March of the Dinosaurs. 2011 by Touch Press. iPad. App webpage.
Reviewed by Brian Switek
Dinosaurs have changed a hell of a lot since I was a kid. My beloved “Brontosaurus” was beheaded and recast as Apatosaurus, Torosaurus might just be the spectacular mature form of Triceratops, and we now know that many dinosaurs were covered in lavish, colorful plumage. I like it. There are plenty of complaints about how paleontologists are ruining cherished childhood memories by altering our understanding of dinosaur lives, but all the immature whining misses the grander point. We know more about dinosaurs lives than ever before, and the more we learn, the stranger and more wonderful the creatures become.
Dinosaurs trodding through the snow is one of my favorite new images. For as long as I can remember, Stegosaurus and company were presented as inhabitants of steaming jungles choked with ferns, cycads, and horsetails. Rudolph Zallinger’s gorgeous mural The Age of Reptiles at Yale and the short, dinosaur-filled segment of Disney’s Fantasia left no doubt in my young mind that dinosaurs lived in a seemingly endless global summer. But this was a holdover from the idea that dinosaurs were sluggish ectotherms that required considerable heat to start up every morning. Not only have such swamp-bound monsters been given a makeover, but a better understanding of the habitats dinosaurs occupied has altered our previous understanding of the world tyrannosaurs, ceratopsians, and their ilk lived in.
Continuing research in Alaska, for example, has even turned up dinosaurs which lived within the Arctic circle. These dinosaurs were not outcasts or vacationers, but part of complex communities which permanently made their homes up north, including everything from the svelte tyrannosaur Gorgosaurus to the feathered, switchblade-clawed raptor Troodon and plenty of Pachyrhinosaurus – a magnificent horned dinosaur with bony hooks jutting from its frill and a big, lumpy boss on its nose. And while prehistoric Alaska was a titch watmer than today, there was still snow and many months of darkness. Here, dinosaurs once slogged through Cretaceous snowstorms.
A paleo drama about these chilled archosaurs – titled March of the Dinosaurs – was released by Impossible Pictures last year. It was another Walking With Dinosaurs wannabe – all computer-generated violence, very little science. I love a feather-covered, acrobatic Albertosaurus sailing through the air with claws extended as much as anyone else, but, without any explanation of how we have come to know of this animal’s existence, the dinosaur is just another special effect. But when fellow Download the Universe contributor Deborah Blum told me there was a March of the Dinosaurs app for the iPad, I felt a stirring of hope. Maybe, with the interactivity an iPad allows, some of the glossy effects might be combined with some scientific explanation.