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Clay: Can't you speak to her? You're practically one of those critters!
Dojo: I beg your pardon!! She's prehistoric, and that's offensive to dragons! Just because she speaks with a British accent doesn't make her smart! We breathe fire, fly, and chew with our mouths closed!
Some people just can't get over how similar some dinosaurs are to dragons.
Both are big lizardy things, right? They're already so similar, why not give them the ability to breathe fire? It'd be a shame not to, right? Therefore, in a lot of media, especially videogames, dinosaurs have fire-breathing abilities as part of the gameplay. Before 1980 or so, it was also standard fare to portray all dinosaurs as carnivorous, also, because hey — big lizard things just have to eat meat. Just like dragons! And if they ever meet with humans, they must messily devour them all! Just like dragons!
In Western media, this may tie into some kind of Hollywood History that also associates ancient times with a lot of volcanoes. While there was a lot of volcanic activity during the Cretaceous, it certainly was nowhere near as violent as depicted in fiction, and it had more to do with poison gas than rivers of lava and hellfire raining down everywhere.
In Eastern media, this trope is thought to tie very strongly into a long-standing translation mixup. When people discovered fossil bones in ancient China, they believed them to be dragon bones. Therefore, the word for dragon in Asian languages is very similar to the one for dinosaur, and sometimes it's simply used to refer to both dinosaurs and dragons. While the western names share fewer similarities, this doesn't mean there aren't hundreds of examples of dinosaur fossils put together and labeled "dragon," often with a claw put on the skull and called a horn.
This trope may also have some relationship with the belief, held by both certain creationists and some cryptozoologists, that some dinosaurs survived the mass extinction and inspired the stories of dragons. Kent Hovind goes so far as to say that some species "must" have breathed fire (because the Bible mentions dragons) and may still exist in some Lost World in The Amazon or somewhere.
Coming at the issue from a different angle, quite a few anthropologists are convinced that all of the legends of fantastic beasts could only have been based upon misinterpreted fossils. This was certainly the case for a few legends, but surely not all of them (the thing is, people have imaginations). At least one anthropologist has dropped the other shoe and proposed that dragon legends have to be based upon ( get a cold drink and a comfy seat) long-held "Racial Memories" of dinosaurs. (Just so we are clear, these would have to go back to the tree-shrew days.) In any case, in other words, it's more like dragons are dinosaurs.
If you like dinosaurs, this trope is a Wall Banger because it equates them with fantastic monsters, when they were just another animal trying to make it in this world, with a strong undertone of the actual truth not mattering. If you like dragons, this trope is a Wall Banger because it brings the most awesome and/or noble of fantastic creatures down to the level of ordinary animals.
If you like dinosaurs and dragons, good luck reading through these examples without going bananas.
Especially evident in videogames. See also Our Dragons Are Different and (naturally) Somewhere A Palaeontologist Is Crying.
Examples:
Video Games
- In the Adventure Island franchise, one of the ridable dinosaurs has fire breath as his power.
- Yoshi of the Super Mario Bros series was referred to as a dragon and a dinosaur interchangeably in Nintendo publications early on, although Nintendo seems to have gotten a handle on the distinction now. He can't breathe fire on his own, but an occasional power-up can give him that ability. Also, in Super Mario World, when Mario or Luigi stomps on a Dino-Rhino on Chocolate Island, it shrinks and becomes a Dino-Torch, which breathes fire upward.
- Yoshi's Final Smash in Super Smash Bros Brawl puts him firmly in dragon territory — he grows wings, becomes invincible, and flies around the screen breathing fire. It's even called the "Super Dragon".
- Tricky the... well... they call him a triceratops... in Star Fox Adventures.
- For some reason, almost all of the Dinosaur-type monsters in the various Yu-Gi-Oh video games are shown breathing fire for their attacks. Contrast with the anime (see above), where they usually just bite or stomp.
- Pokemon both uses and averts this trope. While it is possible to teach many of the dinosaur-like Pokémon in the series to breathe fire, naturally learned firebreathing is left to Fire Pokémon and the actual Dragons.
