BA In BBC Series Walking With Beasts

I had just finished reading Phil's book when I sat down to watch the first episode of the new BBC documentary series "Walking With Beasts" (from the makers of Walking With Dinosaurs) when what do I see is a very obvious bit of BA.

In the first few minutes of the first episode you see the bright streak of a meteor followed by the scene of a small (about baseball sized) meteorite on hitting the ground and making a small crater in the dirt. So far so good. The effect was a nice reminder of the fate of the dinosaurs a few million years earlier. The BA was present because the meteorite after hitting the ground was glowing red and slightly smoking.

I was a little disappointed at this because the producers of this series of programs are usually quite good with their attention to scientific accuracy...So much so they even acknowledge both theories relating to dinosaur extinction - large meteorite hitting the Earth's surface and a prolonged period of violent volcanic activity.

Maybe the paleontologists (sp?) should have consulted an astronomer before they created their meteroite effect:-)

[Donnie B.]

Good one, steve, and welcome to the BABB!

Of course, if a meteorite is big enough to make a substantial crater, it probably would be hot -- hot enough to vaporize and not be visible at all. So any way you look at it, they got it wrong.

I think this is one of those situations where the animators never even thought to check on the science. The focus of that show was prehistoric animals, after all, not meteorites. Besides, everybody knows that meteorites are hot as blazes! Hey, didn't you see The War of the Worlds?

Donnie,

Thanks for the welcome.

On reflection it was silly of me to think that a little thing like scientific accuracy should come into play when creating a special effect for a respected documentary:-)

[nebularain]

FYI - if you put a space between the word and the:-) you will get a real smilie face, like this /phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif !