This week is a return to good movies, and this one is one of my first, and one of my favorites. My dad introduced me to Classical Music at a young age, and decided to nourish it with the 1940 Walt Disney animated classic Fantasia. The dazzling colors and shapes set to Bach’s toccata and fugue in D minor, the antics of Mickey Mouse set to Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the classical majesty combined with colorful creatures of classical myth set to Beethoven’s 6^th symphony, satirical slapstick animal ballet of Ponchielli’s Dance of the hours and the nightmarish demonic revelry in Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain all made impacts on me, but it was the prehistoric epic of the Rite of Spring that impressed me the most. It was at the time I loved dinosaurs thanks to this film, The Land Before Time, and trips to the Field Museum’s dinosaur hall. Thanks to Fantasia, my love of dinosaurs increased and my love of classical musical blossomed. It’s still one of my favorite movies and Stravinsky is one of my favorite composers.

Movie Review: The Lost World (1925)

It’s Friday and that means it’s movie night! Yes, today we’re going to look at a dinosaur movie, and this time we’re looking at one of the first. Today’s film is from 1925-yes, dinosaurs not only were before people, but before talkies. This is Harry Hoyt’s adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s the Lost World. Before Harry Potter and its trend of having films made of recent popular books, this film was made only 13 years after the original book was published, and proved more popular.  Every dinosaur fan has  seen this, every fan of special effects owes it to themselves to see it,  and the bizarre history of this film makes it special among even silent films.

An overview of dinosaur exhibits, part 1: The 19th century universities

Since age 4, I’ve been a museum fanatic. I still have dreams about museums that exist only in my mind. Of course, the best museums are the natural history museums and their highlights are always the dinosaur exhibits. Dinosaurs are big business for these museums, so every natural history museum has a fossil exhibit of some sort. However, there’s more than one way to make a fossil exhibit, and not only does the format depend on the fossils involved,  but the artistic style, the fashion of the period, and the overall scheme of the curators.

I never go on vacation without seeing a dinosaur-if there is a museum, I will visit it. Some vacations I’ve based solely on museums. Still, I haven’t seen some in years, such as the Los Angeles Museum or Royal Ontario Museum, and since they have since been renovated I will omit them from the list. The following are a list of museums I’ve visited and the structure of their dinosaur exhibits, in the order of the age of the institution.