Everyone has their guilty pleasures, whether it is chocolate, Korean television dramas, or even Irish coffee. Among my guilty pleasures I have to include watching cheesy, truly awful science fiction "creature features." These movies are, unlike some major Hollywood films that simply come off as ridiculous, never intended to be high theater, or to be premiered at red carpet events and break box office records. These are made quickly and are generally tongue-in-cheek ridiculous the whole way through. There is just something about their terrible acting, their ridiculous plots and horrible special effects that entertain me to no end. Believe me, I enjoy good films just as much as the next, but there are some times when I just want to sit back and watch a bad movie with ice spiders, giant sharks, and prehistoric beasts. But if there is one thing I hate about bad science fiction movies it is some of the terrible, outlandish science that gets put in--and nothing raises my hackles more than when it's bad science relating to paleontology or dinosaurs.
This really got to me when I sat and watched Sand Sharks, which was quite entertaining while still containing a lot of bad science. First of all, the premise, that sharks are swimming through the sand, is rubbish, but that's pretty much a given when it comes to these films. No, what really got me was when the actress playing the marine scientist says that she is going to take samples for carbon dating. I was generally unclear as to whether she was referring to samples of the creature or samples of the fossil the creature was supposed to have come from. If it was a sample of a recently-deceased creature, then carbon dating wouldn't tell them anymore than they already knew, that the creature died a few days ago. If a fossil, then it would be pointless to use carbon dating. Using carbon isotopes to date an artifact only works with objects that are not much older than 50,000 years old. Anything older and different dating methods need to be used; radiocarbon will be inadequate to the task. Regardless, it's quite confused in its use of the term, and was probably put in as filler scientific jargon by someone with no understanding of what it meant and directed at an audience including few who would recognize the improper use of the term.
Another type of error that really burns me is when people refer to something as a "dinosaur" when it isn't at all. Dinoshark is a nice-enough example; no dinosaur swam, and the creature in question isn't a shark either, strictly speaking, but rather an extinct aquatic reptile--from the look of it, probably an ichthyosaur with bigger jaws added to make it more shark-like and thus justify the title. Dinoshark is, as it happens, also an example of some really bad paleontology--the creature, extinct for 150 million years, was frozen in an iceberg only to be released due to global warming. Leaving aside the terrible biology involved, there were no ice ages 150 MYA--the global climate that dinosaurs and other extinct reptiles inhabited was a hothouse. Even the supposed scientist in Predator X refers to his resurrected creature (with DNA taken from bones, another impossibility of paleontology; at least Jurassic Park was a plausible resurrection, given what was known at the time!) as a "dinosaur" when really it is more of a mosasaur, another extinct marine reptile which is also not a dinosaur.
I could go on, but these examples give a sense of some of the factual errors that abound in the genre. Granted, with the bad writing, acting, and all the other bad aspects of the film, bad science isn't exactly unexpected. But still, it takes less than a minute to fact-check some of these things, and when it comes to basic paleontology, it is worth getting it right.
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