- Final Fantasy VI had an infamous translation error where the Japanese word for "dinosaur" (Kyoryu) was translated literally as "frightful dragon" — in a part of the game where the player's goal was to find dragons, causing much confusion. In addition, the dinosaurs in question were spellcasters for no apparent reason, some casting the powerful Ultima spell.
- The Brachiosaur and the Tyrannosaur were the dinosaurs in question. The Brachiosaur could cast Ultima, as well as the Status-inducing 'Disaster' spell, and was generally death on legs. The Tyrannosaur could cast Meteor. And the sprites for the two were used (with similar colors even) for two actual dragons (Tyrannosaur -> Earth Dragon, Brachiosaur -> Gold Dragon)
- Final Fantasy XII somewhat rationalises this by defining the dragon genus as an overarching term for most large reptiles, so including the more traditional wyrms and wyverns and the more historical theropods in the same evolutionary chain.
- In Dragon Spirit for the TurboGrafix16, many land-based enemies are dinosaurs that spit fire balls at you.
- In Medievil 2, the skeletal dinosaur boss breathes fire.
- Pop'n Music has a character called Dino, who is a fire-breathing dinosaur.
- Averted in the game EVO Search For Eden, where the dinosaurs are... just dinosaurs. Although one of the 'hidden forms' you could briefly take looked remarkably like a flying horned dragon (it didn't breathe fire though).
- Tales Of Symphonia pokes fun at this trope in a science academy which contains the assembled skeleton of a dragon on display. A nearby scholar indicates that it was a prehistoric creature that lived long ago. Nevertheless, many varieties of real, living dragons exist in the game, including both winged and non-winged varieties, some of which have even been domesticated for human use. Unfortunately for the scientists, they all live in places that they are unlikely to ever see.
- In Tales Of Eternia, one can encounter dinosaurs. They're big green lizardy things with tiny arms and lots of teeth. Also, they breathe fire. Making it worse, elsewhere, one can find actual dragons, which are exactly like red Dinosaurs with tiny wings.
- Misuzu Kamio of Eternal Fighter Zero can summon various fire-breathing (stuffed) dinosaurs with her "Gao Gao Fire" super. Sure, they're just stuffed animals, but still...
- King Dodongo from The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time.
- One of the versions of the second Mega Man Star Force game is "Fire Dinosaur." They changed it to "Fire Saurian" in the US release, probably thinking nobody would know what it meant, and even if they did, they wouldn't care. They were right.
- The Dragos of Mother 3 are simply regular dinosaurs. The one Drago that falls victim to the Pig Army's chimerization plot gains the ability to breathe fire. (though from the looks of its sprite, it appears they shoved a flamethrower down its throat).
Tabletop Games
- The first World Of Darkness played this pretty straight in the mythos of Werewolf The Apocalypse. One of the species of Changing Breeds are the Mokole. Nominally, they're weregators, except for the fact that, since they serve as Gaia's Memory, their War Form can be anything sufficiently lizardly drawn from earthly history. Most of them go for dinosaurs, but there are Eastern variants that can become dragons.
- Dungeons And Dragons, naturally, subverts this. Dinosaurs are nothing more than animals, though they're cool enough that they aren't listed in one appendix in the Monster Manual, where animals normally are, but instead under their own heading. Which makes D officially (and suitably) the most feared section of all creature books for D&D, what with dragons, demons, devils and dinosaurs.
- Some of the dragon-related source books take an interesting approach to this issue by suggesting that dinosaurs may be evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs, 60 million years on. (This might be more plausible if Young Earth Creationists weren't absolutely right in most D&D worlds.)
- In the latest D&D books, dinosaurs were renamed "behemoths", in an effort to avoid anachronisms. In the 4th edition Monster Manual, we have a "Bloodspike Behemoth" (an Stegosaurus), and a "Macetail Behemoth" (an Ankylosaurus). So the D section lost a little coolness (but remains filled with Dragons, Devils, Demons, Dracoliches, Dragonspawn, etc. etc. etc.)
