FRDT Author - The Meta Weta

Bloody hell, it's been five years since Jurassic World came out and paleontology nerds the world over despaired at ever seeing scientifically accurate dinosaurs in cinema ever again. Bringing up that again wasn't what inspired this post, however. The recent speculative zoology binge I've been on got me thinking: what fun it would be to imagine a dinosaur. Back in the day, Jurassic World had a go and the Indominus Rex ended up being a rather boring design that was simultaneously too exaggerated and not outlandish enough. Naturally, this prompted the palaeontology nerds to rally and come up with much more interesting designs: Jolly good stuff, people. But now we can stop talking about the creatively bankrupt institution that is Hollywood, let's imagine some dinosaurs! First, some ground rules for the process: Our Dinosaurs Must be... - Physically possible. They shouldn't break the laws of physics or biology. - Placed somewhere on the dinosaur family tree....

Being the paleontology nerd I am, it's no surprise that one of the first things I put up on this blog is that a Far Cry game with dinosaurs would be totally friggin' sweet .  Hell yes.  On a similar note, I recently got hooked on the topic of speculative zoology. In particular, a specific website dedicated to one rather bizarre thought experiment: what if you seeded a world with just enough life to support a population of canaries, and just let natural selection take its course for millions of years? That website is Serina: A Natural History of the World of Birds  (the brainchild of artist Dylan Bajda, a.k.a Seather888 ), which is one of the best hard-science speculative zoology projects I've ever heard of. Piece by piece, the reader is taken through a journey through millions of years of evolution on the moon of Serina, as the canaries and other creatures diversify and evolve into some truly bizarre and epic creatures. In fact, it's mostly the creature design ...