Archived Discussion Main / SomewhereAPalaeontologistisCrying

• Well, the dinosaurs were apparently created by human genetic engineers before the cataclysm, so paleontologists might not cry so badly over it. Population biologists, no doubt, are better off avoiding it.
• Wait, wait... Several HUNDRED?! FROM THE DINOSAURS?! 65,000,000 YEARS IS SEVERAL HUNDRED?!
  • Several hundred years from now, right? Calm down, dry those palaeontologist-tears-of-rage!

• Along similar lines, Kent Hovind has made a career out of "evidence" that dinosaurs existed alongside humans before the Great Flood. Or, at least, he did until he was sent to jail for tax evasion, the obnoxious greedy slimeball.
• Among the incidents that derailed Stockwell Day's career as leader of Canada's Canadian Alliance Party was his claim that Adam and Eve were historical persons and coexisted with dinosaurs.
• Carl Baugh, another creationist, used to have a traveling road show where he carted around a selection of lizards. Lizards, according to Baugh, are dinosaurs, just small ones. Because everyone knows that if you let an iguana grow big, it will look like a T-Rex.
• The believe can work in common sense, so long as Jack Chick doesn't talk. Ever! Reasonable considering that adult dinosaurs wouldn't be able to fit in Noah's Ark (thus young versions...well, you can figure it out) and that we are well aware of what plant-life grows in the area of Mt. Ararat. The young herbivores would have difficulty adapting, and likely go extinct. The carnivores would adapt by eating livestock. And, take a guess how humans would take that?
  • That assumes that A: A Great Flood capable of covering all but 1% of the world's land area, let alone there be a wooden ark capable of surviving such a flood, B: Said Ark landed on Mount Ararat.
  • The Ark did not land on modern day Mt. Ararat, a dormant volcano, but "the mountains of Ararat", a mountain range.
  • Goddidit
  • Because a worldwide ocean that deposits fossils on the tops of mountain ranges is SO unrealistic...
  • Think of all those poor water-dwelling plesiosaurs et al that drowned in the Flood...
  • I'm not sure about what most Christians teach about it, but Jewish teachings suggest that the seas boiled during the flood, thus killing fish also. They don't normally say that there were dinosaurs around at the time, though.
  • The Given defense? The amount of water required for a global flood would change the air quality (stated as "Colder") and thus choking them out. Right Idea, wrong conclusion (among other problems).

• Note that the film takes place in the modern day, on a tiny island where dinosaur-like creatures have either persisted or re-evolved. If the creatures are dinosaurs, hundreds of millions of years have elapsed since their last common ancestor with any dinosaur we have ever found. If they are merely other animals that have developed to appear superficially similar to dinosaurs through convergent evolution, expect them to be even more different.
  • It's also a very hot thing.
  • Walt thought that three finger looked cooler than two fingers despite knowing full well that they only had two fingers, and, well... the company has his name on it.
  • Also, Dimetrodon didn't live in the "Coal Age", or Carboniferous, it lived in the Permian, which was characterizd by, amongst other things, deserts, not swamps. Oops.
  • Later pushed to surrealism and Affectionate Parody in AllegroNonTroppo.

• Adding to the part about the Carnotaurus, in order to make them more effective as the Big Bad villains, they were increased to the same size as the largest T-Rex. Real Carnotaur's were actually smaller than Iguanodon's, which was the species of the main protagonist.
• Let's not forget everywhere is covered in grass, which didn't evolve until long after the dinosaurs died out.
• In order to make them be able to talk better, they gave all the Iguanodon characters lips. Real Iguanodon's had a form of beak.
• Iguanodon's were also all portrayed as entirely quadrupedal animals. The real animals easily had the ability to be both bipedal and quadrupeds and were most likely bipeds when they needed to run.
  • Ironically enough, for all the inaccuracies the film had, it probably had (and still has) the most realistic Velociraptors put on screen in a feature film so far in terms of size and build.

• Slightly justified by the fact that the dinosaurs in the third movie apparently live in a Journey To The Center Of The Earth-esque world.
  • Another point is much more unjustified. The baby tyrannosaurs that follow Sid around in the previews hatch in eggs that are exponentially bigger than the biggest dinosaur egg ever known (that of the elephant bird, the largest non-avian dinosaur egg was the size of a basketball), they have squat, short faces like adult T-rexes, as opposed to the leaner bodies scientists now know juvenile tyrannosaurs had, and they have no feathers. In fact, none of the dinosaurs have feathers (as far as one can tell from the previews) in the movie. In fact the producers specifically went out of their way to cut feathered dinosaurs from the move because they were "too weird".
  • There are fossil imprints of T. rex skin. The adults at least didn't have feathers. Wether to hatchlings and juveniles had them is unknown but if they did they were lost by the time they reached their full growth.
  • They're not T-rexes. They're Calvinosaurs.

