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INSPIRATION

   It’s important to learn from other people in whatever field you’re working, and the creative arts industry is no exception. But when it comes to imitating, you should only imitate the most iconic. This may be on a spoofing basis or a simple act of tribute. A lot of stories are structured with heroic male and female leads, main villains and wise supporting characters, very much like fairy tales, and this depiction of good-fighting-evil is also a very biblical portrayal. Each writer, though, is inspired by different aspects, some more unique than others, and these ideas came originally from great minds. My aim is to search for the real legends that inspired popular entertainment. Here are a few examples.

   Some of you may know Daphne du Maurier as the author of Rebecca, which in 1940 was adapted into the only Hitchcock film to win an Oscar for Best Picture. It’s little wonder that the director had a taste for her work as many of her stories, if not most of them, are slightly spooky. Even if they’re short stories, the works of Du Maurier draw the reader in very easily and are very gripping. I could be wrong, but they were almost certainly what inspired Hitchcock suspense. I feel that that this kind of tone is more effective in literature than it is on the screen, especially considering where cinematic suspense was taken with disaster movies in the 70s. As well as full of suspense, her writing is very descriptive and has influenced my own descriptive abilities. Much in that genre where the audience is kept guessing is owed to one of the great authoresses of the 20th century.

   A major portion of my own book, Family in a Tree, is based on encyclopaedic knowledge of the natural world. An encyclopaedic novel is one which you read and learn something factual along the way. One writer who had reputation for the genre was 19th century French author Jules Verne, author of such imaginative novels as Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon and Around the World in 80 Days.

 

   I had read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, shortly before I saw the 1954 Disney film. It was a little complicated but easy to follow. The story is about a team of explorers who are captured and held prisoner aboard a giant electricity-powered submarine, commanded by the mysterious Captain Nemo. Not exactly good  nor exactly bad, he provides them with humble hospitality as he takes the explorers on an epic underwater sea voyage. They come across strange creatures, most famously the giant squid. It was one of a collection of books which made Jules Verne one of the fathers of science-fiction, not in a space-age sense, but envisioning the kind of feats man may be able to achieve in the near future.

   Referring to what I mentioned about the real inspirations, one of the first things that came to mind when I read 20,000 Leagues was Pirates of the Caribbean, as they are full of remarkable similarities. These likenesses are shown in the film, which, like Pirates, was made by Disney. It was also probably an act of tribute for Pixar (another Disney studio) to give the name Nemo to the world's best-loved clownfish. 

   The last and most important thing I have to say about the real inspiring legends refers to my concerns that the family unit is somewhat deteriorating. For those of you who love comedies such as Mr Bean and Chucklevision, I definitely recommend looking at some comedy films from the silent picture era made by the great visual comedians, such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy. As well as understanding where the more recent comedians got their inspiration from, it’s likely they've been concerned about the profanity of some comedy, and were retrospective of those great legendary comedians who never used a single unacceptable word. I feel the same about great stories, whether they are on page or screen. Literature has moved on dramatically. Writers such as Beatrix Potter, A. A Milne and Roald Dahl are among the few who have provided stories which can return us to a more secure and homely world. The same can be said for TV companies, including Smallfilms, A.P.F/ Century 21 and Hanna-Barbera, and even film companies such as MGM, Ealing and especially Buena Vista, Disney's former distribution arm. In view of this nostalgia, I've put my ambitions as a performer on hold and committed myself to writing instead, at least for the time being. My challenge as a writer has been to create a picture of great power and dynamism without much use of material likely to harm or offend, which does sound ambitious in this day and age. Nevertheless, I truly believe that family entertainment can be stabilized, and that families can be brought together with adults and children feeling much stronger about their own views and appeals at the same time. I know many of you readers can relate to what I've stated, and I'm grateful for your interest in my work, as I have much more to come.                              

10 Things You Didn't Know About Prehistoric Life

   With the depiction of prehistoric life in my first book, it’s reasonable for me to want to expand on the subject. The scientific story of life on Earth was once my biggest obsession. There are infinite ways of explaining it, considering most people never knew many of the animals and plants actually existed. I would like to go through ten important points that remind us of how much we could still have to learn.

