Given all the recent stink over a certain other documentary, I’m not exactly itching to jump back into dino docs.
Oh well.
The Public Broadcasting Service’s long running series NOVA, has a new episode out, entitled Arctic Dinosaurs. The episode is about a particularly exciting find in Alaska, and its implications for our view on dinosaurs. The researchers; namely museum Victoria’s Tom Rich and MNS Dallas’ Anthony Fiorillo, came across a fossil bed along Alaska’s north slope, that revealed the existence of hadrosaurs, ceratopians and coelurosaur theropods, all living in far North Alaska.
As I had mentioned previously, NOVA tends to get lauded for its well put together documentaries. I would argue that this doc was no different; though there were some missteps that I feel may be a sign of NOVA’s producers trying to fall more in line with the fare seen on Discovery Channel and the A&E networks.
First, and foremost, I would like to applaud PBS for making this NOVA special available online.
Secondly, I would like to lambast PBS for what is probably their most egregious error with this, and other NOVA specials. Namely the lack of Firefox love. The only way I am able to watch these NOVA specials is by firing up Internet Explorer. If I use Firefox all that happens is I get a dead loading screen.
The premise of the series is fine, and as in previous iterations, NOVA has done a good job of letting the scientists talk how scientists really talk (i.e. with lots of caution and caveats).
I was far less impressed with the writing for the narrator. There were more than a few instances where the narrator resorted to straight up hyperbole. Especially in the beginning when it is revealed that all these dinosaur fossils had been found in this polar state.
The narrator said:
The startling discovery that these ancient reptiles, “thunder lizards,” lived and thrived in the arctic has taken scientists by surprise.
Then a little later:
According to conventional wisdom, it shouldn’t be here, because this is how dinosaurs are typically pictured: cold-blooded reptiles living in tropical climes, not in cold, arctic environments like this one. And the Hadrosaur is not alone.
Um, no. We have had discoveries of dinosaurs, and other reptiles from polar and paleo-polar latitudes, for decades now. The real neat thing about this find, was the sheer number of animals discovered. This doc served more as a review of what we have learned so far, rather than a breaking news story.
There was another writing snafu that occurred a little further in too that I feel needs clarifying:
Scientists long believed that dinosaur biology resembled that of cold-blooded reptiles like crocodiles, animals that require warmth to survive and cannot withstand prolonged exposure to temperatures below freezing. But not one crocodile fossil has been found along the Colville, which suggests that polar dinosaurs found a way to adapt to an environment that their cold-blooded cousins couldn’t tolerate. But how?
This statement is misleading. We do have evidence of non-dinosaurian polar reptiles. These include Cretaceous crocodylian and turtle fossils found in Victoria, Australia (which would have been closer to the South Pole) and Axel Heiberg Island in Canada, as well as plesiosaur fossils from Antarctica, and at least the assumption that Meiolaniid turtles (large, ankylosaur like armoured turtles that lived from the late Cretaceous through to the Pleistocene) had once lived in Antarctica.
Oh, and also Leaellynasaura amicagraphica was a herbivore; not a carnivore as was stated in the show.
So there were those few writing missteps. The only other thing I can fault the show for was its very lackluster CG work. As NOVA is a mostly public funded series, I can forgive the lower quality CG work, though I still think they could have afforded to make their models at least a tad more realistic (especially since they teased feathers on Dromaeosaurus albertensis before returning to scaly maniraptors (i.e. the Troodon formosus). Plus their Gorgosaurus libratus was just atrocious.
Regardless, most of these complaints are small. The writing flubs were probably the worst offenders. Short of that, the show was well put together. Though the show still fell a little more in the pro-warm-blooded camp for dino metabolism, it was the first and only time I have ever heard a documentary point out that warm-blooded and cold-blooded are opposite ends of a continuum. In fact one of the better writing moments occurred towards the end when the narrator stated:
Dinosaurs likely had their own unique solution to the body temperature problem, which allowed them to survive for millions of years in the toughest seasonal conditions their world had to offer.
It was nice to see a documentary that actually took a more objective stance on the whole thermophysiological debate.
Finally another big plus for this show was the sheer number of paleontologists that rarely seem to make it in front of the camera, including Hans-Dieter Sues and Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan (the latter of whom while being a great scientist, has one of the harder to pronounce names in paleontology).
Overall, this was another fine piece of work from the folks over at NOVA. Though there was a tendency to stray into the realm of hyperbole with the narration, and the CG work is somewhat painful to watch, the show proved informative and interesting.
In the end, that’s really all a documentary should strive for.
~Jura