• Among the many other things in the movie already making history teachers cry at night, 10,000 B.C. has a herd of Woolly Mammoths roped into building the pyramids in ancient Egypt. Probably the most epic (and awesome) case of Misplaced Wildlife so far this year. Granted, this is probably one of those "they know it doesn't make sense, it's not suppose to" case.
  • The last Mammoth was thought to have died out around 4,000 BCE, it's the Egypt that's misplaced, not the mammoths.
    • Egypt did have mammoths in the Ice Age. They called them elephants.
    • First, it's not Egypt, but a fictional civilization that would inspire the Egyptians in the distant future with its ruins and other remnants, and second, the biggest problem of having mammoths in this setting is that the species was most likely killed by the ending of the ice age! In other words, they would have died of the extreme heat of the desert environment seen in the movie.
  • The Mammoths in the film are also stated by the hunting tribe to be led by a 'lead Bull' (a male Elephant). In real-life, Elephants are led by female Matriarchs and Mammoths seem to be no different.

• The trailer for the 1992 film Adventures In Dinosaur City boasts that the film's main characters lived millions of years before turtles (A Take That! directed at the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles popular at the time) even though turtles actually did live during the time of the dinosaurs. This is a film about talking, upright-walking dinosaurs (in a style similar to the Jim Henson Dinosaurs series) who live alongside cavemen, so this is mostly likely another case of They Just Didn't Care.
  • As much as it galls me to admit I've actually seen this movie, the plot actually has the protagonists warped into their favorite cartoon show, Dinosaurs. So it's really the Show Within a Show that this trope applies to, as the plot is never portrayed as anything but fiction, even within the film itself.

• The motion based sight was also retconned in the Lost World with a handwave about the T Rex being full. Apparently Crichton changed his mind about the likelihood of that based on how most animals today respond to hearing a potential threat: going absolutely still.
  • When Jurassic Park was first published Gregory Paul interpreted Deinonychus as a species of Velociraptor (Velociraptor antirrhops). Crichton did a lot of his theropod dinosaur research off of Paul's book "Predatory Dinosaurs of the World" hence the classification in the book. The idea of the Tyrannosaurus speeds also came from this book, though whether or not T rex could run at these speeds was not even investigated until after the movie was filmed (and mostly because the movie was filmed), although the matter as to whether it was more of a scavenger is still heavily debated ... by the sort of paleontologist who might also insist that the Enterprise would easily beat a Star Destroyer, or vice versa. Everybody else in the field knows that there's very very few predators who only eat fresh kills, and the overwhelming majority of them will scavenge whatever they can, whenever the opportunity presents itself. The paleontologists who insist that there is a controversy, in passing, are also generally regarded by their peers as obsessive nuts. The irony of this is not lost on the peers, either.
    • Ironically, right after the movie came out a new species of raptor, Utahraptor ostrommaysi, was discovered that was even bigger than the unrealistically huge raptors in the film.
  • The movie, at least, contains a character who is supposed to be a paleontologist saying "Dinosaurs and man. Two species separated by sixty-five million years." See if you can spot the problem.
  • Another scene has him holding a baby dinosaur in his hands. "What species is it?" he hisses to a nearby geneticist. "It's a Velociraptor," responds the geneticist. Neither of these trained scientists who really ought to know these things picked up on the fact that Velociraptor is the genus name.
    • Velociraptor is the genus name and therefore also half of the species name, but besides that it is also considered a "common name" for the species shown and therefore would not be strange for either scientist to refer to the species in such a way.
  • Spielberg stated that, when graduating from California State University, he used Amistad and Schindler's List as references for college works, but had to write a paper on paleontology, because "Jurassic Park was too apocryphal to count for credit."
  • Crichton gets away with his Dilophosaurs, because he actually made them the correct size in his book and his explanation for why they spat poison did sound plausible (coelophysoid jaws were not that strong, and so Crichton felt there must have been some other way that they were killing their prey - also, he wanted to include examples of how live animals could behave in ways not determinable from fossils alone). Spielberg, however, takes this way over the line. First off, he shrinks the Dilophosaurs down from twenty feet to four feet. Then, he gives them a gaudy frilled lizard-like frill (something that was not present on Crichton's Dilos, by the way). In an ultimate irony, this was to distinguish them from the Velociraptors, though in reality Velociraptors were the size Dilophosaurus was in the film, and vice versa. I suppose this could be explained by the Dilophosaurus being a juvenile, but...Epic Fail man, like Epic Fail.
    • Not to mention that the film's Dilophosaurus used the ridiculous frill in an even more ridiculous manner — puffing it out right before spitting poison and killing, when any animal with this adaptation would use it to scare away predators, not to look awesome and scary to its PREY.
  • In the Lost World novel, Chriton included Carnotauruses who had chameleon-like camouflage abilities. While its not completely implausible that there were some species of dinosaur who possessed this, existent animals only use this type of camouflage as part of ambushing or hiding from larger predators and usually have a small and sedentary body structure as part of the package.

