Walking With Sea Monsters
Monday, November 10th, 2003 07:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manJust watched the first episode of Walking With Sea Monsters. It was presented as a Walking With Dinosaurs trilogy, and featured Nigel Marven travelling into the past and interacting with the creatures there, like in the last WWD special (and Walking With Cavemen). This probably gained the programme BBC One-type viewers, but annoyed the BBC
Two-type viewers.
I didn't think it was so bad, though it was very silly. It did present lots of interesting information, such as that during the Ordovician the day was only 21 hours long, and had high levels of CO2 and low levels of O2 in the atmosphere.
However, the same criticism can be applied here as in the previous series, which is that there was no distinction made between facts known from the fossil record, items deducible from modern creatures, and complete guesswork. There was no interactive component this time to fill in some of the gap; the only way to do so was the website, and the information there did not address these issues fully.
Moreover, not all of the facts presented were properly explained. For instance, they pointed out that the orthocone (a nautiloid cephalopod) has a primitive eye. They did not mention the evidence for this was (presumably, as I doubt the soft parts fossilised to that extent) the eye of the modern nautilus, which is a pinhole camera filled with seawater -- it has no lens. This is the sort of thing the previous two series presented in pop-up fact boxes in their interactive versions.
Furthermore, by jumping around (the first episode went from the Ordovician 450 million years ago to the Triassic 230 million years ago to the Devonian 360 million years ago) they lost the opportunity for narrative continuity. For example, between the Ordovician, where the top predators were cephalopods, and the Devonian, where they were fish, they lost the opportunity to show how when fish evolved they outcompeted the cephalopods, because they could go up and down faster in the water. The only cephalopods to survive were the ones that lost their air-filled shells (octopods, squids and cuttlefish), plus the nautilus, which went for the opposite trick of being able to go further up and down than fish can manage without getting the bends.
Still, I'm not going to let the above stop me enjoying the remaining two episodes.
Disclaimer: All trivia here are presented as fact but may have been distorted by imperfect memory.
Two-type viewers.
I didn't think it was so bad, though it was very silly. It did present lots of interesting information, such as that during the Ordovician the day was only 21 hours long, and had high levels of CO2 and low levels of O2 in the atmosphere.
However, the same criticism can be applied here as in the previous series, which is that there was no distinction made between facts known from the fossil record, items deducible from modern creatures, and complete guesswork. There was no interactive component this time to fill in some of the gap; the only way to do so was the website, and the information there did not address these issues fully.
Moreover, not all of the facts presented were properly explained. For instance, they pointed out that the orthocone (a nautiloid cephalopod) has a primitive eye. They did not mention the evidence for this was (presumably, as I doubt the soft parts fossilised to that extent) the eye of the modern nautilus, which is a pinhole camera filled with seawater -- it has no lens. This is the sort of thing the previous two series presented in pop-up fact boxes in their interactive versions.
Furthermore, by jumping around (the first episode went from the Ordovician 450 million years ago to the Triassic 230 million years ago to the Devonian 360 million years ago) they lost the opportunity for narrative continuity. For example, between the Ordovician, where the top predators were cephalopods, and the Devonian, where they were fish, they lost the opportunity to show how when fish evolved they outcompeted the cephalopods, because they could go up and down faster in the water. The only cephalopods to survive were the ones that lost their air-filled shells (octopods, squids and cuttlefish), plus the nautilus, which went for the opposite trick of being able to go further up and down than fish can manage without getting the bends.
Still, I'm not going to let the above stop me enjoying the remaining two episodes.
Disclaimer: All trivia here are presented as fact but may have been distorted by imperfect memory.
