History Literature / Carnosaur

* SympathericAdulterer: Lady Jane is a [[ZigZaggedTrope zig-zagging case]]. Darren Penward is clearly an evil person, and this extends to being an unloving husband to her; she genuinely views her affair with David as a potential escape to a happier life. However, she has quite a few bad qualities of her own, and is ultimately responsible for [[spoiler: all the people killed after she releases the dinosaurs]].

* FanDisservice: An in-universe example for David. He normally wouldn't mind seeing Jenny naked, but he's shocked to see her with anohter man having sex with her from behind.

* ButNotTooBi: When they confront each other after [[spoiler: she frees the dinosaurs from containment]], Darren says to Jane that she's slept with "every male - "and" some of the females - under the age of thirty in Cambridgeshire." While her affairs with men have been well established by this point, this is the first time any lesbian affairs have been suggested. Of course, Darren could be exaggerating to sound more hurtful.

* ButNotTooBi: When they confront each other after [[spoiler: she frees the dinosaurs from containment]], Darren says to Jane that she's slept with ''every male - "and" some of the females - under the age of thirty in Cambridgeshire.'' While her affairs with men have been well established by this point, this is the first time any lesbian affairs have been suggested. Of course, Darren could be exaggerating to sound more hurtful.

A novel by [[FunWithAcronyms Harry Adam Knight]] (a penname of Australian science fiction author Creator/JohnBrosnan, used for his schlockiest work), written in 1984, six years before Creator/MichaelCrichton penned ''Literature/JurassicPark''. The novel's story is vastly different from the InNameOnly Roger Corman [[Film/{{Carnosaur}} film]]. In it, [[IntrepidReporter David Pascal]] in Cambridgeshire, England is trying to discover the causes of a recent rash of deaths. The local bigshot, Sir Darren Penward, who collects rare and exotic predators, insists it was a Siberian tiger that escaped from his private zoo. However the lone survivor of one of the attacks, a small boy, claims it was a dinosaur.

* CoversAlwaysLie: Tor released a movie tie-in version of the novel to coincide with Corman's film, whose cover, featuring the movie poster artwork, blurts, "[[BlatantLies In the Startling Tradition of Jurassic Park]]!". It gets double ironic when you consider the novel predates ''Jurassic Park'' in both novel and film format by six and nine years respectively.

** The book repeatedly emphasizes how bird-like some of the predatory dinosaurs look and behave, which causes an UncannyValley effect on anyone seeing them as most of the characters in-universe are expecting big, slow, lizard-like monsters. When the ''Deinonychus'' and ''Tarbosaurus'' feed, they're compared to carnivorous birds in how they pin their prey down with a foot and rip into it with their jaws. This theory actually is well accepted even today (and made its way into ''Film/JurassicPark''), and all supporting evidence for it came ''after'' the book was published! One could say ''Franchise/JurassicPark'' is merely the TropeCodifier in the ''public's'' mind of dinosaurs being warm-blooded proto-birds rather than giant, cold-blooded lizards and this book, at least in fiction, is the TropeMaker. It's notable as while the bird-dinosaur connection theory had been around since the [=1860s=], it had largely been pushed to the wayside in the 1920s with alternatives enjoying much wider support until the 1970s; and even then well in the 1980s it was divisive.

** The manner in which the dinosaurs were created is actually much more realistic than the one presented in ''Jurassic Park''. While ''Jurassic Park'' shows its dinosaurs being produced through [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_cell_nuclear_transfer somatic cell transfer cloning]], this is actually impossible for animals that lay shelled eggs.[[note]]To clone an animal, you need to put new DNA into an egg cell, so it will grow into a copy of the DNA donor. You can't do this with birds and reptiles because the location of the embryo inside the egg makes implanting the donor DNA impossible. This is why most of the animals that have been cloned so far have been mammals. [[/note]] In ''Carnosaur'', on the other hand, the dinosaurs are created by altering the genetic structures of modern-day birds. This is theoretically doable (assuming we had dinosaur DNA to use) and indeed the idea of turning birds into dinosaurs has been [[https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/paleontologist-jack-horner-is-hard-at-work-trying-to-turn-a-chicken-into-a-dinosaur/2014/11/10/cb35e46e-4e59-11e4-babe-e91da079cb8a_story.html taken seriously]] by at least a few scientists.

* TerrifyingTyrannosaur: ''Tarbosaurus'' is given the role of the main big predator in the story. ''T. rex'' is also in the book, but the only ones shown are a pair of hatchlings that [[spoiler: appear at the end to eat Lady Jane]].

A novel by [[FunWithAcronyms Harry Adam Knight]] (a penname of Australian science fiction author Creator/JohnBrosnan, used for his schlockiest work), written in the [[TheEighties 80's]], some time prior to ''Literature/JurassicPark''. The novel's story is vastly different from the InNameOnly Roger Corman [[Film/{{Carnosaur}} film]]. In it, [[IntrepidReporter David Pascal]] in Cambridgeshire, England is trying to discover the causes of a recent rash of deaths. The local bigshot, Sir Darren Penward, who collects rare and exotic predators, insists it was a Siberian tiger that escaped from his private zoo. However the lone survivor of one of the attacks, a small boy, claims it was a dinosaur.