Follow TV Tropes

Following

Context Literature / Dinoverse

Go To

1[[quoteright:314:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/dinoverse_2795.jpg]]
2
3A YoungAdult book series, which is in short, about junior high students who get transported back in time and turned into dinosaurs.
4
5Written by Creator/ScottCiencin, and published rapid-fire between 1999 and 2000. One just called ''Dinoverse'' came out first, then was later divided into ''I Was a Teenage T. Rex'' and ''The Teens That Time Forgot''. After that came ''Raptor Without a Cause'', ''Please Don't Eat the Teacher'', ''Dinosaurs Ate My Homework'', and ''Beverley Hills Brontosaurus''. Each pair of books has its own set of characters, though the third pair has Mr. London from the second set and Bertram from the first return.
6
7The setup for this fantastic premise involves TeenGenius, Bertram making a memory interpreter device for the school science fair. His machine [[AchievementsInIgnorance somehow]] has the ability to transport people's minds back in time into the bodies of dinosaurs.
8
9The first pair, ''I Was a Teenage T. Rex'' and ''The Teens Time Forgot'', (later re-released as a single volume)has Bertram and three other students sent back to the late Cretaceous period. The three other students, [[BigManOnCampus Mike]], [[AlphaBitch Candayce]], and [[RebelliousSpirit Janine]] get changed into a ''Tyrannosaurus rex'', a ''Leptoceratops'', and a ''Quetzalcoatlus'', respectively, and Bertram becomes an ''Ankylosaurus''. They have to trek across the country to get to a certain point or risk being stuck in the Cretaceous forever.
10
11The second pair has [[ClassRepresentative Will]], [[ClassClown Za]][[BrilliantButLazy ne]], [[{{Tomboy}} Patience]], and their teacher [[SchoolTeachers Mr. London]] get sent into the mid-Cretaceous and possess a ''Deinonychus'', a type of ''Brontosaurus'', an ''Acrocanthosaurus,'' and a ''Hypsilophodon'', respectively. Their task involves an amber key and preventing some kind of extinction event.
12
13In the third set the formula changes. Now a whole horde of middle schoolers are sent back along with the MIND Machine. The main characters this time are Bertram again, new kid [[SurferDude Aaron]], [[TheBully JD "Judgement Day" Harms]], and [[SchoolIdol Claire]]. They take the bodies of a pair of brother ''Dilophosaurus'', a small ''Apatosaurus,'' and a ''Carcharodontosaurus''. They have to survive, try to fix the machine, and worry about a new plot involving alternate dimensions.
14
15----
16!!This series provides examples of:
17
18* AchievementsInIgnorance: Bertram's memory interpreter... which somehow manages to send people's minds back in time. When ''Dinoverse'' was converted into ''I Was A Teenaged T. Rex'' and ''The Teens Time Forgot'', a line of {{Technobabble}} was added stating that they'd been converted into 'pure thought-energy brainwaves'.
19* AlphaBitch: Candayce. [[CharacterDevelopment She gets better]].
20* AlternateAnimalAffection: Nuzzling.
21* AmazingTechnicolorWildlife: Many of the dinosaurs are brightly colored.
22* AmplifiedAnimalAptitude: All of the dinosaurs and pterosaurs are quite intelligent, and the ones with what could pass as hands have humanlike grasping ability and shoulder rotation. [[spoiler: Junior/Hook's]] intelligence is a plot point in the second pair of books, in which normal dinosaurs also frequently nod agreement or approval and pick up tool use after it's shown to them.
23* AnimalsNotToScale: All over the place. Some scale is used, but the differences aren't generally that dramatic - which looks odd when you consider the indexes at the back of the books, which have scale drawings of these dinosaurs next to humans, and the differences are striking.
24* AnachronisticAnimal: The first two parts try to keep to animals and plants native to the times the kids have been flung to. The third disregards this entirely and has kids BodySnatching dinosaurs from many eras in the same time and place together thanks to how badly the time machine has malfunctioned - this is a bit contrived as previously the time machine was only capable of facilitating MentalTimeTravel.
