September 10, 2012
Dinosaurs on a Spaceship
I have a confession to make. Before this weekend, I’d never watched even a single episode of Doctor Who. (Shock. Horror.) I’m a bad nerd, I know. But when BBC One announced that the second episode of the show’s seventh season was titled “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship”, I knew I had to finally check out the goofy sci-fi staple.
I’m not going to say much about the plot of the show itself. When you have dinosaurs, Queen Nefertiti and a pair of insecure sentry robots voiced by David Mitchell and Robert Webb on the same ship–among other things–it’s better to simply let the program speak for itself. All you need to know is that an alien ark is harboring a number of dinosaurs rescued from earth before the non-avian varieties perished around 66 million years ago. I will say this, though: the dinosaurs in this episode of Doctor Who look infinitely better than the wonky puppets in the “Invasion of the Dinosaurs” episode of the original series. (Worst. Dinosaurs. Ever.)
Let’s start with the non-dinosaurian aspect of the alien ship’s prehistoric bestiary first. At one point, the Doctor and companions are attacked by a flock of Pteranodon. (Because where you find dinosaurs, flying monsters are never far behind.) The experts behind Pterosaur.net are better qualified to comment on these flying, non-dinosaurian archosaurs than I, but, my apologies to the Doctor, “pterodactyl” isn’t the proper term for these animals. The proper general term for these flapping archosaurs is “pterosaur.” “Pterodactyl” is an outdated term derived from the genus name of the first pterosaur recognized by science, but the term isn’t used by specialists anymore. It’s time to put “pterodactyl” to rest.
The rest of the Cretaceous cast is relatively thin. A pair of ornery ankylosaurs–modeled after Euoplocephalus–make a smashing entrance early on in the show, and our heroes soon cross a snoozing Tyrannosaurus youngster. Sadly, the juvenile tyrant is neither fuzzy nor sufficiently awkward-looking. Thanks to specimens such as “Jane“, we know that young Tyrannosaurus were leggy, slim and had relatively shallow skulls. They didn’t have the bone-crushing skull profile of their parents or the graceful bulk. And, as I’ve remarked many times before, young tyrannosaurs may very well have been fluffy flesh-rippers. The Doctor Who version, unfortunately, looks like a shrunken version of an adult.
Two different dinosaur species get most of the screen time, though. A friendly–or, at least, not overly aggressive–Triceratops helps the Doctor and friends out of a few tight spots. Like the ankylosaurs, though, the ceratopsid is a little bit too tubby and doesn’t run quite right. A Triceratops is not a horse. Likewise, the dinosaur’s tail was a bit too limp. The organ, essential to balance, flopped around like a big green sausage. All the same, the big herbivore was rather cute.
The dromaeosaurids, on the other claw, were not so friendly. They mostly keep to the shadows until the final act and are ferocious enough to temporarily endanger the crew. All the same, the unidentified “raptors” suffered the curse of the bunny hands and insufficient feathery coats. Filmmakers seem reluctant to drape feathers over dromaeosaurids, but, for any effects artists who may be reading, we know that these dinosaurs had exquisite plumage covering almost their entire body. If you’re going to have raptors, they should be intricately feathery. Nevertheless, I liked the idea that dinosaurs could ruffle their feathers to communicate with each other, and potential threats. You may want to laugh at a Deinonychus all puffed up, but that will be the last sound you ever make before it starts to eat you.
[For another take on the episode's dinosaurs, see Marc Vincent's post at Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs.]
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Excellent blog and I hate to drag us all back into pedant’s corner re:language but I do rather like this bit
““pterodactyl” isn’t the proper term for these animals. The proper general term for these flapping archosaurs is “pterosaur.””
The term used generally more by everyone outside the palaeontological community isn’t the correct general term? Surely the more general use of it means it is?
I guess it depends on if you think language should conform with actual use rather than proper etomology but I think it is a bit of an uphill struggle with pterodactyl (even though it pains me to say it).
Cool!
It’s probably worth pointing out (well, I say “worth”…) that a term being “outmoded” and not used “anymore” probably doesn’t mean a lot to a time traveller. I mean, the Doctor’s medical degree was earned in the 19th century so it’s equally possible his paleontology credentials are just as dusty and old. (Besides which, for all we know “pterodactyl” could be back in fashion 200 years from now!)
And another thing, though it doesn’t really blunt your point about the accuracy, according to the Doctor Who Magazine feature on this episode the mantra of the CGI team was “No fur, no feathers, no flocking” to describe what *couldn’t* be done on a TV budget. So it’s not so much Ignorance at work as Doctor Who’s constant enemy since the 60s — Lack of Money.
To be fair, convincing plumage is render and time intensive. It would be pretty hard to pull off well on a TV budget. Scales? Much easier.
One thing you do need to keep in mind is that feathers are really hard to do in 3D well. Which means they cost a lot more…
Not that I’m saying they shouldn’t try once and a while, but just remember they are not something you can just add with no consequence to production values, time, or effort.
All that means feathers are out of the artists hands (and the artists have no choice anyways in a production pipeline… ultimately it is up to the director. If they say no, it doesn’t happen).
That episode ranked worst episode ever. Incompetent all around.