Web Comics
- The fan-winged dragons in The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob evolved from kuehneosaurus
 (a real life lizard that lived in the Triassic and which had "wings" formed from overlong ribs which extended out from its body; it is believed to have used these to parachute from trees.) The dragons destroyed their civilization in a war—wiping out the dinosaurs in the process—after which they became peaceful, pastoral creatures. Millions of years later, when human knights and hunters began "slaying" them, they revived their old technology and left Earth for the planet Butane in the Kuiper Belt.
Trading Cards
- There's Topps' insane Dinosaurs Attack! trading card series. Any question as to whether or not Topps was invoking this trope were gone the minute it turned out that the (all carnivorous and homicidal regardless of species) dinosaurs were sent by Dinosaur Satan. No, I Am Not Making This Up. In addition, this is one incredibly violent series of cards - rivaling even Topps' own "Mars Attacks" in terms of sheer mayhem. The whole set generally appears to be aiming for Refuge In Audacity. For example, you've got to love this card. Because the scene of a giant [fictional] monster sinking a ship just isn't enough: needs more shark!.
Film
- Godzilla is either a dragon or a dinosaur depending on which fan you ask. Indeed, the fantastic nature of most Kaiju sways from one extreme to the other depending on the movie. The original film says that he's a dinosaur who was resurrected and mutated by the miracle of atomic mutation and happened to fit the local dragon mythology.
- The Back To The Future ride at Universal Studios, while not having the dinosaur actually breathe fire, had it living in the heart of an active volcano. Because animals like to live inside volcanoes.
- Oddly, Fantasia may have a lot to do with the volcano subtrope. "Rite of Spring" begins with a seemingly endless field of lava-spewing volcanos. A short and easily missed transition showing the progress of life on Earth then suddenly cuts to the late Cretaceous. Given that this is one of the most influential dinosaur film moments ever, perhaps many people missed the transition...
- This was translated over into "real" life in 1966 when Disneyland added the animatronic Primeval World diorama to their Disneyland Railroad attraction. In the Diorama, a T. Rex is depicted fighting a Stegosaur in the midst of a volcanic landscape.
Western Animation
- The Dinobots' trademark attack is fire breath; Slag (the Triceratops) actually had "Flamethrower" as his official assigned function. (Well, at least they're robots.) The ones in Animated also breathed fire and were made from animatronic dinosaurs, but they weren't suppose to have it; it was something Megatron, who was working with an unwitting Sumdac, added the so they would have a weapon.
- The Megatron from Beast Wars started as a Tyrannosaurus, but somehow (thanks to the original Megatron's spark and a lava dunking) gained a huge dragon form near the end of the series. The fact that he's a robot makes it a little easier to take, but considering they created their beast modes using scanned DNA, the dragon really comes out of nowhere.
- Extremely evident in Gumby, where Prickle would claim to be a dragon in some episodes (and even breathe fire), and insist he was a dinosaur in others.
- What makes the inconsistency especially stupid is that there's a whole episode devoted to him proving he's a dinosaur so he can get into an ice cream parlor that doesn't allow dragons (because they melt the ice cream).
- While the series has other problems, The Flintstones had a dino/dragon who doubled as a lighter or an oven. ("It's a living...")
Anime
- In Yu-Gi-Oh Dragons are dinosaurs... sort of. Rex Raptor has a dinosaur Theme Deck. However, his two strongest monsters, Serpent Night Dragon and Red Eyes Black Dragon, are dragons. Possibly justified as dragons are not affected by the arbitrary dinosaur weakness, and Rex may even be exploiting the confusion here. (In the Yu-Gi-Oh 'verse, a two-headed dragon is a Tyrannosaurus. Um, yeah.)
- The card game, however, distinguishes between dragons and dinosaurs by making them separate types (Dragons, and, well, Dinosaurs). For quite a while since the start of the game there were very few Dinosaur-type monsters, however, and it was years before a particularly powerful one was released, which may be because of this trope.
- Digimon is full of dinosaur characters that can breathe fire. One is usually the main Mon of each season. The WallBangery happens when the Mon calls himself a dinosaur in some episodes and a dragon in others.