1. Mistakes of the past and present

   It's no big surprise how palaeontologists have a reputation for getting things wrong, when the most recent evidence has been fossilised for thousands and millions of years. Today, too, we make quick judgements and therefore occasional reconstruction errors.

Sail-back, mammal-like reptiles

   About 290 million years ago during the Permian period, when reptiles had begun to dominate the land, the first giant breeds had appeared. These were not dinosaurs. This was 60 million years before the dinosaurs existed. Two of the largest species from this time had large sails on their backs for radiation. They would act like a solar panel, absorbing the heat of the sun, and making these the first warm-blooded reptiles. Edaphosaurus was a 3-metre-long vegetarian, living in herds in what became North America and Central Europe. But another slightly larger breed in the same area was Dimetrodon. Dimetrodon was a meat-eater, and would commonly feed on Edaphosaurus. Looking at their skeletons, it is easy to mistake animals like these for the dinosaurs. Certain dinosaurs even had those same sails on their backs for the same purpose.      

Iguanodon

   In the 1820s, the wife of English scientist, Dr Gideon Mantell found the fossilised teeth of Iguanodon, the very first dinosaur to be recognised. Originally, only one of its deadly thumb spikes was found, and it was mistaken for a rhino-like nose horn. As a result, two very inaccurate models were reconstructed for the Crystal Palace Park in London. One of them even had a dinner party held inside it for 20 people, before it was finished. They both remain there, long after corrections have been determined, as a reminder of scientific error.

Close cousins of dinosaurs

   There were two other major groups of reptiles which shared the world with the dinosaurs during their age: the pterosaurs and the plesiosaurs. Pterosaurs (including pterodactyls) were the largest living animals ever to soar through the sky. They came in all shapes and sizes with a variety of teeth and head crests. But considering their ability to fly, only rarely are fossils of the same species found worldwide. Plesiosaurs were the powerful predators that hunted in the hazardous oceans. Their bulky bodies had a streamlined shape and were equipped with wing-like flippers. There's probably no one who initially didn't mistake these groups for relatives of dinosaurs. They were very close cousins, and although no dinosaur could fly, some bird-like dinosaurs could theoretically glide.

   The way to identify a dinosaur is by the structure of its pelvis. There were two primary groups; Lizard-hipped Dinosaurs and Bird-hipped Dinosaurs, and pterosaurs and plesiosaurs belonged to neither. All of them were part of an ecosystem that can only be described as Mesozoic Reptiles.

2. Grass

   Such is the dominance of the familiar plant on this planet called Grass that it's hard to imagine life without it. As a wild speculation, you might think it's always been here. However, it only appeared as far back as 3 or 4 million years ago, more than 60 million years after the dinosaurs became extinct. Around this time, there appeared the first ape-like humans, and new types of mammal grazers now that grasslands had grown. Becoming this common at in a relatively short period of time has made grass one of the world's most successful plants.

3. Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus

   The biggest land animals of all time were the sauropods, giant plant-eating dinosaurs with long necks and tiny heads, and long tails to balance their necks. Everything about them was the largest of any dinosaur apart from their skulls - thatrecord is held by members of the Triceratops family. Brontosaurus is one of the first names that come to mind when the sauropod figure is caught sight of, but the story behind that dinosaur is another temporary misunderstanding. In 1877, the first skeleton was discovered of a similar dinosaur named Apatosaurus. Two years later, remarkably similar fossils were found and named Brontosaurus. Much later after that, it was agreed that both specimens were the same dinosaur, and so with that, the name Brontosaurus has been dropped. 

4. A new kind of marine desert

   A marine desert usually refers to open, uninhabited ocean, thousands of miles from the nearest civilisation. But 40 to 36 million years ago during the late Eocene period, when large, grazing mammals had appeared, it had a very different meaning. Even though it's the last place on Earth you'd expect to find anything to do with marine life, evidence of an underwater ecosystem lies in the Sahara Desert. At the end of the Eocene, North Africa was completely covered by a tropical sea called the Legendary Tethys.

