Re: Dinosaur cd-rom

[Amado Narvaez <anarvaez@umd5.umd.edu>]

On Wed, 29 Apr 1998, Chris Nedin wrote:

> Does anyone know of a good cd-rom (prefer Mac version - doesn't everyone?)
> we can buy which has nice moving images of dinos running around and
> generally making a lot of noise?  We are trying to get together a dinosaur
> presentation/lecture for school students and can't use footage from
> "Jurassic Park".

The best of the currently available CD-ROM titles with animated clips is
Knowledge Adventure's 3D-Dinosaur Adventure, which is indeed available
for the Mac. There is a particularly nice sequence of a _T. rex_ skeleton
that goes through "reverse" decomposition, regaining the internal organs
and then the flesh until it "walks again."

Unfortunately, although there has been an explosion of dinosaur science
print material recently, such has not been the case with multimedia. In
fact, some really nice CD-ROMs like Microsoft's Dinosaurs and Grolier's
Prehistoria have lapsed into "out-of-print-dom." Maybe this would be an
opportunity for an entrepeneurial paleontologist or two to come up with a
definitive multimedia program for both platforms (Mac and Windows).

It's too bad, too, that some of the dinosaur TV productions of the past
few years are not available in both NTSC and PAL formats.

----- Amado Narvaez