New extended version of Future is Wild

["Thomas R. Holtz, Jr." <tholtz@geol.umd.edu>]

Greetings,

Last night Animal Planet started showing the new extended version of the
Future is Wild.  This is still probably not the original British version.
The new version is a series of two hour episodes, each being one of the time
slices.  Last night was the -5 Ma slice.  In any case, there was some good
and some bad:
*The addition of various talking heads, including DML's own Jim Farlow,
invert paleo Peter Ward, Neil Shubin, and comic book writer Stan Lee.  (Why
the heck Stan Lee was on, I have no idea...)
*The addition of biomes and taxa cut out of the initial U.S. showing (for
example, the Mediterranean Desert fauna)
*Attack of the stock footage!!  In order to bump these episodes up to two
hours (even with the talking heads), they kept on reusing the same shots
(sometimes mirror-reversed) in order to extend the "story line".
*Astounding new information: such as crocodiles being a type of lizards...

Incidentally, for non-U.S. viewers: did the version you see have the space
probes?

                Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
                Vertebrate Paleontologist
Department of Geology           Director, Earth, Life & Time Program
University of Maryland          College Park Scholars
                College Park, MD  20742
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/tholtz.htm
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~jmerck/eltsite
Phone:  301-405-4084    Email:  tholtz@geol.umd.edu
Fax (Geol):  301-314-9661       Fax (CPS-ELT): 301-405-0796