Dinosaurs Giants of Patagonia 2007
#AncientEarth #Documentary #Dinosaurs #Prehistoric #Evolutionary
Dinosaurs: Giants of Patagonia is a 2007 film about life in the Early Cretaceous of Patagonia, southern South America. It features paleontologist Rodolfo Coria and his work, with Donald Sutherland acting as main narrator.
Story
The movie opens on a scene from approximately 65 million years ago, in the Late Cretaceous of North America. The narrator explains that a massive comet is about to arrive to mark the end of dinosaurs, before taking us back to the Late Jurassic, circa 150 million years ago. From the announced end of the dinosaurs, this time travel serves the purpose of introducing us the biggest creatures to have ever lived on Earth.
We are first introduced to the ocean life of the Late Jurassic period. The first of these is an ichthyosaur, a prehistoric creature resembling a dolphin, with several individuals shown hunting, before one is shown escaping from a Liopleurodon. The movie then takes us to the Early Cretaceous of South America, approximately 90 million years ago.
From this point on, the narrative alternatingly takes us between the work of Rodolfo Coria and the Early Cretaceous. Of all the species of dinosaurs featured, two receive the most focus: Argentinosaurus and Giganotosaurus. The reason for this focus is easily explained by the fact that those two species are Coria's most important discovery. Of these species, the narrator presents two individuals: Strong One (a male Argentinosaurus) and Long Tooth (a female Giganotosaurus).
Strong One is first shown among an Argentinosaurus nest with hatchlings venturing out. The narrator announces that if Strong One survives, he will grow to become one of the largest creatures the Earth has ever known. Then, depicting just how precarious life was, a Unenlagia arrives and steals an egg, which it runs off with to feast on elsewhere. At this point, we travel back to the present day in order to witness Rodolfo Coria's discovery of Argentinosaurus. The narrator explains that Coria owns his own museum, the Museo Carmen Funes (the museum is featured in the movie as we see Rodolfo Coria in his museum with one of his daughters, as he shows her casts of Argentinosaurus and Giganotosaurus skeletons). We see Coria as he arrives at a digging site with his daughters, where he and his team work on digging out an enormous backbone, which one scientist declares larger than any other bone he had seen. They discover that the bone belonged to a large sauropod. They named it Argentinosaurus, meaning "Argentinian lizard".
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