Re: BBC THEROPOD PROGRAMME

[Luis Rey <luisrey@ndirect.co.uk>]

As Darren rightly has pointed out, if there's something that the BBC
program lacked was essentially originality and almost any kind of rigour.
One of the main (long outdated) assertions was that  sauropods were
traditionally believed completely extinct from the Northern Emisphere by
Cretaceous times and  hence it was thought that  sauropods were not
adapted to confront Tyrannosaurus-sized 'really big predators'. They
manipulated the information of the program so it could show that it was
thanks to the discovery of Argentinosaurus and Giganotosaurus in the same
strata that this belief was challenged.
First of all, what time scale at the level of "traditional knowledge" are
we talking about?  Early 20th Century? Whatever happened to Alamosaurus,
assorted European and North American brachiosaurids. Opisthocoelicaudia
and several titanosaurids from China and Mongolia including
Nemengtosaurus? And I'm sure I'm missing quite a few that were already
known >decades< ago. Even Bakker would depict battling T. rex and
Alamosaurus in his good ol' Heresies.

The main premise was wrong from the start.

So after  doing the Columbus trip once again, the BBC perpetrates the
atrocity of recycling  WWD Diplodocus as a plated titanosaur!  And goes on
showing a giraffe necked Allosaurus  as Giganotosaurus (and yes Darren,
with the >same< originally wrong horns on top of the eyes).

The only part of the program that I found essentially enjoyable (apart
from seeing some great people talking and have another peek to those
awesome Argentinosaurus bones) was Currie's quest and find of Barnum
Brown's  albertosaur pack site. Finding the site through old pictures was
quite a feat.


Luis Rey

Visit my website on http//:www.ndirect.co.uk/~luisrey