VampireBuddha: This trope was originally meant to be about how certain types of dinosaur turn up far more often than others, but along the way, seems to have mutated into about dinosaurs not being protrayed accurately. Now, dinosaurs portrayed inaccurately is itself a {{trope}}, and I think it would be a shame to lose all the hard work that has gone into this page.

However, I do think that the fact that certain dinosaurs appear more often in disparate media is also tropeworthy. Hence, I suggest splitting this page. The current page keeps the title and most of the examples, but has the description changed to more accurately reflect the fact that it's about time and space misplaced dinosaurs.

A new page would then be created which would include most of the current description, but restructured so as to be less nattery. That page would be called something like [=StockDinosaurs=], and be about how certain dinosaurs are far more likely to appear in fiction than others.

Thoughts?

{{Ununnilium}}: Sounds good. StockDinosaurs is tropeworthy.

TTD: Capital idea. Would JurassicStockpile be too punny?

VampireBuddha: I've been meaning to make this split for some time, but stuff keeps getting in the way. I'll try and hvae it done by tomorrow.

While I normally oppose overly original names, JurassicStockpile does have a certain charm.

LATER: The split has been made. Comments on the other page are welcome. Also, here's some stuff I took out and couldn't fit back in:
-->****And keep in mind that the Jurassic Park dinosaurs were gentic contructs made from a BiologicalMashup of dinosaur, frog and reptile DNA. Basically they were (literally) TheThemeParkVersion of dinosaurs, and thus conformed to public expectations.

-->* A few other Therapods have become increasingly popular in fiction. Most of these will be of recently-described species who are touted (even in scientific literature) as "[[http://gavinrymill.com/dinosaurs/carnivores/ Bigger than T.rex!]]" And bigger is obviously scarier, isn't it?


-->** Regardless of species, every single carnivorous dinosaur (and quite a few of the ones that aren't) will want to [[KillAllHumans chase after large, fast-running, clever, evasive humans]]. Really, this would be as if you gave up on a bag of popcorn to chase after fruit flies for a snack.


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{{Ununnilium}}: Good stuff. ~.~ However, cutting out a few bits which seem to be there only to confirm that the people writing this page know more about science than those darn fiction writers. (Also, shut up, ''DinoRiders'' was awesome.)

RossN: Should we at least expand on the Maniraptors a little? The relationship between birds and dinosaurs should probably be given a sentence of explanation or two for those with less familiarity with the subject.

TragicTheDragon: Sorry, it's just cause I love animals and know '''way''' too much about them. ^_^ I've added a link to a website that straightens the feathery Dromaeosaur issue out better than I could.

So on another topic:

* ''The Land Before Time'' features ... a ''Parasaurolophus'' '''(probably because they hit it with a dart)'''

Say what?

{{Ununnilium}}: AKA, chose it at random.

Also, "the smaller relatives were probably more intimidating from a predatory standpoint" -- I don't get this.

{{Duckluck}}: This probably goes along with the notion that some recent paleontologists have been bouncing around that T. Rex may have been sort of a scavenger. The idea is that its huge jaws and tiny forelimbs wouldn't be all that useful when chasing down prey, but could be quite handing for stealing prey from other predators. There's also some talk that small predators may have been faster, although others disagree with this. The problem with paleontology is there's a limit to how much information you can actually glean from a bunch of bones buried in a rock shelf. There's really no reliable way to tell how a Tyrannosaurus hunted based on its skeleton, but that doesn't seem to stop people from arguing about it.

RossN: *Sigh* I love dinosaurs, but sometimes (as so often in life) reality is a sad substitute for romance and imagination. A scavenger Tyrannosaurus might make more sense, but it is a poorer sort of universe for that sense.

If that past sentence made any (sense that is).

{{Ununnilium}}: Recent? I've heard about "scavenger T. rex" my whole life. `.` Anyway, taking the sentence out, because the RuleOfCool sentence makes it superfluous:\\
"Never mind that the species was, by all evidence, exceedingly rare and that the smaller relatives were probably more intimidating from a predatory standpoint."

