Phil Tippet's Prehistoric Stock Footage

In 1984, stop motion animator Phil Tippet created a short film called Prehistoric Beast, which told the story of a "Monoclonius" and its deadly encounter with a hungry Tyrannosaurus, and is widely regarded as a masterpiece of dinosaur cinema. Shortly after the release of Prehistoric Beast, Tippet was hired to create additional dinosaur scenes for a CBS documentary simply titled Dinosaur! (not to be confused with the A&E documentary series of the same name, even down to the exclamation point). Scenes created for the documentary included the growing up of a baby hadrosaur, a Struthiomimus raiding a nest and later hunted down by a pair of Deinonychus, a herd of Apatosaurus feeding, and the extinction of the dinosaurs.

However, it is not the documentary itself that I want to focus on for this post, but rather the legacy it left behind. It seems that after the program premiered, both the footage from Prehistoric Beast and the additional scenes made for Dinosaur! became widely used stock footage for other documentaries (and in at least one case a computer game, as explained below). I do not know why this particular footage was used so much, but regardless, it became a prominent part of my childhood. In all those years of seeing the sequences I mentioned above, I had never seen or even heard of either program. For a long time, I wondered where these ubiquitous sequences had come from. I finally got a partial answer when I came across Dinosaur! and the footage I had grown up with. I initially assumed that was the original source, until I learned of Prehistoric Beast, after which all pieces of the puzzle fell into place, and I was satisfied.

I want to give a brief discussion of some of the sources that made use of this stock footage. It is not meant to be comprehensive, only a listing of the examples that I personally grew up with. If you know of any others let me know in the comments. First off, the PBS documentary The Dinosaurs! (sheesh, dino doc makers sure loved exclamation points back then) used a few brief scenes from Prehistoric Beast and Dinosaur! but mainly relied on animations created specifically for the program. Eyewitness Dinosaur used some of this footage, such as the scene where "Monoclonius" is attacked and bits with the Struthiomimus. The Really Wild Animals episode about dinosaurs used Tippet's footage extensively, especially the hadrosaur story. And finally, the computer game 3-D Dinosaur Adventure used several sequences in the Movies area.