{"id":21286,"date":"2022-05-27T17:09:03","date_gmt":"2022-05-27T16:09:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ounews.co\/?p=21286"},"modified":"2022-05-27T17:09:03","modified_gmt":"2022-05-27T16:09:03","slug":"prehistoric-planet-tv-show-asked-us-to-explore-what-weather-the-dinosaurs-lived-through","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/science-mct\/science-environment\/prehistoric-planet-tv-show-asked-us-to-explore-what-weather-the-dinosaurs-lived-through\/","title":{"rendered":"Prehistoric Planet: TV show asked us to explore what weather the dinosaurs lived\u00a0through"},"content":{"rendered":"
Robert Spicer <\/a>from\u00a0The Open University<\/a>; Alex Farnsworth <\/a>from\u00a0University of Bristol<\/a> and\u00a0Paul Valdes <\/a>from\u00a0University of Bristol <\/a>write for The Conversation<\/a> <\/em> about the new TV series, Prehistoric Planet<\/a>.<\/figure>\n
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When conjuring up images of when dinosaurs ruled the planet we often think of hot and humid landscapes in a world very different from our own. However, the new TV series Prehistoric Planet<\/a>, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, shows dinosaurs living and indeed thriving in many types of environments, including colder regions where snowstorms, freezing fog and sea-ice were commonplace.<\/figure>\n
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When the show\u2019s producers first approached us to help understand the kinds of weather and environment that dinosaurs lived in before being wiped out around 66 million years ago, it prompted us to tackle a problem that has existed in palaeoclimate modelling for decades. That was, when scientists like us used computers to simulate, or \u201cmodel\u201d, the climate of prehistoric Earth, the models tended to make the poles much colder than evidence from fossils and rocks suggested they had actually been.<\/figure>\n
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For the TV series, not only have we improved our models, but we have run the computer programmes for longer than anybody else has ever done to get the models as close to ancient \u201creality\u201d as possible.<\/figure>\n
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Prehistoric Planet depicts CGI dinosaurs based on the latest research. AppleTV+, CC BY-NC-SA.<\/p><\/div>\n

The producers, the BBC\u2019s Natural History Unit, needed to know about the weather so they could film \u201creal world\u201d locations similar to those that existed in the past where dinosaurs lived. But most of what we know about the climate that long ago comes from indirect \u201cproxy\u201d evidence, such as leaf fossils and traces of certain chemicals in rocks, which can only reconstruct the average climate over decades or centuries. This is where the narrative of a much hotter and more humid Cretaceous world<\/a> comes from.<\/p>\n

This narrative isn\u2019t exactly wrong, but it doesn\u2019t tell the whole story since weather and climate behave differently. For instance, even in today\u2019s warming world a place like Texas, largely hot and humid, recently experienced widespread snowfall<\/a>. Geologists a million years from now will spot the sudden global warming \u2013 but not the freak snowstorm. Nonetheless, modelling the the prehistoric equivalent of these snowstorms is important since we know warmer worlds will experience greater weather extremes<\/a>. And these extremes will have largely determined which regions were completely inhospitable to dinosaurs.<\/figure>\n