Smithsonian.com

I’ve never been a “Doctor Who” fan, but any show that devotes an episode to dinosaurs is  alright in my book. In the above video, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks talk about how the clunky, stiff dinosaurs in the 1970s episode “Invasion of the Dinosaurs” came to life (or, as it were, not).

Since Jack Horner and James Gorman’s book How to Build a Dinosaur debuted almost three years ago, periodic lectures, interviews and articles have piqued the public’s curiosity about reverse-engineering a non-avian dinosaur from an avian one. Perhaps a “chickenosaurus” isn’t as outlandish as it sounds.

The possibility of creating a long-tailed chicken with teeth and claws is based on the fact that birds are living dinosaurs. A relatively minimal amount of tinkering could turn a bird into something like its non-avian ancestors. But, during the dinomania of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the idea that birds were derived from dinosaurs was still something that made people tilt their heads and say “What?” Rather than focus on efforts to turn birds into something akin to a dromaeosaur, dinosaur documentaries envisioned the real evolutionary changes by which one lineage of non-avian dinosaurs were adapted into early birds. Even better, two shows animated this change.

Within the array of Mesozoic programming from the early 1990s, one of my favorite shows was The Dinosaurs! This four-part PBS miniseries featured scientists investigating the details of dinosaur lives, and different prehistoric vignettes were presented in colorful animated sequences. The one that stuck with me most powerfully was a short scene about the origin of birds. A small, green dinosaur akin to Compsognathus runs through a forest, but when the theropod pauses on a branch it rapidly grows feathers. In an instant the small coelurosaur changed into Archaeopteryx. The 19th century naturalist Thomas Henry Huxley was absolutely right when he imagined that, when clothed in feathers, a dinosaur like Compsognathus would look little different from archaic birds.

But a similar clip from an earlier, 1989 episode of the series The Infinite Voyage is even better. The episode, “The Great Dinosaur Hunt,” is an excellent snapshot of how perspectives on dinosaurs were changing in the wake of the “Dinosaur Renaissance,” and the program included a similar coelurosaur-to-bird transformation. This time, though, the change starts with a fuzzy, feather-covered dromaeosaurid similar to the sickle-clawed Deinonychus. Rather than focus on the outside of the dinosaur, though, the show gives viewers an animated X-ray view as the skull, arms, shoulders, legs and hips are gradually modified in a transition through Archaeopteryx and modern birds. The change didn’t happen exactly like this—Deinonychus was a larger dinosaur that lived millions of years after Archaeopteryx—but different anatomies represent the general pattern of the evolutionary change.

I still have a fondness for those animations. Part of that affinity is probably due to nostalgia, but I also think that they beautifully illustrate a point that is often taken for granted now. The fact that birds are modern dinosaurs is reiterated in books, museum displays, CGI-ridden documentaries and blogs, but rarely do we see the transitional changes actually laid out in front of us. Both animations could use some updates, but they still vibrantly encapsulate one of the most fantastic transitions in the history of life on earth.

You Are Umasou must be one of the most adorable dinosaur films ever made. It’s also one of the strangest. Within the annals of dinosaur cinema, I can’t recall any other film in which a carnivore, raised by an herbivore, takes in and protects another herbivore, all rendered in anthropomorphic anime.

Based on Tatsuya Miyanishi picture book, You Are Umasou starts off just like Disney’s Dinosaur—with a lost egg floating downriver. A mother Maiasaura spots the wayward egg and cares for the developing baby back at her own nest. But it’s not a little ornithopod that hatches out. The egg held an infant tyrannosaur. Despite the pressures of her community to abandon the youngster, though, Mama Maiasaura stays true to her name and hides her adopted son—Heart—and raises him with his natural-born brother, Light.

The herbivore lifestyle doesn’t suit Heart. While Light comfortably masticates any plants he can find, Heart is finicky and prefers red berries (or lizard tails, when he can catch them). Eventually Heart discovers that he is a miniature Big Jaw—one of the terrible, monstrous carnivores that eat other dinosaurs. What he feared to be true is a reality. He will grow up to be a jagged-tooth monster. Frightened and ashamed, Heart leaves his family to make a life for himself as a loner without a true territory of his own. He grows to be faster, stronger and craftier than the other young tyrannosaurs in the grasslands, but he’s also an outcast from his family and the tyrannosaur community.

History then repeats itself. Heart comes across a tiny egg, like his mother did, and a baby ankylosaur pops out. “You are umasou” (“You look delicious”), he tells the little one, but the unflappable ankylosaur takes “Umasou” for its name. Confused and embarrassed, Heart decides to temporarily adopt the little dinosaur under the reasoning that he can fatten the ankylosaur up for a later meal. Yet Heart’s unconventional background gets the better of him. Instead of raising Umasou for the slaughter, he quickly teaches the teeny armored dinosaur to defend itself in a world teeming with other predators.

Heart and Umasou become inseparable. Umasou loves his adoptive father, and Heart can’t suppress his instinct to care for what he momentarily considered a crunchy morsel. But Heart remembers the difficulty of his own childhood, being raised as an herbivore when his nature was clearly different. He abandons Umasou to the outside world, and by the time he realizes his mistake Heart’s only way to save his child is to further ostracize himself from the other Big Jaws of the plains.

