Postcards From Pangaea

  Well, plenty of time (too much, I’m afraid ) has gone by since my last pos t and, among other things that have happened since then, the winners of the Jurassic Park 30 th Anniversary Challenge by Threadless were finally announced several months ago . For a contest that started in September 2023, and whose winners should have been notified by November 27 th , it really took a long time (can’t remember when it exactly happened) . It took s o long that at one point I feared that it might have been called off for some sponsor-related reason. I emailed them in June 2024 asking about it, and this was Luis’s kind reply: “ Hi Josep, Thanks for contacting us. The Jurassic Park challenge has not been cancelled. All the winners have been contacted at this time but we have not made any announcements because licensed design challenges sometimes have a lot of moving parts. In this particular case there's licensors as well as retail outlets that need to align...

I assume every dinosaur enthusiast out there is well aware that this year of 2023 marks the 30 th anniversary of the Jurassic Park movie. I was 13 back then and its release was a big deal for those of us who were just the right age to be absolutely delighted to see the most believable dinosaurs ever shown on a screen. We had huge expectations, and boy did the film deliver the goods. Even then I was able to spot some scientific inaccuracies due to artistic license ( T. rex had actually excellent eyesight, and those were definitely not Velociraptors ) and the plot’s inconsistencies (for instance, the T. rex seems to be heavy enough to make the earth shake with every step and form waves in the kids’ water cups, but the earth conveniently forgets to shake later on when Rexy unexpectedly appears to save Grant and the kids from the raptors… didn’t I already talk about this before? ). And yet, it remains a wonderful adventure movie, thanks mainly to Spielberg’s masterful...

When I was a kid obsessed with dinosaurs, my favorite time period in the Mesozoic Era was the Late Jurassic by a mile. Sure, there was no T.rex , no Triceratops , no Velociraptor and no Ankylosaurus yet . And those are among many people’s favorite dinosaurs. The Cretaceous period is the one that gave us the most popular dinosaurs. But the Late Jurassic was The Amazing Age of the Giants for me. It was the time of the giant sauropods: the long and slender Diplodocus , the bulky but muscular Brontosaurus , the colossal Brachiosaurus . The time of the plated herbivorous Stegosaurus , with a weight of 3.5 metric tons and a brain the size of a walnut. Those herbivores shared the land with the mighty Allosaurus and Ceratosaurus , animals that, while not as big and robust as a T. rex , were apex predators nonetheless that herbivores of the time had all the reasons in the world to fear, especially the young or sick. It was also a time of heavy contrasts. The biggest dinosaurs shared their ...