Also:
** How about animals taking the place of modern machines? Or people using their feet to run cars, often at highway speeds? Realism was obviously [[MST3KMantra not the point]].

Well ''duh''. Both these sentences are already covered by the simple phrase TheyJustDidntCare.

TTD: "the smaller relatives were probably more intimidating from a predatory standpoint"

It's partially the scavenger theory, partially a question of whether you'd want to be chased by a Grizzly Bear or a Mountain Lion...

As far as the scavenger issue, what drives me nuts is the contention many scientists seem to have that T. rex had to be either a predator or a scavenger. This is in spite of the fact that few living animals are either/or. Also, we're talking about an animal with a head about the size of a Mini-Cooper. It's going to eat whatever the f*** it wanted to. >:)

The British spelling is "palaeontologist", not "paeleontologist".

Mysticpenguin: I wonder, can the scope of this trope include not just an uncreative selection of prehistoric animals, but movies/shows that use them in such a stupid way as to make paleontologists cry (for example, the pteranodons in the third ''Jurassic Park'' movie, which had toothed beaks despite their name meaning roughly "toothless wing")?

TTD: Yup, and indeed it already has. I'll add "J.P.3" in as an example. Though I don't recall teeth on the Pteronodons. The bigger issue was having them immediately prey on the humans. That kind of thing jhappens in nearly every fictional depiction of Pteronodons. Next time you see it, ask yourself when was the last time you were dragged off by pelicans?

{{Demetrios}}: Agreed. Even though ''Pteranodon'' was one of the largest pterosaurs (23-foot wingspan), it only weighed 37 pounds. Not exactly the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the pterosaur realm, is it?

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Moving these out of the main YouFailBiologyForever page as they're a tad redundant now:
* There is no such thing, scientifically speaking, as a Brontosaurus. The name was given to a genus of sauropods that a paleontologist thought was a newly-discovered genus, but was later decided to be a species of the earlier-reported Apatosaurus genus, and the rules of scientific naming of species give the title to the latter. (As often cited, an incorrect skull ''was'' placed on the Brontosaurus, but this actually had no bearing on the naming issue, contrary to popular belief) But that doesn't stop "Brontosaurus" from being used as a synonym for "Apatosaurus".
** For example in ''DoctorWho''. "Invasion of the Dinosaurs": "The Brontosaurus is large, placid, and stupid!".
** Their appearance in ''TheFlintstones'' is really the least of their problems.
** A few Paleontologists (probably figuring that if you can't beat 'em, you may as well join 'em) have taken to using Brontosaurus as a synonym for either all Sauropods or just certain kinds of Sauropods (such as the iconic [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplodocidae Diplodocid]] family.
** In ''{{Discworld}}'' it's acknowledged that it isn't really a brontosaurus, but ''should be'' since it's just a much better name.
** The Peter Jackson KingKong got around this by having the Brontosaurus be a new species of sauropod native to Skull Island.
* Actual ''Velociraptors'' were about the size of a dog, not the man-sized version used in the film JurassicPark and copied all over popular culture thereafter. The "Jurassic Park" 'raptors are actually ''Deinonychus'', and this is ''somewhat'' justified as it and Velociraptor are both in the subfamily ''Velociraptorinae''. Furthermore, the name ''Maniraptor'' was (and still is in some circles) a popular name for the group of dinosaurs now known as [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dromaeosauridae Dromaeosaurs]].
** Really, thanks to a surge in new Dromaeosaur finds in recent years, the bigger issue here is that we still see "Raptors" who look exactly like they walked off the set of "Jurassic Park" when we now know the real animal was actually small, fluffy... [[http://dino.lm.com/images/display.php?id=3038 and kinda cute, really...]]
** There was, in fact, a species of raptor about the same size as those in "Jurassic Park". The Utahraptor stood up to 6 feet tall, was 22 feet long from nose to tail tip, weighed over a thousand pounds, and sported a gigantic 9-inch curved claw on each foot.
** Averted/spoofed in ''Runaways''; One of the characters has a pet Deinonychus (her parents were time-travellers) that is constantly being mis-identified as a Velociraptor, much to her irritation.
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{{Ununnilium}}: So, it looks like we're going to have to change the name of the entry, due to the mispelling of paleontologist/paeleontologist.