Woah, Brian. It is not very scientific to assert all dromaeosaurs had to be covered in feathers, just because feathers are present in a the fossil remains of a few species that tend to be smaller animals. And while you seem to be content that baby T-Rexes were fluffy, though their parents probably weren’t, it is just as possible adults of some of the larger D-saurs also shed their baby fuzz and looked like a Jurassic Park “Raptor”. Until that time machine is built, we will probably never know for sure.
I don’t get the hate that so many people have for the word “pterodactyl”. Pteranodon is a member of the pterosaur clade Pterodactyloidea. Calling it a “pterodactyl” is exactly like calling Yutyrannus a “tyrannosaur” (which you did when you blogged about it).
This show sounds terrible. I’m happy that as a proud non-nerd, I’m not obligated to watch it.
I absolutely love that last sentence:
“You may want to laugh at a Deinonychus all puffed up, but that will be the last sound you ever make before it starts to eat you.”
I struggled through the last season of Primeval despite their insistence to reduce(!) the plumage on their maniraptorans, and was hoping that’d be the last time I see such abominations on British TV. Sadly, I was again badly mistaken. Budget seems to be the worst enemy of accurate deinonychosaurs, although it doesn’t really explain the bunny hands.
Also, Dan, the scenario you describe is about as likely as Phorusrhacids shedding their feathers as they matured and turning into scaly freaks. You can’t conclusively prove it didn’t happen, so it clearly has to be plausible!
If you’re going to choose what science-fiction to watch based on how accurately dinosaurs are rendered, then don’t bother, because you’re completely missing the point.
“Invasion of the Dinosaurs”, one of the Third Doctor’s best adventures (Jon Pertwee), wasn’t actually about Dinosaurs, it was about genocide. Were the special effects bad? Of course, but who cares? By the way, I thought “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” was the first Doctor Who you watched?
Dinosaurs in the last episode of Doctor Who were an element in a story. So they weren’t made perfectly accurate, so what? Are you telling me that the cops in “CSI” are accurate? Or the politicians in “The West Wing”, or the people in “Seinfeld”? A story is being told in an entertaining way, and in the case of Doctor Who, a bigger message is also trying to be conveyed. It would help if you understood that.
I don’t watch Doctor Who anyway because the writing and storytelling is too juvenile – and this is coming from someone who enjoys a couple of juvenile pursuits. But when I heard dinosaurs were in this episode I knew I had to avoid channel-hopping on Saturday evening. This write-up tells me what a good decision that was.
I don’t watch CSI or The West Wing either.
Easiest explanation for the pterodactyl error: the Doctor maybe doesn’t know the right terminology either. He’s not from around here, after all.
Or maybe he speaks pterosaur and knows they’d rather be called pterodactyls? (If you watch more of the show, you’ll learn that in the last season, it’s been revealed that the Time Lord gift of language turns out to be far more extensive than previously disclosed. Either that, or the Doctor is pulling everybody’s leg, which is entirely possible, and in character.) What struck me is that they were very large; a lot of folks, likely including writer Chris Chibnall and the effects team, don’t realize how small pterodactyls and most other pterosaurs were. Much like modern fliers, most specimens are small. These are so large I found myself wondering if “azdarchid” would be a better word, except that of course few in the audience would know it. The azdarchids were the biggest of all pterosaurs, including the gigantic Quetzalcoatlus. Of course, that also brings to mind the fairly controversial status of giant pterosaurs; the traditional depiction of them as filling a niche analogous to large seabirds or wading birds may not be accurate, given that many fossils are found on what was likely dry land. Some paleontologists have gone so far as to suggest they lived mainly on savannahs, though it’s really hard to say right now. In the movie, though, it very much seemed they were pandering to the pterosaurs = ancient seabirds notion. Not a big deal for me; it’s certainly not out of the question. It did seem a bit stereotypical, but then, this was a light romp of an episode, and the beauty of stereotypes is the audience gets them very quickly without explanation.
BTW, there is a simple reason why effects people are reluctant to abandon scaly or minimally feathered dinosaurs — scaly skin is a hell of a lot easier to render without looking weird.
For a full-length movie, I would expect feathered dinosaurs. A TV series, however, I can accept deciding on a more traditional (albeit less accurate) depiction. I’d rather have decent looking scaly dinosaurs than crummy looking feathered ones, even if the feathers are more paleontologically accurate.
whew, there’s a term for people who are overly persnicketty about details, the nicer version being anal-retentive, and it looks like we’ve got a good case here. More importanty, however, until we’ve found a fossil of a large (human-sized) raptor that is “intricately feathery,” to say we “know” they were like that is just plain wrong. I can just imagine some far-distant future blogger criticizing a show for showing an elephant, rhino, or hippo, or even a whale as being relatively hairless, “because we know that mammals were covered in thick hair.”
Totally with David Bump on this one.
Brian Switek needs to lay off the caffeine and recognize that artistic license presents no threat to scientific literacy. The not-feathery-enough raptors are no more a threat to paleontology than the sound in space in “Star Wars” is a threat to astronomy.
But I’ve already said this rant. http://johnkpatterson.wordpress.com/2012/10/01/feathered-dinosaurs-vigilance-and-room-for-artistic-license/