25* {{Animorphism}}: Subverted. Not quite a [[{{Animorphism}} transformation]] and yet not quite a case of [[BodySnatcher Body Snatching]]. In the ''Literature/{{Dinoverse}}'' characters can have their minds transferred into the bodies of dinosaurs that lived millions of years in the past. Usually this is by accident, and the dinosaurs don't have their minds transported to the future (at least not until the end) so it's not exactly a FreakyFridayFlip either.
26* ArtisticLicensePaleontology:
27** Aside from anything bipedal having useable hands and human-style shoulder flexibility, it's generally averted. Lots of things are dated ''now'', but were believed at the time. It does get brought up in the final set, though, in which the MIND Machine's gone berzerk and we have kids inhabiting dinosaurs from many eras in one place and time.
28** T. rex living exclusively on fish?!
29** The first book has an ''Elasmosaurus'' using its neck to constrict like a snake. Plesiosaur necks don't work like that.
30* BeautifulAllAlong: Patience. She {{lampshades}} the trope angrily when it's first brought up, but apparently decides to go with it later.
31* BigManOnCampus: Mike seems to be this as the kind and popular jock but he's got his own issues.
32* BrilliantButLazy: Zane acts like the ClassClown when he's actually extremely intelligent, because he thinks people wouldn't accept him if he wasn't funny.
33* BodySnatcher: See {{Animorphism}}; the MentalTimeTravel involved means possessing dinosaurs (and a pterosaur), whose own minds are suppressed in the process.
34* CarnivoreConfusion: Mike becomes a tyrannosaurus, and initially he angsts and starves himself over the fact that he has to eat things that, for all intents and purposes, resemble his friends. [[NoCartoonFish He resolves the issue by eating fish]]. When Patience becomes a similarly-sized acrocanthosaurus she elects for carrion and small rodents. Will the deinonychus also eats small rodents, but goes for salamanders too. They're not quite as squeamish as Mike, but they too refuse to kill other dinosaurs for food. In the third set this is skimmed over entirely, and the only thing carnivorous characters eat is fish.
35* DaddyHadAGoodReasonForAbandoningYou: The rebellious graffiti artist Janine resents how her mother is often not at home, forcing her to miss school in order to prepare the hotel for guests herself. As it turns out, her mother is keeping Janine from getting in trouble over the graffiti - she never confronted her daughter because she feared Janine would run away.
36* AnimalTalk: The main characters explicitly ''can't'' speak English, but they all have PsychicPowers while in these different bodies, and use them. They also make dinosaur noises, but it's clear that if they didn't have those psychic powers, understanding each other and the dinosaurs they encounter (who don't use words at all) would be a lot more difficult.
37* DudeMagnet: Candayce. This extends even to when she becomes a ''Leptoceratops'', as she ends up attracting a small harem of male ''Leptoceratopses'' who practically worship her.
38* DumbDinos: Averted -- the non-transformed dinosaurs the protagonists encounter are often friendly, intelligent, and helpful.
39* FollowTheLeader: The ''Dinoverse'' series probably wouldn't have been created had it not been for the immense popularity of ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}''. Creator/ScottCiencin was also the author of several of the ''{{Literature/Dinotopia}}'' spin-off novels, which probably also played a hand in its creation.
40* FormerFriendOfAlphaBitch: There's a form of this - Janine had a close friend who publicly rejected her to get into Candayce's inner circle, but in private told her that they could still be friends as long as no one knew. Unsurprisingly, Janine has a grudge against Candayce -- in the end, though, they work it out and become VitriolicBestBuds.
41* FosteringForProfit: Patience lives with the Mushnicks, who give her food and board in exchange for a monthly paycheck and are completely indifferent to her, which she claims is how she likes it. Notably, she doesn't even use their last name.
42* {{Gasshole}}: Bertram's high-fibre diet and multi-chambered stomach as an ankylosaur lead to a lot of flatulence.
43** Runt the Pleurocoleus (brontosaurus) also has his share. Zane -- who ended up in the body of Runt's older sibling - suggests lighting some of it on fire.
44* GiantFlyer: Quetzalcoatalus is the largest known pterosaur and can have a wingspan of up to 15.5 meters/50 feet. Janine is one of these.
45* GoingNative: Janine ends up buggering off to go live with actual quetzalcoatli for a while.
