More Cephalopod Cinema Please
The Thimble Tickle Giant Squid of 1878 (Image Credit: Julie Potton, CC BY 4.0)
Category Archives: Cinematica Animalia
The Rancor: Textbook Animal Cruelty
No matter the quality of the film, episode or comic, Star Wars has always had immensely cool, and mostly believable creatures. It even boasts one of the best speculative ecology field guides out there, and if you haven’t heard of it before then definitely check out The Wildlife of Star Wars by Bob Carrau and Terryl Whitlatch.
With The Book of Boba Fett having recently sauntered laconically onto our screens, we got a second look at a creature that made a brief but memorable appearance in The Return of the Jedi. That creature is the Rancor, the 5 metre tall basement dwelling biped that Jabba the Hutt (later Boba Fett) fed humans through a trapdoor on a semi-regular basis.
Read moreRunning Into Awful Academics At The Movies
Image Credit: KiwiDeaPi, CC BY-SA 3.0
It’s not often we can readily identify with movie scientists. Even if you are a biologist, the image of a handsome labcoat wearing genius scribbling equations on a perspex board isn’t something that many of us see ourselves in. My own experience with science consists more of wading through spreadsheets, poring over manuscripts and generally yelling at a computer screen seen through barely concealed tears of frustration.
But every now and then I stumble across something I very much recognise in an on-screen academic. On this particular occasion, said stumble occurred during a watch of The Relic, a 1997 monster movie set in the Chicago Field Museum. It was a welcome setting, given that I wrote my PhD while working at Trondheim’s Natural History Museum, and that Chicago’s Field Museum is potentially the best museum I’ve ever visited.
Read moreTesting Invasive Frameworks In The Witcher
Season two of The Witcher hit Netflix late last year, giving us the chance to have a look at some all-new movie creatures (as well as Henry Cavill’s perfect chin). So in light of my love for a) invasion biology and b) top-class television (though I have to confess to sarcasm in this instance), I thought I’d traipse once more through the world of The Witcher and some of the concepts it brings up.
Read morePutting The Science Into Science Fiction: Meeting NY Times Best-Selling Author Scott Sigler
Image Credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, image cropped with book title inserted
Over the last nine months, we’ve been joined on our biology/movie focused podcasts by some amazingly talented biologists to discuss some movies of immensely varying quality. So when my co-host Adam Hasik announced that he’d secured a science fiction writer as a guest, it was a chance to change pace and look at science from a plot perspective, rather than the other way around.
Read moreMarvel-ous Mythology and Bad Biologists
During the two most recent episodes of our podcast Cinematica Animalia, we looked at some of the mythical Chinese creatures portrayed in Marvel’s recent outing, Shang-Chi, and some movie science tropes that always ignite a bit of ire for biologists.
Read moreThe Biology Behind Dune, Vampires, And The Goblin King
Not caught up on the latest episodes of Cinematica Animalia, the podcast where we break down the biology behind our favourite (and not-so favourite) movies? Here’s a quick summary of some recent episodes, with the links below.
Read moreThe Ecology of The Lion King (With Lion Specialist Maria Gatta)
Image Credit: Wade Tregaskis, CC BY-NC 2.0, Image Cropped.
If there’s one film that I could perhaps credit for sparking my fascination with the natural world, the it’s The Land Before Time. BUT if we’re going with films that do not feature the most gangly Pachycephalosaurids you ever did see, then it has to be The Lion King. The sweeping landscapes, the (at times literal) fountains of species, the Shakespearian drama, the poor understanding of trophic cascades – it’s got it all.
Read moreBogs, Beavers and Blood: Freshwater Ecosystems in Film
The freshwater world is full of horror movie potential, and yet most of the time it’s the ocean that is the centrepiece of aquatic horror stories. It’s not entirely unexpected, after all the ocean makes up over 97% of the earth’s water-based surface, and freshwater doesn’t have much to offer in the way of an ‘abyss’.
Read moreBreaking Down Biology at the Movies
Ecology for the Masses 