Our heroine . . . Dolichorhynchops . . . and her droogs.
Some life is weird by virtue of time delay. If the inhabitants of the Cretaceous Seaway — the long strip of semi-shallow ocean that flooded middle North America some 82 million years ago — could see the vast blubbery mammals that inhabit the seas today, they would no doubt think them odd. And tasty.
But it so happens we live now, not 82 million years ago, and it is we that them them odd. You see, in that time, the oceans were filled not with mammals who put out to sea, but with reptiles who did. Large reptiles. With nasty big pointy teeth.
The niche presently occupied by dolphins was occupied by icthyosaurs (although they had gone extinct by 90 million years ago) and small plesiosaurs like the four-finned marine reptile Dolichorhynchops (Do-li-ko-rin’-kops), the Lambda-class shuttle of the Cretaceous Seaway. That of the Loch Ness Monster was occupied by long-necked plesiosaurs. And the niche occupied by sharks was occupied by mosasaurs and . . . well. . . sharks.
Growing up, I was curious about these mysterious seas and the creatures that inhabited them. But I only had a dim idea of what they were like because the only places to find them were line drawings in books or bones in museums, where they generally took a big backseat to media-darling dinosaurs. Because, and this is a big point to remember, folks – especially if you’re talking to paleontologists – these sea creatures are not dinosaurs. Not Dinosaurs. Remember that. In my college dinosaurs textbook (“Dinosaurs: The Textbook”), one of only two places pleiosaurs show up is in the section on ancient reptiles that are not dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, according to “Dinosaurs: The Textbook”, can be most easily thought of as a group of extinct reptiles having an upright (not sprawling or swimming) posture. Paleontologists seem quite sensitive on this point.
Enter Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure — the latest (first?) offering by National Geographic in the world of gargantuan IMAX films. It seeks to fill in this Cretaceous-Seaway-sized gap in our collective imagination. To see the trailer for “Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure”, click here. I saw this at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science two weeks ago at a special screening with a lecture on the science behind the film by paleontologist Ken Carpenter. A Dolichorhynchops is the heroine of the film, but the directors couldn’t resist shortening her name to the overly-cute “Dolly”( Can’t we just say Dolichorhynchops? Please? Is it really that much harder to say than Dmitri Medvedev or Boutros Boutros-Ghali?).
The directors worked with Carpenter to develop the most scientifically accurate reconstructions of these creatures possible. And wow, what a wonderful job they did. Though the plot is a bit treacly (hence the moniker “Cretaceous Bambi” bestowed on the film by Carpenter at the end of my screening), the animations are stunning. Though assuredly, there are gratuitous eye-candy shots of the giant predatory mosasaur Tylosaurus leaping in slow-mo toward the viewer for the benefit of the 3D patrons, they also made sure to include some ostensibly less-glamorous creatures. A mating swarm of glowing red ammonites, for instance. And they used an absolutely fantastic “time lapse” device to illustrate the incomprehensibly vast sweep of geologic time.
Carpenter explained that the filmmakers took pains to vet every detail, behavior and design to make sure they were realistic as possible. He’d circle errors and write in corrections on stills. He’d endure marathon hours-long phone-call editing sessions. The directors even persuaded a husband and wife team of professional swimmers to latch on to one another and don plesiosaur flippers to test how a creature like Dolichorhynchops with four fixed fins might have used them in practice. They quickly found they must beat together to get anywhere, and the animators found while working with their computer models that the fins couldn’t flip up – a detail that paleontologists had missed until the animators pointed it out.
The human parts of the plot are, however, far less successful than the reconstructed animals. Poor acting. Poor scripting. I cringed. At one point, a fossil is being “excavated” by some paleontologists — but you can clearly see the outlines of the fake fossil cast they apparently plonked in the ground to stand in for a real fossil.
But far worse than that were the scripted “scientist” scenes, which I hated the for all the same reasons I hate Macgillivray-Freeman films: cheesy, fakey dialogue and acting and totally unrealistic depictions of scientists. The lead female scientist was particularly unbelievable, inauthentic, smug and annoying. I have worked with women scientists. I know women scientists. Women scientists are friends of mine. Madam, you’re no woman scientist.
In short, she falls victim to the Elizabeth Shue effect. Ever see “The Saint”? The last decent Val Kilmer movie in which he plays a man of many disguises who falls for the impossibly beautiful, but completely unconvincing physicist? It’s not that some female scientists aren’t beautiful — see Lisa Randall. But when directors hire gorgeous actresses to play brainy scientists, the results are usually not good (exception: Jodi Foster). I mean, come on — how many female scientists do you know that look perfectly coifed and attired with a chic haircut and perfect make-up to go digging in the dirt of backwater Kansas? Couldn’t we film some real scientists on a dig for some relevant fossils rather than relying on fake scientists with even faker dialogue? In my opinion, it isn’t fair to kids to misrepresent science this way. They’re trying to turn them on to science, and to my adult brain at least, the result is both misleading and a turn-off. For a film that took such pains with getting even the tiniest angle of a fin on a fish in the background just right, why couldn’t they take such pains with the depiction of science and scientists?
Still, the movie works more often than not and it captures a world whose story has gone untold far too long. At one point, “Dolly” barely escapes death by shark, but she doesn’t escape having a back flipper nipped and permanently tucked. And sure enough, as Carpenter showed us in his slide show, scientists have actually found a fossil Dolichorhynchops flipper with its back edge missing a shark-bite sized piece.
Just don’t forget Lesson #1. One of the very first slides in Carpenter’s presentation was a dinosaur with a big red circle with a line through it. He took questions after the film, and an audience member asked something about the dinosaurs in the movie. Carpenter looked as though he’d just been hit by a sniper. “Oooooh . . . ” he winced. “NOT dinosaurs.”
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Oh heaps good! Diplodocus was always my favourite, I think I just liked saying it. Didn’t realise the swimming kind weren’t actual dinosaurs, I think you’ve just saved me from a future faux pas! I’m totally with you that it annoys me when they dumb down science for movies and stuff – like calling it “Dolly” – so lame. Just say its freaking name, do you really think it WANTS to be called Dolly? Is it a Doll? I DON’T THINK SO!
I like that they tied in the shark encounter with an actual fossil specimen, kind of a nice touch, and I love how painstaking they were with the accuracy of animation.
Thanks for the comment! Yes, it was cool they incorporated the story about the nicked fin . . . but that wasn’t the only fossil story they included. They also have a fossil of a mosasaur with a perfectly intact fossil fish in its stomach. They think it choked on the fish since the mosasaur must have died soon after eating it or else the bones of its meal would have been jumbled. They included this little vignette in the film too — if you ever see it, watch for it!