Extinct Animal Park

An Extinct Animal Park is an animal park — or zoo, menagerie, or other place where animals are kept and displayed — that houses creatures that, by rights, shouldn't actually exist anymore.

The animals in question are often artificial creations, usually brought into being through cloning or genetic engineering. Less commonly, ancient beasts may be brought into the modern day through time travel, or they may be sourced from a convenient Lost World. The layouts of these institutions are typically based on zoos or safari parks, with discrete cages or enclosures holding different animals; true, wide-open natural reserves are rarer. This is typically due to most examples being built with a visiting public in mind: the beasts kept in these parks are meant to be seen and admired by the crowds, and as such are usually placed in cages, paddocks, aviaries or aquariums where visitors can get a good look at them.

Most modern examples are heavily influenced, directly or indirectly, by Jurassic Park, although the trope as a whole predates the franchise, and consequently share a number of features derived from it. Most prominently, the animals in these zoos lean heavily towards dinosaurs, which may very well be the only creatures present; Cenozoic megafauna is less common but turns up from time to time, and Paleozoic creatures are fairly rare. Additionally, it's relatively common for such parks to share Jurassic Park's disastrous end and for some or all of the creatures to escape and rampage out of control.

When an Extinct Animal Park is the focus of its story, the narrative will often focus on the science that created it, the varied and exotic beasts it contains, and the challenges of keeping it running properly — which can range from the difficulties of caring for animals with largely unknown ecologies and native to long-vanished environments to dealing with ten-ton predators running loose amid the patrons. In other cases, these parks can feature as part of a story's background scenery, especially in far future or other high-tech settings. Here, they serve as a way to illustrate the increased technology level and the way in which what for us would be wondrous advances in science have become a commonplace part of civilization.

Subtrope of Fantastic Nature Reserve. This often overlaps with Fossil Revival. See also Jurassic Farce, which it often overlaps with (but doesn't have to). Also see Domesticated Dinosaurs for other depictions of extinct life in human captivity.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Dinosaur Sanctuary follows the staff of a small struggling dinosaur zoo in a world where such things are relatively commonplace. The manga's chapters follow different episodes in work at the place, dealing with various issues for the animals much in the same way real-life zoos take care of modern animals.

Comic Books

• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: "Return to Forbidden Valley" ends with Scrooge getting a baby hadrosaur for his zoo.
• Judge Dredd: There's a Dinosaur National Park full of cloned dinosaurs, twelve years before Jurassic Park (1990) was written. Dredd runs into "Satanus", a particularly vicious T. rex that had escaped from the park, in several adventures. In a bit of Canon Welding, Satanus was later shown to be the offspring of Old One-Eye from Flesh.

Fan Works

• Prehistoric Earth: The titular zoo features various animals from the original Prehistoric Park series as well as from the larger Walking with Dinosaurs franchise by virtue of being rescued from the past via time portal by the adventurous zoologist Drew Luczynski and his team of allies.
• Prehistoric Park: Extinction World: Prehistoric Park, more so than its canon counterpart by virtue of including even more prehistoric animals than were rescued in the original series. Besides the animals that were rescued in the original series, the park is home to several animals that were featured in the original series without getting rescued, multiple prehistoric animals that were never featured in the original series (such as iconic giant herbivores from the Jurassic period, pterosaurs, prehistoric ocean animals, animals from the Paleozoic era predating the dinosaurs, etc.), and even several animal species that became extinct directly through the actions of mankind (i.e. dodos, moa, thylacines, Caribbean monk seals, Caspian tigers, etc.).
• Prehistoric Park Reimagined: Prehistoric Park serves as this for multiple dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals rescued from extinction via the time portal, with the characters from Prehistoric Earth taking the place of Nigel and the rest of the crew from the original series.
• Prehistoric Park: Returned from Extinction: Prehistoric Park, as in the original series, is this, although it goes further than several other examples as it also includes creatures from other Impossible Pictures works. Eventually, it even starts taking in creatures from the future.

Film — Animation

• Doraemon: Nobita and the Island of Miracles ~Animal Adventure~: The titular Miracle Island is a 22nd Century natural reserve and sanctuary housing various long-extinct animals, including dodos, glyptodons, wooly rhinoceroses, sabre-toothed tigers and rarer species like Megatherium, Chalicotherium and Ceratogaulus. The adventure is kicked off when Doraemon and Nobita finds a stray moa and decide to travel to the future and find the reserve (while Nobita tries sneaking a giant prehistoric beetle out without Doraemon's permission), but then a group of evil poachers attack the island and strand the main characters on it.

