Making dinosaur science fun . . . with a chicken and a sink plunger
Wildlife fanatic Chris Packham is known for his trio of big obsessions: animals, science and guitar rock. One creature embodies them all . . . Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Head-banging in his car as he motored to a fossil dig in Montana, USA, Chris looked like a man who had won the lottery and the pools on the same day in The Real T. Rex (BBC2).
Marc Bolan’s T. Rex were on the stereo, thrashing out 20th Century Boy. The bones of a newlyunearthed tyrannosaurus were waiting for him at a place called Hell Creek and dino- scientists were queuing up to update him on their discoveries.
All that excitement couldn’t fail to translate into a documentary that fizzed with energy. even if you thought you’d long grown out of dinosaurs, this was as much fun as watching Jurassic Park for the first time with a barrel of popcorn.
Chris convincingly portrayed the T. Rex as a real animal, by comparing it to an assortment of modern birds and reptiles. A white-backed vulture ripped flesh from a rack of bones that he gleefully held out, to demonstrate how Rexie fed.
lassoing an alligator and thrusting a bite-o-meter between its jaws, he explained that T. Rex could crush bones with four times the force of today’s biggest crocs. To prove his point, he placed a cow’s skull under a hydraulic hammer in a lab. Nothing but bone-dust remained.
each fact was neatly explained. Children used to be taught that the tyrannosaurus walked upright — think of Rex the cowardly dinosaur in Toy Story. Chris showed that, in fact, they stooped forward, tail out and jaws to the ground.
To illustrate what he meant, he produced film of a chicken with a sink plunger glued to its rear end, forcing it to lean forward for balance. That’s how you make science memorable.
More contentiously, he claimed that T. Rex lived and probably hunted in packs. No doubt some outraged paleontologists would duel to the death before they agreed with that notion.
But, once again, Chris had strong and simple evidence — scars on the fossils that could only have been inflicted by other T. Rexes, perhaps during battles for mating rights.
He saved his favourite question for last: what colour was this dinosaur? Taking hints from pigments discovered using electron microscopes, and comparing the plumage of raptors such as owls and hawks, Chris guessed that it was black and brown, with orange highlights.
That sounds a good guess. But surely it was wishful thinking to propose T. Rex had a mane . . . especially one that looked suspiciously like the presenter’s own punkish quiff.
The guesses were wilder and more random in The Greatest TV Moments Of All Time (iTV), a rundown of memorable clips from the past 50 years that might as well have been dubbed A Couple Of dozen Things That Came To Mind during A ‘Research Meeting’ down The dog And duck.
True enough, we all remember the elephant in the Blue Peter studio and Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch. But they could just as easily have been replaced with John Noakes’s epic climb up Nelson’s Column, and John Cleese thrashing his car with a branch in fawlty Towers.
Some of the selections, such as a mildly funny bit from The Vicar Of dibley, must have been chosen by people who don’t watch much telly.
Where was Bob Geldof’s ‘Give us the money NOW’ rant from live Aid? Or father Ted kicking a bishop up the backside? Or . . . oh, don’t get me started.
SCHEDULE OF THE WEEK: Crime thriller McMafia (BBC1) starring James Norton started on Monday, continued one day later and now switches to Sundays. That’s as complicated as a Cayman Islands moneylaundering scheme.