Also, taking out:
* Ah, the Spinosaurus. First off, she is introduced to the audience as "BIGGER" than a Tyrannosaurus rex. (For those not in the know, a Spinosaurus is sixteen meters long, and a T. rex is thirteen meters long, so by that reasoning, an anaconda is "BIGGER" than an elephant.) The even bigger issue is that we've got another animal generally agreed to be a fish-eater and/or scavenger chasing after large, fast-running, clever, evasive humans. Really, this would be as if you gave up on a bag of popcorn to chase after fruit flies for a snack.

For the first half... the Spinosaurus ''was'' bigger than a T-rex; longer and heavier. For the second, it's covered by a reference to KillAllHumans.

TTD: Really bigger? Hmm. Well, I'll add in some information about ol' Spiny in the Big List Of Popular Dinosaurs section as (thanks to [=JP3=]) it's become popular.

{{Ununnilium}}: "Indeed, Spinosaurus is generally agreed to be a fish-eater and/or scavenger." Well, yeah, but there's that whole thing about T. Rex being a scavenger too. ``

In case you're wondering, I edited the "T. rex was a scavenger" bit due to my personal experience. I've been into dinosaurs since I was five, have absorbed a lot of knowledge about the subject, have worked on fossils at a museum and in the field for most of last summer, and attended a professional conference of paleontologists from around the world. And basically, the background of the scavenger idea is this:
Jack Horner, a specialist in hadrosaurs, came up with the idea and published it in a book called "The Complete T. rex". He never sent his idea to a peer-reviewed journal and nobody at all in the scientific community (except Jack Horner, of course) takes it seriously. He's been telling it to the media all over the place, though, and since the media loves a controversy, they make his position look better than it is. If you want more information, you can check out the archives of the Dinosaur Mailing List at http://dml.cmnh.org/. Try doing a search for "horner" "rex" and "scavenger".

VampireBuddha: *checks some books*. Bugger, I've somehow been [[KissThisGuy misreading the word ''palaeontologist'']] for 22 years. Yeah, the spelling should definitely be corrected.

As for ''T. rex'', it seems like every few years somebody comes along and says "This thing was too big to have been a hunter/scavenger, it must have been a scavenger/hunter". I've never seen any merit in something as big as that, with all those teeth, subsisting on corpses. Also, those little arms seem to have been much better adapted for holding onto struggling prey than any use in scavenging.

{{Ununnilium}}: I'm just plain taking it out, at this point:
** Some paleontologists suggest that, in a depressing violation of the RuleOfCool, the T. rex may have been a scavenger all along (which is why its arms atrophied). Writers of fiction ignore this - as well they should.
*** This editor, as an aspiring paleontologist, can honestly say that nobody in the scientific community (except the guy who thought up the idea) actually thinks the scavenger idea has any merit.

Also:
***Additionally, ''Dilophosaurus'' was about ten feet tall, not the cuddly household pet size depicted in the film. Oddly enough, in the book their size was portrayed correctly and they didn't have the neck frill, making this a case where the filmmakers ''did'' do the research...and then disregarded it for some reason.
**Actually, the dilophasaurus was a baby, hence Nedry's comment about it just being a baby. Interestingly enough, the tar spitting was also creative license. The frills where based on a Australian lizard.
**And because I like Jurassic Park, I feel I have to defend it: The Dienonychus were at the time (of the book) were considered by some to be Velociraptor. Or something. In the third one they do phase in feathers though. In the fourth [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park_4#Jurassic_Park_IV: (Raptor Mercenaries!)]] they might be pretty much birds. Mercenary birds

First of all, "because I like Jurassic Park, I feel I have to defend it" means "I haven't read JustifyingEdit". Second, "actually" means "I haven't read ConversationInTheMainPage either". Third, the paragraph ''beginning'' with actually completely cancels out the one before it, so I'm just pulling the whole thing out.
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VampireBuddha: The page title has been corrected. You may wish to update your watchlists.