46* HeelFaceTurn: J.D., once in the body of a rather small sauropod, starts claiming to have changed and become more caring. There are some hints of BecomingTheMask, but it's still in his own self-interest - he doesn't want to go home, so he arranges to [[spoiler: break the remains of the MIND Machine, turn everyone against the idea of fixing it, and get the one kid who sees through him exiled]]. When he gets a vision from his alternate-reality self, though, he goes through an epiphany, leading to...
47* HeelFaceDoorSlam: [[spoiler: The others find out what he's been doing and refuse to believe him.]]
48* HumanityEnsues: There's a gag at the end of the first set where three Pachycephalosaurs briefly possess the bodies of three humans, but it's not permanent. However, at the end of ''Please Don't Eat The Teacher'', [[spoiler: GK]] ends up in [[spoiler: Will's]] human body. [[spoiler: [[SplitPersonality Along with Will.]]]] And at the end of the series, the brontosaurus scientist [[spoiler: Jae'Dee]] from the [[TitleDrop Dinoverse]] voluntarily takes the vacated body of [[spoiler: JD Harms]]. Both of these ''are'' permanent.
49* ImprobableTaxonomySkills: Known dinosaur-nerd [[TeenGenius Betram]] probably has a reasonable chance of identifying common animals and plants in his favorite part of the Mesozoic. When it's his teacher's turn, well, Mr. London knew about Betram's adventure and regeared all his classes to be about the age of the dinosaurs, so he and his students aren't jumping into things blind, but it's weird how they quickly and unambigiously identify non-stock dinosaurs like Acrocanthosaurus and Hypsilophodon. And back in the first set of books [[RebelliousSpirit Janine]], who's insightful but not markedly interested in dinosaurs, happens to know about the digestive processes of Ankylosaurus.
50* InSpiteOfANail: Despite a bunch of teenagers going millions of years into the past everything ends up exactly the same when they come back.
51** It's a StableTimeLoop. The four [[spoiler: carve in the past the stones that mark the place in the present. Janine scribbles "WAS HERE" into one of them]].
52** Alternate universes may be involved in the second set of books. It's basically stated that [[spoiler: Hook]] is unusually smart, and saving him is tied to the [[TitleDrop Dinoverse]] which has peaceful highly-evolved dinosaurs in the present day.
53* InterspeciesRomance: Of a sort. Several of the kids sent back in time and into other bodies end up in maybe-sort-of relationships with creatures of the same species.
54* MyNaymeIs: Canda'''y'''ce.
55* TheNicknamer: Pretty much every character meets at least one native that they subsequently name. In the first pair, Mike calls his rival T. Rex [[Literature/SherlockHolmes Moriarty]]. Janine calls an Elasmosaurus Nessie, a 'slow' Quetzalcoatlus Bobo, a Triceratops Mc Gurk, and her semi-boyfriend quetzalcoatlus [[Myth/NorseMythology Loki the Trickster]]. In her cameo in a later book, she calls skater boy Aaron "Slick" after he offends the school bully, and refers to Mr. London as Mr. L. Canadayce calls her leptoceraptopsian admirers things like Han and Bluto. Bertram calls the ankylosaur who falls in love with him Beanie - "because she's brown and round. Like a bean."
56** In the second pair, Will names a variety of raptors things like Big Guy, Buddy, Binky, and Junior (later he renames it Hook). He then calls a Tenotosaurus "Tink". Zane calls his body's little brother "Runt". Patience names the first Acrocanthosaurus she meets Number 47, the number of her personal enemy, calls the chivalrous one who likes her first Green Knight, and later GK, and when she meets her body's parents she calls them [[Series/TheBradyBunch Mom and Pop Brady]]. Mr. London names his little posse of hypsilophodon friends Leo (after Creator/LeonardoDaVinci), Albert (after UsefulNotes/AlbertEinstein), Carl (after Creator/CarlSagan), and Hal (after [[Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey HAL-9000]]).
57* TheNoseKnows: Kids in the form of big predators invariably have this ability. When [[spoiler: Will and GK end up SharingABody]], they end up keeping this power despite being human-shaped.
