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Re: Terra Nova: thoughts
- To: dinosaur@usc.edu
- Subject: Re: Terra Nova: thoughts
- From: mkirkaldy@aol.com
- Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2011 10:27:44 -0400 (EDT)
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I didn't see all of the program, but would the Brachiosaurs have even
noticed the puny fence around the trees? Seems like a herd of them
would have just pushed through to eat.
Mary
-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas R. Holtz, Jr. <tholtz@umd.edu>
To: dinosaur <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Sent: Tue, Sep 27, 2011 10:00 am
Subject: Terra Nova: thoughts
First, a news article:
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/09/26/7973577-terra-nova-gives-dino-fans-something-new-to-chew-on
Synopsis (superbrief): Colonists from a dystopian mid-22nd Century
populated
entirely by early 21st century suburban Americans
facing environmental catastrophes flee via a rift in time to the early
Santonian
(85 Ma), where they have to deal with dinosaurs,
intra-colony rivalries, and Steven Speilberg.
My Facebook observations are a) kids love the show and b) those who
have been
around the block more often find it tedious, poorly
placed, and a poor execution of some halfway decent ideas.
Now, my thoughts:
Plot/setting: "Political refugees and misfits escape via stable oneway
timerift
to a parallel past" is a combination of science
fiction tropes that work fine for plot reasons. Parallel past allows
for people
to actually act and do things without consequences
for the future (Utley's Silurian short story cycle and Stirling's
Nantucket
series both used this premise). The "political refugees
and misfits escape via stable oneway time rift" is the same background
of May's
Saga of Pliocene Exile, and plenty of good stories
(Steele's Coyote colony books) [and, of course, reality!!] have been
written
about misfits and other refugees as pioneers.
The idea of using the Santonian is a good one: it is largely a
"twilight zone"
in terms of our paleontological knowledge, which
gives greater freedom to the writers. It stands between the pretty well
known
communities of the Cenomanian and the extraordinarily
well known faunas of the Campano-Maastrichtian. If the writers were
clever (ah,
if only...) they could draw upon both time slices to
create late survivors of the Cenomanian faunas and early precursors of
the
latest K. But more about what they actually did below...
I am not quite certain if they established WHERE on the Earth the
colony is (I
missed it if they said). This is an issue, because by
the Santonian you are getting regionalization of faunas to some degree,
and that
is going to effect your taxon choice. Or at least,
it SHOULD affect your taxon choice.
The mountainous setting has multiple uses: From the point of view of
the
audience, it is pretty. From the point of view of
characters in the story, it makes sense: running fresh water, and the
potential
for hydroelectic power. From the point of view of
the writers, the fact that montane faunas basically don't wind up as
fossils
gives them additional leeway in creating taxa.
The critters:
* Brachiosaurus. Umm, Brachiosaurus. Apparently a very late surviving
population... And they obviously went back in time prior to
the 2000s to find these ones, because they hadn't heard about the
repositioning
of the fleshy nostrils! (My suspicion: they modded
the CGI models from Jurassic Park, and didn't correct this issue). Nice
aspect:
they make reference to the fact (in our world,
possibility) that they occasionally chomped on small animals, too: hat
tip to
Greg Paul. On the other hand, they referred to
"incisors" on these guys...
* Carnotaurus. A very early population of these... (Redated,
Carnotaurus is one
of the youngest of the abelisaurids. But it was once
considered Aptian/Albian. Maybe this is a population in transit due to
the
redating...) Utterly failed to get the forearms right on
them (again!): so far Dinosaur Revolution and Planet Dinosaur's models
are the
only correct abelisaurid arms in CG. While we do not
have Carnotaurus' metatarsi, they gave it feet that are probably far
too long
and slender based on other abelisaurids.
They could have said "brachiosaur" and "abelisaur" and it would have
been fine:
we might get both of these 85 Ma. Specifying the
genus name (okay, I know that etymologically that phrase is
inaccurate!) sets
them up to be wrong. If I were a consultant on this
(which I'm not), I would encourage them not to use particular known
genera.
Also, this is where knowledge of where on Earth they are is important.
If North
America or mainland Asia, the presence of an
abelisaurid is just contradictory to our current information on
dinosaurian
biogeography! Any other continent, not so bad.
* Acceraptor. An invented dinosaur, nicknamed "the slasher". Inventing
new
dinosaurs isn't a bad idea, so long as the invention is
reasonable, given that new species are named at a rate of about 1/week
or more.
This thing, though: it looks something like a
toothed oviraptorosaur (or an oviraptorosaur-crested dromaeosaur) with
Jurassic
Park "bunny hands" syndrome and a slashing tail
weapon. If it were me, I'd have suggested some sort of megaraptoran
neovenatorid. (And jeez, if you want a pack hunting predator,
you are smack dab in the middle of Eudromaeosauria's stratigraphic
range!)
* Giant centipedes. Yes, you read me right: giant freaking scolopendrid
centipedes. Maybe 2 m long. What is next: giant man-eating
plants with mobile tentacles?!? Shades of bad "lost world" movies of
yore...
The colony:
Fleeing to the mid-Cretaceous to escape high CO2 levels, is like
trying to get
out of the cold by heading back to the Last Glacial
Maximum! It is NOT going to be like a "breath of fresh air". They do
make
reference to people and crops suffering from hyperoxic
conditions, but it is not certain if this is because they are using the
model
where mid-Jurassic through Cretaceous atmosphere have
higher-than-present pO2 concentrations (still a matter of debate in
paleoclimatology), or if it is supposed to be the reaction of
people from the craptactular atmosphere of the mid-22nd Century
breathing clean
air for once. Sadly, I expect the latter. Just a
reminder: the atmosphere of the past is no more the same as the present
atmosphere anymore than the geography of the past is like
the present.
That said, at least it would lack all the industrial pollutants, so
there are
plenty of reasons to want to go back.
However, food may be an issue: most grains use the C4 metabolic
pathway, and
these plants do poorly in higher CO2 conditions. They
will probably have to mostly live off the land.
SPECULATIONS (you are warned): There are mysterious writing (equations)
left on
rocks that the colony leader has forbidden people to
see. Given these, and some other comments, I suspect that the secret
mission of
the colony is actually to set up a reverse time rift
to ship back natural resources to their home timeline. Or maybe not,
we'll see.
--