Film — Live-Action

• Jurassic Park: Though the trope as a whole predates the franchise, these movies are the Trope Codifier. Out of the six that have been made so far, a functioning park appears in three of them.
  • Jurassic Park (1993): The titular park is designed as an open-space zoo stocked with genetically engineered dinosaurs created from samples of ancient blood (plus or minus varying amounts of frog DNA to fill in the gaps), mostly in the form of large Cretaceous species. It falls apart quickly and spectacularly through a combination of sabotage, poor planning and active mismanagement, and the island it was built on is eventually abandoned to its newly feral inhabitants.
  • The Lost World: Jurassic Park: The human antagonists aim to recreate Jurassic Park in San Diego by capturing dinosaurs roaming free on Isla Sorna. They insist they will be better prepared with more secure facilities this time. The protagonists oppose this idea, both because the original park's creators said the same thing and look how that turned out, and because they believe the animals should be left in peace. The antagonists do succeed in bringing a T. rex to San Diego (with heavy casualties) but it ends up breaking free and going on a rampage, after which Ingen finally gives up on the idea of a dinosaur theme park.
  • Jurassic World features an example of a dinosaur theme park that was successfully opened to the public and has been thriving for years. However, inevitably things go horribly wrong when the scientists try to breed a hybrid dinosaur as a new attraction; its hyper-intelligence and unpredictable behavior results in it getting loose and causing havoc across the park.
  • Both Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Jurassic World Dominion revolve around plans to move the dinosaurs to reserves after Jurassic Park is destroyed by the volcano within Isla Nublar and the dinosaurs that were sent loose in Fallen Kingdom become too much of a nuisance and both times this plan turns out to be just a cover for the more insidious, Umbrella/Weyland-Yutani-style Evil Plan of the Evil, Inc.-du-jour of the film.

Literature

• The Albino Knife: Marcus Jefferson Wall has a private zoo that includes several cloned extinct animals. In order to test his scientists' efforts at reversing the Brain Uploading he did to escape his own assassination in The Machiavelli Interface, he has himself downloaded into an elderly male mastodon. To more fully test its capabilities, he then orders the scientists to bring him one of the female elephants so he can have sex with her.
• Great Gusliar: One of the short stories, Retrogenetics, is about Professor Minz's recreation of several prehistoric species, including the pterodactyl and the cave bear, is extremely successful, and the animals live contentedly in a reserve.
• Jurassic Park:
  • In Jurassic Park (1990), a biotech corporation attempts to create a zoo/theme park featuring cloned dinosaurs. Prior to the park's opening, a group of people are invited to review it to ensure it is fit for this purpose. They get their answer when the dinosaurs break out of the enclosures due to a disgruntled employee shutting off the security system to steal embryos for a rival corporation, along with general poor management and cost-cutting measures. The park never officially opens to the public because the army ends up firebombing the island to eradicate the threat, although several dinosaurs had already escaped to the mainland.
  • The Lost World (1995), the sequel, doesn't feature the park itself, but explores the infrastructure that such a park would logically require. The process of cloning dinosaurs shown in the first novel was too streamlined to be realistic, so this novel patches up that plothole by retconning that all the real cloning work was carried out at "Site B" on a completely different island, while the labs at Jurassic Park itself were just a show to impress visitors. In the present day, the protagonists explore the long-abandoned Site B in hopes that its ecosystem of feral dinosaur clones can shed some light on the actual behavior of prehistoric megafauna.
• Meg: A reoccurring plot line in the novels is characters capturing the various prehistoric marine animals to put them in huge aquariums (starting with the megalodons, but marine reptiles and ancient whales get added in later books), partly because giant predators swimming loose in the modern day oceans is a real bad thing. Inevitably, attempts to capture them go awry or they somehow manage to escape.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: The Silurian space-ark from "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" has naturalistic compartments for the various Cretaceous-era wildlife that the ancient reptilians hoped to save from imminent mass extinction.
• Prehistoric Park involves a naturalist who travels through time via use of a specially designed portal and brings back extinct animals — various types of dinosaurs, wooly mammoths and other Ice Age megafauna, giant Carboniferous arthropods, etc. — for his nature preserve in Africa. The episodes' stories alternate between the attempts at retrieving new residents and the zookeepers' attempts at keeping the already-obtained ones fed, healthy, stimulated, and under control — which, given that knowledge of the behaviors and ecologies of extinct animals is by necessity speculative at best, requires a lot of trial, error, and creative thinking. Notable incidents include multiple failed attempts at building sauropod-proof enclosures, dressing up a tractor to resemble a Triceratops in order to give an adolescent male trike something to blow off steam against by fighting, and dealing with a solitary mammoth's depression by convincing a herd of elephants to take her in.
• Sliders: "In Dino Veritas" has a dinosaur preserve, the last place where they can be found on the episode's world. Naturally, it's also a haven for poachers, provided they don't get eaten. Rangers are only allowed to enter the park via holo-projections, so as not to disturb the dinosaurs.

