Tonight, ITV (UK) premiered their new dinosaur show called Prehistoric Park. It’s a cross between Jurassic Park and a natural history documentary by David Attenborough.

It’s the story of Nigel Marven, an adventurer, who goes back in time and captures various dinosaurs to bring them back to the 21st century where a place in Prehistoric Park awaits them, the idea being to prevent their extinction.

In the first episode, Nigel goes back in time to Montana, just before an asteroid strikes in the Yucatan Peninsula, a true event, that wipes out practically all of the dinosaurs. His aim is to bring back a Tyrannosaurus Rex (or T-Rex for short), the dinosaur made infamous by the movie Jurassic Park and it’s sequels Lost World - Jurassic Park 2 and Jurassic Park III.

However, he ends up collecting 3 different species - A young male Tricerotops, 2 young T-Rexs, a male and a female, and a herd of some ostrich-like dinosaurs called Ornithomimus velox .

The special effects are pretty good and with some tongue-in-cheek commentary by none other than David Jason, of ‘Only Fools and Horses‘ and ‘A Touch of Frost‘ fame, it makes for a very entertaining, as well as educational, show. There are some very interesting facts e.g. to do the filming they had to find a location devoid of grass as grass had not yet made it’s debut in the world of flora at that time. Another interesting tidbit is that the blast wave from the asteroid strike takes only 3 minutes to reach Montana - considering the distance it has to travel, that must’ve been an incredible impact!

Sponsored by GenesReunited.co.uk, it shows on ITV1 at 8pm on Saturdays.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 22nd, 2006 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Life & living, Movies & the like. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.