Also, now that the spelling has been sorted out, I've removed this:

By the way, ''paeleontologist'' is the standard spelling in Britain and Australia. In the USA, the first ''e'' tends to be dropped. Either spelling is acceptable.
**''Palaeontologist'' is the spelling in Britain and Australia, while ''paleontologist'' is how it is spelled in the USA.
*** We're sorry about the spelling issue.
****DidNotDoTheResearch, eh?
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{{Rogue 7}}: Correct me if I'm mistaken, ScizioTechnician, but I was under the impression that true birds as we know them weren't really present until the early-to-mid Cretaceous period, while Archaeopteryx is a Late Jurassic creature.

{{Ununnilium}}: Yeah. Plus, being "a holdover from an earlier time" is very EvolutionaryLevels. Pulling it out.

*** To make matters worse, it was a holdover from an earlier time, like platypuses are to modern mammals- ''there were already birds as we know them by the time of archaeopteryx''.
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{{Ununnilium}}:
* ''10,000 B.C.'' That is all.

No, it's a title, which doesn't tell us anything about what the movie has to do with this trope.

{{Demetrios}}: I think the movie has plenty to do with the trope. Come on, ancient Egypt? I couldn't think of a ''less'' appropriate place for a woolly mammoth to live. Would ''you'' walk around the Sahara Desert wearing a fur coat? I don't think so.

{{Ununnilium}}: It may well have plenty to do with the trope. So tell us about it, ''in the entry''.
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RadioactiveZombie: Sigh. This page sounds like a big BAAAWWWWW for not doing research. ''It's fiction''. I'll have to re-write the damn page later, so it doesn't sound like another "lol no research itz faakee!111one" thing.

{{Rogue 7}}: That's the entire point of the page. It's here to let us, geeks as we are, show the world that we know more about dinosaurs than the people who write this sort of stuff. It's supposed to be pretentious and kinda arrogant. I'll be reverting this later today during my lunch break.

{{Ununnilium}}: Research isn't unnecessary just because you're writing fiction. This trope points out mistakes, not only so that people who've seen the series where the mistakes were made will know the truth, but also to help the creators of the future avoid them.

TTD: Cutting this from the main page as it sounds similar:

"Then again, maybe some paleontologist's are babies, most people don't care about accuracy when there's no real point, and are just [[RuleOfCool trying to tell a damn story]]."

Good job of Complaining About Tropes You Don't Like. >:/

There's a -reason- I put in the MST3KMantra link. It was me slapping around the angrier parts of this.

TrouserWearingBarbarian: I remember Bill Watterson talking about how he thought that dinosaurs were ''cooler'' after he started learning more about them and portraying them more accurately in ''The CalvinAndHobbes Tenth Anniversary Book''. I'm personally a big proponent of RuleOfCool and I know that fiction isn't supposed to be realistic, but dinosaurs are a case where the reality is just as awesome as fiction, if not more so.

Besides, some of this stuff is on roughly par with "African jungle populated by tigers and man-eating kangaroos" when it comes to [[DidNotDoTheResearch not doing the research]]. A [[RunningGag six year old]] could do better.
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{{Ununnilium}}:\\
apparently [[DidNotDoTheResearch ignorant of the fact they already used the name Bahamut]].