OK, this all seems to have been reasonably correct at the time it was published, barring some Artistic License.

• There had been big nasty sharks like Squalicorax and Cretoxyrhina during the Cretaceous. The predominant theories regarding them is that the mosasaurs ate them out of existence when they became dominant (Cretoxyrhina), or the sharks became scavengers and stayed the hell out of the way (Squalicorax). So...hell yeah to the mosasaurs.
  • But remember sharks have no bones : We can hope to find nearly only teeth. For example, theses two sharks were discovered only in 1995, by finding shark teeth on bones of a 18 foot mosasaur...
• Except that the largest known Mosasaurs, Hainosaurus, are estimated to be roughly the same size as a Megalodon. While the two would certainly have been very competitive, it would have been a close one (if the two had lived at the same time, which they didn't).
• The new book (Hell's Aquarium) also has all sorts of aquatic prehistoric beasties living in Panthallasa, a gigantic underground sea beneath the Earth in a manner of Journey to the Center of the Earth. Only problem is that Panthalassa is the giant sea which covered the world during the Triassic, way before mosasaurs and the like and unbelivable older than Megalodon. And it was on the surface.
• Actually, 47 millions years can be a huge difference in evolution (carnivors mammals can often kill actual reptiles far biggers than them, for example).

• The Doctor Who episode "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" had a large, placid, and stupid Apatosaurus, which the UNIT commander insisted on calling a Brontosaurus. The Doctor called it by its proper name at first, but later switched to Brontosaurus for convenience.
  • Many people are quite aware that Apatosaurus is the proper name, but simply prefer the name Brontosaurus - initially the name for a fossil that was later shown to be an Apatosaur. The most popular argument is that it's simply a cooler word. Besides, what Homo Sapian uses only the Linnaean taxonomy of beasts in their idiolect?
    • Not convenient enough for the Brigadier's men, who'd use the word "steggie" instead of Stegosaurus.

It seems the writers here are aware of the correct term, but simply wrote about humans who prefer the popular term.

For example, one "fight" features a Nanotyrannus that, according to the narration, knows the juvenile T. rex it's stalking has a mouthful of bacteria that will give it a nasty infection if it gets bit. That's right, ladies and gentlemen: dinosaurs understood germ theory of disease.

• Not as far-fetched as it may first seem. When the narrator said 'knows', he meant in an intuitive fashion. Many modern animals use the same weapon. the Komodo dragon for instance, will bite prey and then instinctively wait until it succumbs to infection. Even humans have intuitive microbiology; we develop an aversion to food that appears contaminated at a very young age, when nearly anyone would not yet have been taught germ theory.
  • In a case of Science Marches On, it's actually been recently discovered that Komodo dragons do indeed have a venom, they don't rely just on diseases, although they may play a part.

• Not necessarily a strictly scientific issue, but anyone with a functional eye should notice that some... or rather, most of the animal movements are way unnatural and over-the-top (as in, rearing back, like cartoon characters do, pulling whatever stunt is needed at the time to look cool, then even "bouncing" like rubber a bit upon landing, while needlessly bellowing and screeching, akin again to movie monsters). Looks like an effective way to get tired and dizzy quickly, with all those excess movements. This isn't exclusive to Jurassic Fight Club, of course, and a lot of documentary shows that use CGI for their creatures have been animating their subjects this way, but I have never seen such rubbery skin on any computer-generated "scientifically accurate" animals before. The skin on the Pachirrhinosaurus' face, for instance, wobbles like human female breasts with implants do, simply from the animal looking up. Heck, the thighs of the Theropods wave around so much when walking, you'd think their muscle tissue has detached.
  • And for that matter, the writings in the screen occasionally have misspellings as well (Nanotyrannosaurus).

  • Of course, this was also a parody of a weird little genre of monster movies where the "monsters" in question were probably the cast's pets.
  • Of course people did think Iguanodons looked like that◊ for a while.

  • In the Eberron campaign setting, halflings ride deinonychus — the setting has local names for many species as well, mostly of the form "adjectivebodypart". On the other hand, there are also fictional dinosaurs who are, basically, dragons.
    • Most notably, the fleshraker, with its venomous claws and tail, stretches the definition of "animal" so far it must have been designed by a munchkin who likes to play druids.
  • Since the first edition Monster Manual had no specific listing for "sea serpent" (except for the weird Dragon Turtle), many DM's used plesiosaurs for that purpose. And really, since plesiosaurs are so close to our popular conception of sea serpents anyway, why not?