- Dinosaur King. It was an... interesting decision to make a generic Mon show with actual creatures. It was even weirder to see them change shape, breathe fire, and perform "electric tackles".
Live Action TV
- Played in a unique fashion by Dragons A Fantasy Made Real, a Discovery Channel Mockumentary that showed "genuine" dragons as a species of prehistoric creature that survived into modern times, and which possessed a variety of fire-breathing that had a plausible biological explanation. Or as plausible as EATING PLATINUM could ever be, anyway. They didn't say anything about them actually being dinosaurs - but they did have a Bad Ass Tyrannosaurus Rex / Wyvern battle...
- Definately averted, as it is stated that for Dragons to work in anything close to the way they do in stories in the real world, they'd have to be more closely related to crocodiles than dinosaurs. This is because of two crocodilian features that would come in extremely handy for dragons: the swim-bladder, converted to store the precious hydrogen that allows them to breath fire & offsets their weight enabling flight, & also the crocodile's false-pallet, which would help with controlling their fiery breath.
- The creationist antagonist in the second season of Waterloo Road held this view, and used it to sway several of the students (including a regular cast member who had been established as very impressionable) because dragons are cool. Real Life creationist literature targeted at the underage plays up the dragon angle.
- Made into a joke on Friends (The one with the Secret Closet)
Phoebe : How would you feel if you couldn’t share your cooking? Or-or imagine how Ross would feel if he couldn’t teach us about dragons?
Monica : Dinosaurs
Phoebe : Potato, potaato
Literature
- Several years earlier than Dragons A Fantasy Made Real (enough to wonder if a lawsuit could be justified), Peter Dickinson's book The Flight Of Dragons took the view that dragons were long-surviving prehistoric creatures. He provides plausible means whereby dragons could be huge, breathe fire, have a reason to hoard gold, and so on, all based on the mechanism whereby they flew. He even sketches out an evolutionary path, and provides a reason why neither fossils nor cave paintings of dragons should exist.
- One character in the Drenai books remembers "dragons" skeletons that he saw in a museum, while thinking that it was impossible for such animals to breath fire without burning their own throat
- The Kill All Humans aspect is ubiquitous in pulp fiction. Authors seemed to like portraying every dinosaur species, including triceratops and stegosaurs, as carnivorous. Not only that, but both the legitimate carnivores and the derailed herbivores appear to prefer humans over any other potential prey. And mention must be made of a Tarzan novel in which our hero meets a stegosaurus who can fly (using it's spikey things as aerofoils, of course.)
Real Life
- The skull of the herbivorous dinosaur Dracorex hogwartsia is housed at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. Its name, which means "Hogwarts' Dragon King", was voted on by fans of Harry Potter. Most visitors probably see past the name.
- Similarly (although nobody could mistake them for dragons) Homo floresiensis almost instantaneously gained the nickname "Hobbit". Since a significant number of anthropologists are convinced that a lost race of small people have to be the basis for little people legends, you could almost hear their collective triumphant shouts of, "See! See!!!"
- Never mind the rather inconvenient fact that legends of little people range farther and wider than the one very small and isolated area in south-east Asia where the fossils that "must" have inspired them were found. (And come to think of it, you can say the same for unicorns, gryphons and dragons.)
- To a point, this can be justified by word getting around (Europeans hear from Arabs who heard from Persians who heard from... about a species of four-legged animal with a horn sticking out of its head). But only to a point.
- Adrienne Mayor argues that fossil discoveries are the source for the myths about giants, gryphons, and (of course) dragons in her books. It should be said that she has recieved quite a bit of flack for some of her theories.
- In a related example, it is said that in ancient China, alchemists often ground dinosaur fossils into powders & used them in traditional herbal medicine believing them to be dragon bones.
- Kent "Dr Dino" Hovind claims that dinosaurs were dragons, breathed fire, rode on Noah's Ark and may still be alive in remote places (!) and was possibly the inspiration for the Waterloo Road example above. That even other creationists don't want much to do with Hovind's hypotheses should give you an idea how crazy they are.
- Proof that we're not making this up: here. Expect much WallBangery.
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