58* [[LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards Linear Dinosaurs, Quadratic Pterosaur]]: In any given book it doesn't take long for kids in dinosaur bodies to get the hang of it and become as good at any given task as others of the species. They're also just about universally strong and sturdy. Janine in a Quetzalcoatlus body is substantially less sturdy and takes a long time and pronounced effort to learn to fly -- but flight is a very intensely useful ability. Flying, Janine could solve nearly every problem the group faces - she could find lost party members, scout out areas for resources and threats, retrieve items from far away, and escape hazards herself. After she learns to fly most of the rest of the book has her absent or unable to fly, for one reason or another. In all the later books, no one else is put into a body that flies.
59* LovableAlphaBitch: Eventually, Candayce ends up with "loveable" applicable to her but it takes a while.
60* PickedLast: Will, as a raptor in a pack which is splitting to go hunting, finds himself this.
61* PredatorsAreMean: A constant refrain in the series, though the ones who fish aren't, and GK is seen as outright noble.
62* RebelliousSpirit: Janine Farehouse is a CoolLoser who's able to intimidate the popular kids with her utter indifference to them and what they want. She's also a covert graffiti artist.
63* ScienceFair: It all starts with one of those. Bertram submits a machine he claims shows people's dreams, though it's really made to cycle through various random clips. Instead it's accidentally a time machine.
64* SeashellBra: Despite not having anything to cover, Candayce doesn't feel comfortable going naked. She tries sticking leaves on with sap -- they fall off. Janine takes pity and makes her a top-and-bottom out of seashells with holes poked in them and strung together by vines; this lasts a little longer.
65* ShownTheirWork: All of the dinosaurs described are from the Cretaceous, and although Creator/ScottCiencin does include stock dinosaurs, many of the species shown are rather obscure.
66* ShoutOut: Janine once sings the lyrics to [[Film/ThreeAmigos My Little Buttercup]].
67** Candayce tries to scare off a T. rex by projecting the sound of Franchise/{{Godzilla}}’s roar into its brain.
68* SplitPersonality: At the end of ''Please Don't Eat The Teacher'', [[spoiler: Will and GK]] - a native acrocanthosaurus who has struck up a relationship with Patience and doesn't eat her friends for her sake, even though he doesn't understand - both sacrifice themselves at the same time in pretty much the same place, an instant before all our wayward humans are plunked back to where they belong. Except, as [[spoiler: Will]] discovers when he's at a party with Patience, [[spoiler: GK]] ended up coming with him, and the dinosaur recognizes Patience and is able to take over [[spoiler: Will's]] body to nuzzle her. ''All three parties are happy about this''.
69* SuperPersistentPredator: Moriarty in the first set, who follows them through earthquakes and over hundreds of miles, despite first meeting them on a beach full of gigantic sea turtles, which are far easier prey. Bertram speculates that it's because as an ankylosaur, a tyrannosaur, a quetzalcoatlus (sometimes) and a leptoceratops, they're a very ''weird'' group and that might signal disease to him.
70* SuspiciouslySimilarSubstitute: Especially at first, Patience and GK are very much like Janine and Loki. Patience and Janine are a pair of outcast girls who are different degrees of hostile to the rest of middle school society, who have unhappy pasts and seem to have better lots in life in the Cretaceous, and have to learn to trust again while in different bodies. They each have a companion of the same species who hangs around and tries to be helpful, and who they quickly come to like a lot. But while Janine and Loki part without difficulty - she once thinks of him as basically her first boyfriend, but his attentions never seem anything but platonic - Patience and GK don't. [[spoiler: And it's not so platonic with them, as seen near the end of the book when he's a SplitPersonality to Will who is intrigued by this human concept of kissing]].
71* TeenGenius: Bertram's a nerd more than a ''genius'' but he does accidentally invent a time machine. It's mentioned in passing that Mr. London was like this once, too.
72* TimeAndRelativeDimensionsInSpace: The characters are sent back in time but landing elsewhere on the planet, and one of them even comments how lucky they are not to be in space.
73* TimeTravel: Of course! Most of the page time is spent in the distant past. It's MentalTimeTravel.
74* {{Tomboy}}: Patience [=McCray=] from the second set. She's quite frustrated when Will tries to get her to pretty up to make him look good for 'taming' her and revealing that she's BeautifulAllAlong.

Top