Re: The Lost Dinosaurs Of Egypt (just seen it).

[Josh Smith <smithjb@sas.upenn.edu>]

Quoting Luis Rey <luisrey@ndirect.co.uk>:

OK.  Here we go.   I guess no one had anything better to do last 
night....
> 
> It was entertaining to say the least and some of the animations
> were decent (a bit on the cardboard side sometimes) and well located
> in mangrel environments.

I didn't think the animations were that good myself.  However, before 
everyone on the DML spends a week and a half whining about the CG and 
comparing it to Walking with Dinosaurs, could we all perhaps remember 
that we had about 10% of their budget and half the time to do it all?

I am not sure what a mangrel environment is.

> I still wonder why they keep making dinosaurs with
> boxed heads...

I am not sure what you mean by this.  The _Paralititan_ and 
_Aegyptosaurus_ reconstructions were based on the most current data we 
had, including a good bit of forthcoming information.  

> and seeing a frontal attack from Spinosaurus to a wounded sauropod
> and the slender head of the predator struggle with the enormously
> thick neck of the Paralititan was something that I would never
> describe as 'believable'. If it wasn't believable in Jurassic Park it
> wasn't going to be here. Carcharodontosaurus (also featured) would
> have been a better candidate for a sauropod attack (but it was kept
> waiting in the wings).

Welcome to Battle #367 that Josh lost with the film company.  My 
position (indeed that of most of the team) was basically that 
_Carcharodontosaurus_ would have been better here.  However, since we 
initially went to Egypt looking for _Spinosaurus_ and it was the 
keynote taxon of Stromer's expeditions, they wanted to make it the 
central figure in the documentary.  So they did.  Many of our 
interviews discuss this animal and they wanted to feature it in the 
CG.  You should have seen what they had it doing in the first couple of 
versions of the battle between it and _Paralititan_....


> On the other hand, the treatment of the expedition as an
> extension of Stromer's work was nicely done and there were some very
> dramatic moments. There's a true sense of history throughout all the
> program. Good also to see paleontologists losing their temper in
> their field desperation.

In truth, we tried to get all of the arguments edited out, but failed.  
We thought it took away from the film.  I am somewhat surprised you 
liked that aspect of it.


> What I would say is the highlight of the show was the discovery of
> those forgotten Stromer photographs at the museum in Munich ... it
> also highlights the neglect and sad state of paleontology in Germany
> (and Europe) these days (source of much debate in the Vertpaleo list
> recently).
> And yes, predictably whatever Egyptian institutional involvement
> in this was completely overlooked. 

Yep.  Wonderful isn't it.

> It would have also been useful to tie all the discoveries with the
> some other African research (Sereno's Moroccan Carcharodontosaurus or
> Philip Taquet's Ouranosaurus from Niger).

Sereno was approached but declined to appear on camera.

> 
> By the way there was no 'camel scene'... did we miss something
> vital?
> 
Maybe it got cut.  There was a scene of us riding camels around the 
pyramids in the beginning of the last cut I saw (indeed, all of the 
cuts) that we all hated and thought was terribly cheesy.

-Josh

----
Josh Smith
Department of Anthropology
Harvard University
18 Traymore Street
Cambridge, MA 02140
Office: 617.495.1966
Project Director, Bahariya Dinosaur Project
http://www.egyptdinos.org