   The sea connected the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and was the home of Basilosaurus, one of the first ocean-going whales. At first glance, Basilosaurus appeared to be a giant lizard or sea serpent, but what linked it back to its mammalian ancestors on land was its set of teeth.

5. The largest carnivores ever to walk the Earth

   Dinosaurs included not only the largest plant-eaters ever to walk the Earth, but the largest meat-eaters too. Tyrannosaurus Rex appeared towards the end of the age of dinosaurs, 65 million years ago in what is now the United States. It was a 13-metre-long bone-crushing machine, weighing 5 tons and able to tear off nearly a tenth of a ton of meat with one bite. Although this is a classic example of the so-called Theropod dinosaurs, and was evidently powerful, a handful of other close and bigger cousins have since been discovered.

Giganotosaurus

   Giganotosaurus was discovered in South America. It was 14 metres long and lived in the early Cretaceous, long before the T Rex. South America was the home of a range of giant herbivores during this time, and they were common prey for a predator such as this. The carnivore was built with strong bones to carry its large body. 

Carcharodontosaurus

   It was named, Carcharodontosaurus after the shape of its teeth. This theropod had a neat set of ripping teeth, resembling those of great white sharks. Living in North Africa in the early Cretaceous, there was wide open space for it to grow to 15 metres, and attack any sauropod it came across. In fact, it was one of the closest relatives of Giganotosaurus. 

Spinosaurus

The largest land carnivore on record, Spinosaurus was from a family of theropod dinosaurs with long snouts like those of crocodiles. At the longest, the carnivore grew to 17 metres, and would stalk the open North African spaces of the late Cretaceous. The most distinguished feature of Spinosaurus was the sail on its back, which it used to control its body temperature. Dinosaurs of this group also spent time in the water, fishing with their long skulls and sometimes even swimming for fish.  

6. A cinema classic saved

   In 1991, work began on the animatronics for Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, the all-time classic dinosaur film. Just one year earlier, very importantly, a long-held belief about the T Rex was finally destroyed, the T Rex being the subject of the film's iconic logo. The second T Rex skeleton was found in 1902, and a large, three-fingered forelimb found nearby was thought to belong to it. In the dinosaur fight between the T Rex and the Stegosaurus in Walt Disney’s Fantasia, which was released in 1940, the T Rex is conspicuously armed with three fingers on each hand. Also, referring to the mistakes of the past, it’s been pointed out that the T Rex and the Stegosaurus lived about 85 million years apart from each other! Finally in 1990, the tenth T Rex was discovered with the first complete forelimb, and that forelimb only had two fingers and was much smaller. These tiny arms applied to other close relatives of the T Rex as well. But more to the point, this three-finger myth was busted just in time for the sake of Jurassic Park.     

7. Feathered dinosaurs

   The dinosaurs, according to theory, resembled birds more than they did modern reptiles. The first birds appeared in the mid Jurassic, 150 million years ago, but dinosaurs continued to go develop path and evolve feathers of their own. Common feathered dinosaurs were deinonychosaurs, small, agile theropods with specialised killing teeth, and a distinctive curved claw on each inner toe. This equipment made the pack-hunters the ultimate dinosaur predators. They lived throughout the Cretaceous, many of them in North America but many others in Asia.

   The 4-metre-long Deinonychus hunted in North America, where it would kill medium-large prey but sometimes also be killed by it in the process. The name Deinonychus means 'Terrible Claw,' giving all deinonychosaurs the appropriate English name, 'Terrible Clawed Lizards.'

   Utahraptor was slightly larger than deinonychus and had a more powerful build. It too lived in North America and would willingly hunt any medium-sized herbivore it could jump and cling onto.

   On the other side of the world in Central Asia, there lived the much smaller velociraptor. This dinosaur was reconstructed in the film, Jurassic Park back in 1993, but inaccurately. For one, the velociraptor in real life was just 2 metres long, whereas those in Jurassic Park were considerably larger, perhaps in ferocity as well as in size. They weren't given feathers either, only their classic lizard skin, although this error was corrected for Jurassic Park III.    

