Dinosaurs

With Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park set to become one of the summer's biggest hits, interest in all things dinosaurus will, believe it or not, become even bigger. PBS's new four-part history of paleontology's efforts to uncover the story of the great lizards will therefore be a pretty hot item. Unfortunately, Dinosaurs is not quite the exciting audio-visual experience that Jurassic Park will undoubtedly be. We watched the opening episode, The Monsters Emerge, which informs viewers that although the relatively stupid dinosaurs partied down for about 140 million years before mysteriously disappearing, the relatively smart humans only found out about them less than 200 years ago. The opener chronicles the efforts of the earliest discovers, people like Mrs. Mantell who in the early 19th-century found a dinosaur tooth, gave it to her husband, and then left him some years later as the man had become--like many youngsters today--totally obsessed with dinosaurs. We also follow the rivalry between early paleontologists' Marsh and Cope who competed (and often cheated) against one another in the race to amass the largest collection of new dinosaur bone finds. Near the close of the program, modern paleontologists speculate that birds arose not from the mammal line but from the dinosaurs and offer compelling evidence to support their claim. Using animation, archival stills, and interviews with paleontologists, Dinosaurs delivers a sound introduction to the story; it's just not as lively as, say, MPI Home Video's The World's Greatest Dinosaur Video (reviewed in our July-August 1992 issue). The other three volumes in the series are: Flesh on the Bones, A World of Dinosaurs, and The Death of the Dinosaur. Recommended. (Available from: PBS Video, 1320 Braddock Place, Alexandria, VA 22314-1698; (800) 344-3337.)