You Are Umasou isn’t so much a movie about dinosaurs as a movie with dinosaurs playing out a fable about identity, family and the tension between your obligation to yourself and those you care about. The same story could be told with a different cast. And the dinosaurs themselves are only so in a nominal sense—the tyrannosaurs look very Godzilla-like and tussle in martial arts style (a corny training montage lists a few of the moves employed), and there are a few imaginary dinosaurs sprinkled throughout. While the feathered maniraptorans that raid the nesting ground at the beginning of the film reflect our current understanding of those dinosaurs, most of the dinosaurs are highly anthropomorphized and act almost as human-dinosaur hybrids. There’s no point in scientifically analyzing every incorrect anatomical point. All the viewer needs to know is that they are in the world of dinosaurs.

There is at least one cute nod to the scientific, though. You Are Umasou‘s opening scenes are modeled on Jack Horner, James Gorman and Douglas Henderson’s picturebook Maia: A Dinosaur Grows Up. The animated film even references Egg Mountain—the Montana field site where Horner and his colleagues discovered the Maiasaura nesting grounds—although, in this case, the animators used the title to create a nearby volcano with a large, egg-shaped rock stuck inside.

You Are Umasou isn’t for everyone. Viewers need an affinity for anime and the various conventions of the animation style. Still, I was delighted to see this curious extrapolation of what happened 74 million years ago in western Montana. Bits and pieces of inspiration were borrowed from other sources, but I have never seen anything quite like it.

The Tyrannosaurus in Fantasia was given a nearly-accurate, tail-off-the-ground pose like this mount of Gorgosaurus at the American Museum of Natural History.From Matthew and Brown, 1923.

Dinosaurs have changed a heck of a lot since I was little. I’m not just talking about how science has altered what we know about their biology. During the early part of my dinomania in the mid-1980s, there were no computer-generated dinosaurs. Puppets, stop-motion creatures, and traditionally animated dinosaurs ruled the day. Some were better than others. Phil Tippett’s sauropods, ceratopsids, tyrannosaurs, and hadrosaurs in the documentary Dinosaur! were the best I had ever seen, while late-night showings of movies like Unknown Island, The Land Unknown and The Land That Time Forgot introduced me to bad puppet dinosaurs. But there was one film that kept showing up over and over again as representative of the Mesozoic: Disney’s mash-up of classical music and animation, Fantasia.

I didn’t care all that much for Mickey Mouse as the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” To me, the real stars of the movie were the dinosaurs. They made their appearance about midway through the film to the slightly rearranged melodies and dissonances of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring“—a composition meant to represent archaic humans choosing a sacrifice to bring back warm weather. The piece wasn’t just about dinosaurs. Although the word “evolution” was never actually said during the piece’s introduction in Fantasia, composer Deems Taylor told audiences that the animated interpretation was meant to be a “coldly accurate” retelling of the growth and development of life on this planet. The origin of the planet through the evolution of early, single-celled life is included, but dinosaurs take up a greater part of the screen-time than any Precambrian organisms.

Criticizing the accuracy of the dinosaurs in Fantasia by today’s standards—or even by the scientific image of dinosaurs when I first saw the movie—would be pointless. Fantasia premiered in 1940, and paleontologists have drastically revised their understanding of dinosaurs since then. The general image of dinosaurs from the Fantasia era is probably best represented by a huge mural made a few years later for Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History—Rudolph Zallinger‘s The Age of Reptiles. The fat, lumbering, splay-legged dinosaurs of Zallinger’s mural are a beautiful and well-rendered representation of everything that turned out to be wrong about dinosaurs, but the painting was considered to be scientifically accurate at the time. Many of the Fantasia dinosaurs look like moving versions of the dinosaurs Zallinger would paint a few years later.

But Disney’s animated dinosaurs created a contradictory image of what life was like during the reign of the non-avian dinosaurs. Before the start of “The Rite of Spring,” Deems Taylor told audiences that dinosaurs ranged from “little crawling horrors” to “100-ton nightmares.” They primarily ate plants and, as a rule, “they weren’t very bright.” Nevertheless, there were “bullies and gangsters among them”—towering predators such as the Tyrannosaurus that takes a starring role in the segment. This was the entrenched view of dinosaurs at the time. They were big, dumb, and ruled the world through brute force.

All of these points can be seen in the dinosaurs Disney’s animators created, but there was more to the segment than that. The dinosaurs were actually quite active and displayed some complex behaviors. Small groups of ornithomimosaurs strutted together through the forest, and cute baby Triceratops remained with their parents. The box-headed, three-fingered Tyrannosaurus was given a slightly more horizontal posture than was common for the time, and many of the dinosaurs appeared to be active, almost bird-like creatures. This was a common occurrence in restorations. The cold-blooded, ugly, reptilian nature of dinosaurs was emphasized in words, but the animals themselves were often restored as dynamic and agile.

