Last weekend, I went to see Sea Monsters 3D: a Prehistoric Adventure, an IMAX movie about Mesozoic marine reptiles. It's playing in the IMAX theater down at the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum.

I kinda liked it. I must admit, I'm a sucker for a Tylosaurus leaping out of the water with a writhing Squalicorax shark in its mouth. I was disappointed by T-rex: Back to the Cretaceous in the same venue, so it was pleasing to check out this feature's relative quality. Unlike the unabashed fiction of T-rex (the heroine inhales hallucinogenic dust from a dinosaur egg, causing her to see a museum's specimens as they were in life), Sea Monsters is more of a straight shooter. It examines the story of the life of a female Dolichorhynchops in the Cretaceous seas of the Western Interior Seaway. As she grows up, you see nearby predators and relatives, and eventually encounter their fossils. The fossils are discovered in the modern day, sometimes in the early 2000s, sometimes back around the turn of the previous century. The techniques of field paleontology, I noted, don't seem to have changed much during that time.


Anyhow, the various creatures lived and ate each other and died and were fossilized, and the various paleontologists, driving their model Ts or their Suzukis, drive out into Kansas or Montana or the Dakotas and excavate these ancient creatures. These "paleontologists" are patently actors, and not especially good ones at that. Six Feet Under, it's not. But the digitally-recreated scenes of the Mesozoic seas were pretty cool. I liked seeing ammonites squirt ink on the Dolichorhynchops ("Dollys," in the film's parlance), and I liked seeing a lone placodont swim weirdly towards the camera. Because the movie is in 3D, you have to wear dorky glasses (it's dark; no one can see), but that means that the toothy snouts of Styxosaurus and its ilk poke out right into (seemingly) the center of the theater. Pretty dang cool.

Labels: fossils, movies