What an amazing use of radioisotopes to gather details of woolly mammoth history on that island! (I shall await another round of Ken Ham’s robotic dismissals of anything which risks adding more credibility to radiometric analysis.)
“The last mammoths died on a remote island” will forever remain a timeless movie trope.
Perhaps @Patrick and @Dan_Eastwood share my memories of these B-movie, stop-motion animation classics. By the time I saw them in the early 1960’s, they were often billed as one of those popular drive-in movie double-features: Dr. Moreau’s Island of the Megamammals and Holocene Herbivores from Hell.
Both movies included that requisite scene where a bunch of cave men throw their toothpick-like spears at the huge beast until one unfortunate guy is grabbed by the monster, thrown to the ground, and stomped to a pulp.
Also, not many people notice this but if you look very closely at the woolly mammoth migration scene which follows the opening credits in Holocene Herbivores from Hell, you will see a very young Aloysius Snuffleupagus in his very first film credit, some twenty years before he got his big break and major stardom on Sesame Street.
Don’t forget the classic: Ferocious Fin-Fitted Iguanas
I actually Googled Holocene Herbivores from Hell on the off chance it was real … because that would be a great movie!
Gotta love Harryhausen!
PS: In the new Amazon Thunderbirds Are Go! series, there is an episode where they actually use Bearded Dragons with fins strapped on their backs. It’s totally hokey, completely appropriate, and a wonderful tribute to the original Thunderbirds series and special effects of decades past.
I loved that one!
Somebody should set up a crowd-funding account for it on GoFundMe.
Perhaps the long-awaited remake of Holocene Herbivores from Hell could be the first cinema production of Peaceful Science Films Ltd. (The company logo in the opening credits of the movie would be an fin-fitted iguana roaring inside of a circle with the Latin inscription: Vero Scientia Pacificae. Swamidass Gratia Swamidassis.) Perhaps the John T. Templeton Fund could help out.
I always wondered about the guy whose job on the B-movie films was to attach those fins to the backs of iguanas. (Perhaps the Academy could give him a Lifetime Achievements Award.)
Out of respect for an accomplished thespian, Aloysius Snuffleupagus should be given a cameo in the remake.
Only slightly related, but the 2005 King Kong features a Bug Attack scene. As if this scene were not already disturbing enough, at the point where a man is being eaten alive by monstrous worms, my niece (who was studying marine biology at the time) leans over and whispers in my ear …
“There really are worms like that!”
I left the theater with a chill that still hasn’t quite left me.
I had a similar reaction while watching an episode of the TV interview program Firing Line. A friend leaned over and whispered in my ear: “There really are politicians like that!”
That chill and feeling of total panic still hasn’t quite left me. Yikes.
I keep telling myself: “It’s only a TV program.” It is very similar when I listen to NPR.
Its very old news about the wrangel island elephants. In fact i thought they were dwarf ones when they went extinct.
Creationists have great ideas about the ice age die off. We think it was from not just warming of the summers but the colding of the winters. In fact mammoths could not survive today on wrangel because its too cold and barron at seasons. So the extinction probably happened in a single year. they were not the last thats just the usual wrong dating system they use. The mammothjs all died out at the same time. Except possibly these lingered a few years because the water level had risen from the warming. Yet pretty much the same time. it was about 2100-1900 BC.