There was plenty that Fantasia got wrong, but the film also got some things right by breaking from the scientific image of dinosaurs as crocodiles writ large. Maybe that’s part of why I kept seeing the film clip for so long during the dinosaur revival of the 1980s and 1990s. Fantasia‘s dinosaurs were squamous and drab, but they were also relatively nimble and social animals that fit into the emerging image of dinosaurs as unique, complex animals. How could anyone look at the skeleton of a dinosaur and not imagine the living animal as something more bird-like than reptile-like? It just took some time for science and art to really hear what the bones had to say.

When I watched the series premiere of Terra Nova in September, I wasn’t entirely sure what to think of it. The first episode was packed with so much awkward exposition that I just wanted the show to wrap up the background and get on with the story. That, and I was eager to see more dinosaurs. What’s the use of setting your science-fiction family drama 85 million years in the past if you’re not going to highlight some of the local fauna?

More than halfway through the first season, I still don’t know what to think of the show. I think the Atlantic Wire’s Richard Lawson hit the proverbial nail squarely on the head when he wrote that Terra Nova is the weirdest show on television right now. Take all the cringeworthy gooshiness of a 1990s family drama; borrow some plot points from LOST; apply liberal spoonfuls of science fiction tidbits from Avatar, ALIENS and Star Trek; then hit “liquefy” and pour out a show that is so overly sweet that you think your teeth are going to fall out of your head.

The components of Terra Nova are not original—from minor characters to plot points, almost everything has been seen before in other shows and films—but the combination creates a weird new hybrid. While the show is trying to build up suspense about the spy in camp and the possibility that evil bureaucrats of the future are going to try to mine Terra Nova for all it’s worth (called it!), the show is so focused on the lives of their primary protagonists, the Shannon family, that it feels as if each episode neatly wraps everything up. The family always overcomes their problems somehow, nothing truly bad ever happens to them, and everyone’s smiling by episode’s end. (Compare that pattern to what happens in the far-superior series The Walking Dead.) This week’s episode, in particular, was especially over-the-top in terms of cuteness. A baby ankylosaur that the Shannon family took in a few episodes prior  is returned to the wild, and a big momma ankylosaur immediately comes tromping out of the jungle to take the little tyke in as the human family looks on, all dewey-eyed. Awwww. This was so saccharine I thought my face was going to melt off, a la Raiders of the Lost Ark.

My advice to the show’s creators? Ditch the Shannon family—a pack of Slashers or even a pair of Carnotaurus would do nicely—and make it the Commander Taylor show. Terra Nova’s leader, portrayed by Stephen Lang, is just about the only interesting character in the whole thing. Then you’d get to keep the action and intrigue with an ensemble cast while deep-sixing the gooey family subplots. (Wishful thinking, I know.)

As for the dinosaurs, I feel that Terra Nova falls a bit flat. Before the first episode aired the buzz was that Terra Nova was going to feature lots of beautifully rendered dinosaurs the likes of which we have never seen before. That was part of the point in picking an 85-million-year-old jungle as part of the setting—our knowledge of dinosaurs during that time is relatively limited, leaving creature creators plenty of leeway to invent cool new species. So far, though, the fuzzy, raptor-like Slasher (seen in the trailer for this week’s episode above) is the only dinosaur that the show’s creators have really had fun with. All the other dinosaurs we have seen are either familiar creatures such as Carnotaurus, brachiosaurs and ankylosaurs, or dinosaurs with fictional names, such as Nykoraptor, Ovosaurus and empirosaur, which look just like dinosaurs we already know about.

Maybe that’s because dinosaurs don’t really play that much of a role in the show. They seem to pop up only when there’s a plot point that needs to be moved along, and the majority of dinosaurs in the show are carnivores. In a real ecosystem you’d expect to see far more sauropods, ceratopsians, hadrosaurs or other sorts of herbivorous dinosaurs, but instead the jungle outside Terra Nova seems to be swarming with medium- to large-sized predators. Maybe they’re all eating each other. More than that, the dinosaurs never bring a real sense of danger to the show. You know that anytime one of the main characters meets a dinosaur, they will somehow escape. Even the most vicious of dinosaurs are rendered virtually toothless by the show’s family-centered format.

Dinosaurs are the prehistoric icing on the so-so supermarket sheet cake that is Terra Nova. They’re simply a part of the setting, and for every glimpse of a dinosaur you have to sit through minute after minute of family programming. At least the dinosaurs look pretty good when they appear. There are some really bad anatomical mistakes, such as the Carnotaurus with long, arms, bunny-hands, and feathers at the beginning of the episode “What Remains,” and the dinosaurs still don’t mesh well with the background environments when seen in stark daylight, but in general, the prehistoric creatures are well detailed. And the special effects crew behind Terra Nova certainly deserves credit for putting feathers on a number of theropod dinosaurs. It’s just too bad that we don’t see more of the local fauna. For a show set in a brave new Cretaceous world, very little time is spend actually exploring the wonders that must be outside Terra Nova’s gates. Where’s a herd of ceratopsids or rampaging tyrannosaur when you need one?