Thanksgiving! I wish you all a wonderful one this year even though, of course, this Thanksgiving is going to be different. But the important parts of Thanksgiving should survive 2020. And as we learned about five years ago, Thanksgiving is about family! And food. And eating a turkey!
Turkeys are birds! Prehistoric-ish birds, even! Therefore, they are dinosaurs! So we should celebrate Thanksgiving with dinosaurs! I have definitely made this joke before!
Everyone of a certain generation remembers the Eyewitness books, which I covered a long time ago. The documentary series is a little more obscure, but the couple of episodes I've watched are quite nice. They manage to feel like thumbing through one of the books, and I love the opening credits sequence! That imaginary museum is basically what my "Mind Palace" feels like. I really like how they use film clips where the books would use still pictures and art; a Good Book-To-TV Adaptation.
"Eyewitness: Dinosaur" even goes so far as to animate stop-motion versions of the signature dinosaur models from it's book equivalent. We also get a cute Aardman-ish mascot character who looks like an ancestor of Henry from "Amazing Animals", which was kind of a spinoff series. And we get a little bit of Phil Tippett's "Prehistoric Beast" to boot!
We also get the strangest variation of the 90's "little theropods are in one clade, big theropods are in a different one" Great Theropod Classification Mess-Up I've ever seen, and it's right there in the preview of the video. So basically, for a long time, little theropods like Compsognathus and Coelophysis and the smaller Maniraptors were all thought to be related and placed in the Coelurosaur clade. Meanwhile Allosaurus, Dilophosaurus, Spinosaurus and good old T. rex, since they were all large, were "Carnosaurs". In hindsight, this is obviously wrong as hell and kind of like saying "Foxes, housecats, otters, and terriers are all in one family group; wolves, lions, wolverines, and Great Danes are in another, different family group."
Well according to "Eyewitness: Dinosaur", little theropods/Coelurosaurs are in the same family group as birds and large theropods/Carnosaurs are in the same group as... crocodiles. Which is like saying, "Foxes, housecats, otters, and terriers are all in one family group which also includes pinnipeds (I guess? Look, we have a distinct lack of an entire clade of diverse flying carnivores, so stay with me.) Meanwhile, wolves, lions, wolverines, and Great Danes are in another, different family group which also includes... Dimetrodon." That is, at least, a new one.
Have a lovely Thanksgiving, everyone! I am, as always, truly thankful for all of you. 💖
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Art of the Day! A nice little landscape for your holiday weekend.
