Geek TV: Before the Dinosaurs

If you didn’t get a chance to see Discovery’s “Before the Dinosaurs” broadcast this past week, you might want to add it to your TiVo WishList. It’s definitely worth the disc space.

Like “Walking with Dinosaurs,” this BBC-produced speculative doc uses state-of-the-art animation, animatronics, and other F/X, oh yeah, and some actual science, too, to paint a picture of what the world might have been like from the Cambrian period (530 million years ago) to the Permian (250 MYA). The production is just incredible, the content is like something from a very effective horror flick: sea scorpions as big as a man, giant spiders the size of bowling bowls, dragonflies the size of eagles, 10-feet long millipedes, lightening that literally makes the sky explode, drought that kills off 90% of all life on Earth, proto-dinosaurs the size of large insects, pre-mammalian beasts that digest vegetation by rolling river-rocks around in their guts. Crazy.

Like a lot of these BBC/Discovery “science” “documentaries,” this is more about the geeky thrill of generous extrapolations of real science and fossil record than it is sticking to known evidence, but keeping that in mind, it’s still a lot of fun and it certainly gets the point across that life had a weird and wondrous backstory before the dinos showed up and it was likely one inhospitable place to grow up. And you thought downtown Fallujah or a south Texas quail farm was a dangerous place to be!