Toys

• LEGO:
  • LEGO Adventurers: In the Dino Island subtheme, Sam Sinister's goal is to exploit the Living Dinosaurs for profit by capturing them and then opening a dinosaur theme park. It's up to the heroic adventurers to prevent him from succeeding and to keep the dinosaurs safe in the wild.
  • LEGO Minifigures: Downplayed in the Zookeeper's bio. The LEGO City zoo is full of extant animals as expected, but the Zookeeper was surprised by one exhibit featuring dinosaurs brought back from Dino Island.

Video Games

• Civilization: Call to Power: Researching genetic tailoring allows you to build the Dinosaur Park wonder of the world. Building the Park triples the value of trade goods in the host city, representing the massive boon to business and commerce that the park brings. According to the flavor text, the major breakthrough that made it possible came with the invention of the artificial womb in the 22nd century.
• Jurassic Park:
  • Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis focuses on you customizing your island, building a functioning park, and cloning dinosaurs from fossils and amber. There's also a Site B mode, where you can create a true Mesozoic ecosystem with no human interference beyond hatcheries.
  • Jurassic World: Evolution: The premise of the game is centered around building a park on each island of the Los Cincos Muertas archipelago and creating exhibits showcasing the array of over sixty species of dinosaurs, such as Edmontosaurus, Dreadnaughtus, Torosaurus, and Tyrannosaurus rex. Each species has its own unique habitat and diet requirements that must be met to keep the animals happy, and live relatively long and happy lives; failure to maintain these requirements eventually results in the dinosaurs attempting to escape by violently destroying a section of the fence that outlines their habitats and going on a rampage throughout the park. The Return to Jurassic Park DLC also saw the addition of a pterosaur, Pteranodon. Jurassic World Evolution 2, while still retaining the same park building mechanics of its predecessor, expanded the available roster by adding nearly a dozen species of pterosaurs and marine reptiles, such as the Mosasaurus, Attenboroughsaurus, and Elasmosaurus. The Biosyn DLC also introduces the synapsid Dimetrodon into the mix.
• Parkasaurus: The game is about building your own theme park filled with dinosaurs and hosting it to the public. However, the process involves using a genetically bred chicken to lay dinosaur eggs, and is rather slow.
• Pokémon Sun and Moon: The Pokémon Breeder who revives fossils for the player talks about his plans to one day open a park filled with resurrected specimens of fossilized species.
• Prehistoric Kingdom: A zoological park management simulator that intentionally apes the gameplay of Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis, but with a much stronger focus on accuracy over spectacle and the inclusion of Cenozoic megafauna. The narrator of the game is also Nigel Marven, who certainly knows a thing or two about managing a park of prehistoric animals...
• Zoo Tycoon: The first and second games allow for the player to obtain dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals to display.
  • The first game's Dinosaur Digs expansion pack lets the player obtain dinosaur eggs which, if cared for by a scientist, will hatch into new dinosaurs to display in your enclosures. Special prehistoric foliage is included to decorate the dinosaur paddocks, as are electric fences to keep them in. Dinosaurs still have a chance to escape, however, and will need to be tracked down and tranquilized for recovery by a specialized team if they do.
  • Zoo Tycoon 2: The Extinct Animals expansion pack lets the player find fossils and clone baby extinct animal from them. If the player gets a 100% on the minigame required to clone the critter, the baby becomes a Super Clone, which is bigger, lives longer, and won't get sick.
• In Pokémon Red and Blue and their remakes, there is a Pokémon Zoo in Fuchsia city that contains an Omanyte and a Kabuto along with several non-extinct Pokémon.

