Dinosaurs, Myths and Monsters
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''Dinosaurs, Myths and Monsters'' is a 2011 British documentary film produced by the
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. The film premiered on BBC Four on 14 September 2011, and is presented and written by
popular historian Popular history is a broad genre of historiography that takes a popular approach, aims at a wide readership, and usually emphasizes narrative, personality and vivid detail over scholarly analysis. The term is used in contradistinction to professio ...
Tom Holland Thomas Stanley Holland (born 1 June 1996) is an English actor. His accolades include a British Academy Film Award, three Saturn Awards, a Guinness World Record and an appearance on the ''Forbes'' 30 Under 30 Europe list. Some publications h ...
. Jamie Muir served as the programme's director and producer. The duration of the film is an hour. In the spirit of
Adrienne Mayor Adrienne Mayor (born 1946) is a historian of ancient science and a classical folklorist. Mayor specializes in ancient history and the study of "folk science", or how pre-scientific cultures interpreted data about the natural world, and how these ...
's ground-breaking studies of 2000 and 2005, the documentary explores how fossils may have influenced the mythologies of different cultures, including the Native Americans and the
ancient Greeks Ancient Greece ( el, Ἑλλάς, Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity ( AD 600), that comprised a loose collection of cult ...
. Mayor speculated that fossils could have led to mythological depictions of the
thunderbird Thunderbird, thunder bird or thunderbirds may refer to: * Thunderbird (mythology), a legendary creature in certain North American indigenous peoples' history and culture * Ford Thunderbird, a car Birds * Dromornithidae, extinct flightless birds ...
, the giant bird of Native American mythology, and the
Cyclopes In Greek mythology and later Roman mythology, the Cyclopes ( ; el, Κύκλωπες, ''Kýklōpes'', "Circle-eyes" or "Round-eyes"; singular Cyclops ; , ''Kýklōps'') are giant one-eyed creatures. Three groups of Cyclopes can be distinguish ...
, the one-eyed giants of Greek and Roman mythology. The concept of the Cyclopes may have been derived from Greek encounters with
elephant Elephants are the largest existing land animals. Three living species are currently recognised: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant. They are the only surviving members of the family Elephantidae ...
skulls. The Greeks, unfamiliar with living elephants, could have misinterpreted the skull's nose cavity as a single eye socket. The film was produced alongside three other dinosaur programmes: ''
Planet Dinosaur ''Planet Dinosaur'', is a six-part documentary television series created by Nigel Paterson and Phil Dobree, produced by the BBC, and narrated by John Hurt. It first aired in the United Kingdom in 2011, with VFX studio Jellyfish Pictures a ...
'', ''How to Build a Dinosaur'', and ''Survivors''. All four programmes were commissioned by Kim Shillinglaw, the BBC's
commissioning editor In book publishing, a commissioning editor is essentially a buyer. It is the job of the commissioning editor to advise the publishing house on which books to publish. Usually the actual decision of whether to contract a book is taken by a senior ma ...
for Science and Natural History.


Reception

Jonathan Wright of ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'' praised the programme, calling it "precisely the kind of off-kilter but insightful documentary that explains why we need BBC Four."
Rachel Cooke Rachel Cooke (born 1969) is a British journalist and writer. Early life Cooke was born in Sheffield, and is the daughter of a university lecturer. She went to school in Jaffa, Israel, until she was 11, before returning to Sheffield, and atten ...
's review in the ''
New Statesman The ''New Statesman'' is a British Political magazine, political and cultural magazine published in London. Founded as a weekly review of politics and literature on 12 April 1913, it was at first connected with Sidney Webb, Sidney and Beatrice ...
'' was more mixed. She enjoyed the segment on Native American mythology, which she found "fascinating," but was more critical of the segment on Greek mythology, writing that "my appetite for TV historians droning on about Homer.... is, I must admit, increasingly limited." Overall, Cooke considered the film uneven, consisting of "too little interesting material being stretched too far."


References

{{reflist BBC television documentaries about history