   It was only in the last 30 years that portrayals of feathered dinosaurs were taken so seriously. Their extraordinarily long fingers are thought to have been used to spread wings. The dinosaurs were very thin and light in skeletal structure too, much like flightless birds.

8. World dominated by birds

   We humans along with all other mammals of today could not simply appear after the dinosaurs died out. We needed time to evolve. The first mammals appeared during the time of the dinosaurs, but they were very small and rodent-like. Some of them survived the great extinction, only to realise that the land was now covered by tropical forest. As the direct relatives of the dinosaurs were flightless birds, so the land and top of the food chain belonged to them for a short period of time. 

9. Australasia and Antarctica

   There are more extinct animals to have been found on each of the other continents than Australasia and Antarctica combined, and they have a weird and wonderful collection. The area that is now Antarctica was once connected to the tip of South America and to Australia. At the time of the dinosaurs, the South Pole was covered by forest rather than by ice. Conditions were still harsh but able to sustain an extent of warm-blooded life. Through the last 50 million years to the Ice Age, the Antarctic continent became separate, and temperatures gradually dropped lower until it settled for the reputation as the coldest, most hostile environment on the planet.     

Cryolophosaurus

   Antarctica's main fossil site is located in the rock formations of Mount Kirkpatrick. Cryolophosaurus was a theropod dinosaur from the Jurassic period, living in the Antarctic forests. It was the largest animal there at the time, at nearly 8 metres long. One recognisable feature was a small head crest, which would have been used for attractive colour display.

Muttaburrasaurus

   This was a dinosaur from the future island of Australia, a 7-metre-long herbivore often searching for food at the South Pole during the mid-Cretaceous. Upon its skull was an inflatable nasal sac to produce elephant-like trumpet calls. This skull feature was shared in many different shapes, by other members of the same dinosaur family, namely Hadrosaurs.  

Dinornis

   Towards the end of the last Ice Age, there lived a flightless bird called Dinornis. This bird could grow to nearly 4 metres tall, and lived in New Zealand. With its long legs and streamlined body, there was much resemblance to the theropod dinosaurs. New Zealand was dramatically shaped by glaciation, and as a catastrophic result, some large animals did not survive. 

10. Living fossils

Amphibians

   360 million years ago, during the Devonian period, amphibians became the first vertebrates to set foot on land. They could easily grow to a metre long, and they swam with the paddle on their long tails, as their legs tended to be so small. The basic body shape of these amphibians is still alive today, in one particular species that has been around ever since, the Giant Salamander of Japan.

   The largest amphibian known to science was Mastodonsaurus, a 6-metre-long predator that appeared around the same time as the dinosaurs did, in the mid Triassic. It had razor-sharp teeth, for hunting and killing prey in the future area of Eastern Europe.

Crocodiles and Alligators

   The ultimate river predators, crocodiles and alligators are nonetheless very primitive reptiles. They've been widespread since before the dinosaurs appeared, and being cold-blooded, they can go without food for months. They'd come a long way during the first 170 million years of their existence, and in the late Cretaceous Deinosuchus appeared. Deinosuchus was the biggest and most heavily-armoured crocodile ever to live on the planet, at 12 metres long and weighing 9 tons. Normally it dwelt on the coasts of North America, where it could swim for marine prey and even bring down small dinosaurs.

Turtles

   Turtles are the only reptiles left today that are most at home in the sea. They come to the coast to rest and to lay their eggs, and can live for more than 100 years. 150 million years ago, the waters of the late Jurassic period were filled with an extraordinary collection of marine reptiles. By the late Cretaceous, the continent that became North America had the honour of homing Archelon, the world's largest-ever turtle. It was 5 metres long, and sometimes large prey for lucky meat-eaters.              

   So, to conclude this analysis, I hope I've given you a curious window into prehistoric life. The story of life on Earth is supposedly, the biggest story of all. It's had a strong influence on my writing, and given me a tree-hugging attitude. I shouldn't have to remind you that the Earth is a far stronger force than humanity. But don't let this worry you. The adaptability of the human race is what has kept us going until now. I may write a prehistoric life documentary series, as I am very conscious about the obsession I used to have with the subject. 

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