Webcomics

• Schlock Mercenary:
  • There's a mention in one strip of a news story about a sick Apatosaurus at a zoo vomiting on a crowd.
  • It turns out a precursor civilization evacuated a sapient species of dromaeosaurs before the asteroid struck (which was accidentally their fault), and set up a few reserves in their worldship for them and their Domesticated Dinosaurs. Including tyrannosaurs.

Web Original

• Huxley Paleozoo: The Thomas Henry Huxley Paleozoological Gardens is a zoo of cloned extinct animals.
• SCP Foundation: The Mesozoic Preserve is about fifty square kilometers of Congolese jungle full of dinosaurs, all of them feathered, and a few non-dinosaurian prehistoric reptiles. An unknown force keeps the animals inside — if they try to leave, they vanish and reappear sedated within the preserve. The dinosaurs are completely passive to humans, except for a few species that have not been discovered by science yet, which are highly aggressive. Apparently, this place is where African dinosaur cryptid legends originate from.

Western Animation

• DC Animated Universe:
  • Superman: The Animated Series: In the two-part episode "The Main Man", Superman is captured by the Bounty Hunter Lobo and delivered to the Preserver, a sinister alien being obsessed with collecting the last living specimens of species from across the universe. Since Superman — and, indeed, Lobo — are both the last of their respective peoples, they become the newest attractions at the Preserver's zoo. After the two of them reluctantly work together to escape and defeat the Preserver, Superman realizes that the other creatures in the zoo (mostly unintelligent alien animals) have nowhere else to go, and decides to build his own zoo at the Fortress of Solitude where they can live out the rest of their days in peace. Later episodes occasionally show him feeding or otherwise taking care of the animals.
  • Batman Beyond: Superman's zoo of near-extinct aliens makes a return in the two-parter "The Call", where one of the exhibits — an innocuous starfish-like alien — turns out to be a Puppeteer Parasite who possesses Superman and makes him do evil. This is the DC Animated Universe's incarnation of Starro the Conqueror, an obscure villain from the comics who would later find fame as the villain of The Suicide Squad.
• DuckTales (1987): In "Dinosaur Ducks", Scrooge plans on keeping one of the Living Dinosaurs in a Lost World as a specimen for his zoo. After the kids talk him out of taking a baby hadrosaur separated from its mother, he ultimately settles on turning the lost world into a safari park.
• Futurama:
  • In "I Dated A Robot", Fry visits a "Jurassic Kiddie Park" where he rides a T. rex and feeds it a small pig, but unfortunately he forgets to hold his hands open.
  • "The Thief of Baghead" features a "Jurassic Tank" at the Monsteray Bay Aquarium, hosted by a John Hammond lookalike and inhabited by prehistoric sea life (and one Tyrannosaurus desperately treading water).
  • "Fry and Leela's Big Fling" had thylacines in a zoo.
• Lilo & Stitch: The Series: In "Retro", the featured experiment to capture is Experiment 210, which can devolve creatures by wrapping them up with its tongue and spinning them around. After being reformed, he's sent to a zoo, where he uses his ability to turn the animals there into their prehistoric relatives to attract visitors.
• The Simpsons:
  • "Days of Future Future": Adult Bart works at "Cretaceous Park", where cloned dinosaurs perform for treats like dolphins at Sea World.
  • "Sweet Seymour Skinner's Baadasssss Song": Principal Skinner wants to write the Great American Novel called Billy and the Cloneasaurus about a futuristic amusement park where dinosaurs are brought to life through advanced cloning techniques. A furious Apu then goes into a long rant explaining how it's already been done before and was so famous that there's no way Skinner shouldn't know that.

Real Life

• One of the more outlandish proposals to combat global warming is to clone woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, cave lions, and other Pleistocene Eurasian megafauna and release them into parks in Siberia to restore the Mammoth Steppe ecosystem. Most scientists are highly dubious that this could even be done at all, much less on a large-enough scale to actually have any sort of meaningful impact on global temperature.

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