Just because they use different words that derive from the same word for different things doesn't mean they're wrong for doing so.
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TrouserWearingBarbarian: Anyone else think that we could use a UsefulNotesOnDinosaurs page?

VampireBuddha: I'd like to have a DinosaurTropes index at some point in the future. Useful Notes...probbaly not, I think we can just discuss the truth in the trope entries.

TrouserWearingBarbarian: [[TropesaurusIndex Dinosaur Index]], you say? I've abondoned the UsefulNote idea, though.
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VampireBuddha: Removed the ''{{Dilbert}}'' examples.
* After calculating that dinosaurs can't be extinct, {{Dilbert}} finds a family of them, Bob, Dawn and Rex, hiding behind his couch. Furthermore even though they all look like carnivores they're vegetarians.

They're funny, but not examples of what this trope is about (12:57 GMT, 26/5/2009)
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VampireBuddha: Applied a hatchet to all the {{natter}} this page had accrued.

[[folder:What was removed]]

** 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 [[DinosaursAreDragons 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.
**** [[DidNotDoTheResearch The Ark did not land on modern day Mt. Ararat,]] a dormant volcano, but "the mountains of Ararat", a mountain ''range''.
***** [[AWizardDidIt Goddidit]]
****** Because a worldwide ocean that deposits fossils on the tops of mountain ranges is SO unrealistic...
*** [[WallBanger 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.


*** [[ConvectionSchmonvection 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 AffectionateParody in [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegro_non_troppo AllegroNonTroppo]].


** Adding to the part about the Carnotaurus, in order to make them more effective as the BigBad 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 "[[RealityIsUnrealistic 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. [[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WMG/IceAge 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 [[RuleOfCool awesome]]) case of MisplacedWildlife 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.


* [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdZybLee9yo&feature=related The trailer]] for the 1992 film ''Adventures In Dinosaur City'' boasts that the film's main characters lived millions of years before turtles (A TakeThat directed at the ''TeenageMutantNinjaTurtles'' 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 TheyJustDidntCare.
** 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 ShowWithinAShow 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 [[http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101020624/spielberg.html 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 ArtisticLicense.

**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 ''DoctorWho'' 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 [[RuleOfCool 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 [[ScienceMarchesOn 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 [[NightmareRetardant weird little genre of monster movies]] where the "monsters" in question were probably the cast's pets.
** Of course people ''did'' think Iguanodons looked [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crystal_palace_iguanodon.jpg like that]] for a while.


** In the ''{{Eberron}}'' campaign setting, [[NinjaPirateZombieRobot 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 [[DinosaursAreDragons 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 [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frill-necked_Lizard 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 ''[[PaperMario 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 ShoutOut to works like LandOfTheLost and KingKong, 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 [[http://www.drmcninja.com/page.php?pageNum=7&issue=3 this strip]].
** And [[http://www.drmcninja.com/page.php?pageNum=51&issue=14 this one.]] With apologies.


** Just to twist the knife, there is an E/I ("[[AndKnowingIsHalfTheBattle 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.


* TheBBC's ''WalkingWithDinosaurs'' 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 [[ScienceMarchesOn march-on of science]], but that really was nobody's fault except ''Megarachne'', for being a scorpion that ''looks'' a whole lot like a GiantSpider. 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'' [[ScienceMarchesOn 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.

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[[folder: Real Life ]]

* Literal TruthInTelevision: 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 [[http://thesilverplatter.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/jesusdino.jpg photographic]] [[http://i27.tinypic.com/2h6yet5.jpg evidence!]]
*** Even though that second picture is an insult to the entire Enlightenment legacy of rationality, it remains [[NinjaPirateZombieRobot pretty cool]].
** we know Jesus lived with the dinosaurs for [[http://img164.imageshack.us/img164/6674/11480430233774mj.jpg somewhat different reasons]].
** And let's not forget that he had to [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT4FZUZz2kU preach the word of God to them.]]
** [[http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/2007/10/14/n5.html 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 TheFlintstones 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

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