  • Forget the cavemen! Is that a saddle on the T-Rex!?
    • Don't knock it - you ever tried to ride one of those things bareback? OUCH!

  • What gets me is that their Styracosaurus figure was labeled a "Stracosaurus" and all of their dinosaur roars were the Godzilla roar.

  • And then there's the Raptors, which don't look anything like the dromaeosaurs they're named after, but more like a bulked-up version of the Australian Frilled Dragon.

  • It's hard to tell if they're the right size or not, though, because the only thing to compare them to is a jeep... that's being driven by another velociraptor, and would thus be scaled to it if they are properly small. This may be an intentional dodge.

  • Oddly, this trope is averted in Super Paper Mario, where the Prehistoria level has nothing (except for a Yoshi statue) looking remotely like dinosaurs around.
    • Actually, there's a Palette Swap of the fairly dinosaur-like Jawbus enemy, though these do show up in other places.

    • But then, Un'Goro is mostly one big Shout-Out to works like Land Of The Lost and King Kong, and is meant to look like a theme park dinosaur show. And the raptors have been made with such liberal artistic license, having a tribal society and wearing feathered armbands, that they really can't even be compared to actual creatures.

  • A lampshade was hung upon this trope in the alt text of this strip.
  • And this one. With apologies.

  • Just to twist the knife, there is an E/I ("Educational/Informational") symbol in the upper corner throughout this show.

  • Not to nitpick or anything, but I believe the duckbilled dinosaur (Whose name is "Dweeb") was refered to as an Anatosaurus not an Apatosaurus. Anatosaurus was a genus of duckbilled dinosaurs...but the more appropriate term used these days is Edmontosaurus. Also, Dweeb looks more like a Saurolophus or possibly a Parasaurolophus rather than an Edmontosaurus.

• The BBC's Walking With Dinosaurs documentary series. It and the other Walking With... series are just about the only notable productions that very, very consciously avoid this trope no matter what it takes. They even knew enough not to show grass during the Mesozoic!
  • However, even a reasonably science-based show like this gets some things wrong. For instance, they showed Postosuchus, a dinosaur-like relative of crocodiles, having a pee. Unfortunately, Postosuchus is a reptile, and reptiles don't excrete liquid urine - as anyone who's ever owned an iguana knows, reptiles secrete a paste of uric acid instead.
  • Sadly, Walking with Monsters was subject to within-series march-on of science, but that really was nobody's fault except Megarachne, for being a scorpion that looks a whole lot like a Giant Spider. And you know that Euparkeria? Might not actually be a dinosaur relative. Little bastards.
    • And Petrolacosaurus - a primitive diapsid reptile - definitely wasn't an ancestor of basal synapsids ("mammal-like reptiles" if you don't like cladistics).
    • And it turns out that there actually was grass in the Cretaceous. (It was just more like bamboo than modern grass - so for the purpose of "green stuff that covers the plains and waves in the wind, still not so much.)

Aversions aren't useful, particularly in a documentary.

Real Life

• Literal Truth in Television: in one of his early books, Palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould told the story of having an argument with another boy at camp when he was (let's say) 8 years old, as to whether or not dinosaurs and humans ever coexisted. They agreed to ask an adult and the adult's opinion/decision was binding. (Gould believed that any random adult would know everything about this, since adults know everything about everything.) The adult they consulted said, of course dinosaurs and humans coexisted: after all, just look at Alley Oop. Cue the (8-year-old, future) palaeontologist crying.
• One spectacular aversion worth mentioning: Dinosaur Not-So-National Park, a roadside attraction in the middle-of-nowhere Erie, Kansas. For an amazing attraction featuring dinosaur skeleton replications made entirely of car-parts, that thing was pretty well accurate.
• One of this troper's classmates asked our Theology teacher whether or not Jesus lived with dinosaurs. And he was dead serious.
  • Of course he was. We have photographic◊ evidence!◊
    • Even though that second picture is an insult to the entire Enlightenment legacy of rationality, it remains pretty cool.
  • we know Jesus lived with the dinosaurs for somewhat different reasons◊.
  • And let's not forget that he had to preach the word of God to them.
  • And they helped the Egyptians build the pyramids.
• Two Words; Creation Science. Ken Ham, Kent Hovind, Ray Comfort, Ben Stein, Jack T. Chick, ALL of them basically think The Flintstones is a documentary.
• This troper, a palaeontologist, was asked in all seriousness by a friend how cavemen managed to hunt dinosaurs. He wasn't even a creationist, either!

This doesn't really add anything.

Puidwen: Why is warcraft in here? Considering that it takes place not on earth but a fantasy planet, and some of the lore that’s been revealed recently I can forgive it