Subject: Prehistoric Park Date: Sun, 05 Nov 2006 22:24:49 -0800
I've been enjoying the new paleontological series on Animal Planet with Nigel Marvin at his most suicidal.
same here...its a fun series!
This is a man who ventures into unknown ecosystems with a CO2 meter (for volcanic fumes), but no firearms.
imagine the sight...
By rights he should have been eaten half a dozen times by now, by things ranging from T-rex to short-faced cave bears...all of which he's managed to outrun on foot. It's worse than all those wildlife celebrities who pick up venomous snakes...seriously!
The outrageous cheating-of-death aside, the conceit of the show: capturing extinct animals for breeding programs as we do with extant ones works quite well. The "time portal" is never explained, just assumed (two probes, stuck in the ground and activated, form a "time field" between them),
_However_, entertaining as it is as fiction; I find that the existence of time-travel is just too huge to be treated in such a haphazard manner. They're just wandering randomly through time snagging 1-2 species per jaunt.
P.S. Nigel pronounces it "FOR-us-RAW-kid"...just in case anyone was curious.
P.P.S. On an unrelated note, would anyone happen to know, off the top of their heads, a greek/latin cognate for "lighter-than-air" or "floating". I'm creating some balloon-creatures for a novel and while "pneumathere" has a nice ring to it, it's not quite what I was hoping for.