Medieval Prehistory

When Mammoths Mean Medieval.

Gail: This makes no sense [...] That's clearly an early medieval city. I mean, come on, everyone knows that woolly mammoths died out some time in the late Neolithic period.
Rob: Yeah, everyone knows that.

— Love, Death & Robots, "Ice Age"

Prehistory is full of creatures that could pass for fantastic; mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, Dinosaurs, and millions of others are strange and unusual enough to be very serviceable fantastic beasts alongside griffins, dragons, and the like, while still similar enough to modern fauna not to feel too out of place in Earth-like worlds. The problem is, you might think of prehistoric human society as boring. The solution? Medieval Prehistory.

Medieval prehistory involves vaguely prehistoric plant and animal life, or climate and environmental conditions, with knights, castles, and princesses coexisting. Doesn't necessarily have to be set in Medieval Europe or a Fantasy Counterpart Culture to it, but it does have to involve a pre-industrial society, so Ancient Grome and ancient Africa or even Mayincatec etc. are permitted. Stone Punk, which usually involves a more modern-type society, is an entirely different trope.

Depending on the setting, this can potentially be anything from a fantasy world explicitly set in the Earth's real or fictional prehistory, with the prehistoric elements taking front and center, to a more conventional fantasy world with a few species of dinosaur and Ice Age megafauna added in among the usual fantasy creatures.

The precise role and prominence of the prehistoric elements can vary, but it typically varies between the primordial creatures being simply another part of the environment and their being rarer creatures restricted to isolated areas and remarkable in-universe as well as out. In the first case, they'll generally be treated as just more animals by local people, who will often have a variety of common names for them and may have domesticated a few varieties.

Ice Age creatures and other Cenozoic megafauna are some of the most common creatures seen in this role, in large part because their similarities to modern animals make them easier to insert in environments ultimately based on real-life ones. The fact that they're mostly associated with cold environments makes them particularly common sights in the Grim Up North; mammoths, in particular, are a fairly common sight in frigid fantasy northlands and may be present even when no other prehistoric creatures are. Dinosaurs are rarer, but also see consistent use; they're less likely to just be something you might find in the woods, but expeditions to a Lost World or the depths of a distant jungle often stand a good chance of running into these creatures. Other prehistoric fauna, such as more obscure mammals and anything that lived before the dinosaurs, is used much more sporadically.

Subtrope of Anachronism Stew. Often overlaps with Alternate History or Historical Fantasy, usually based on the premise that the asteroid did not wipe out the dinosaurs or that somehow other wildlife managed to survive up until the medieval era or something involving Time Travel. Don't expect the wildlife to live in the areas they did in reality.

Related to Dinosaurs Are Dragons and often overlaps with Fantasy Kitchen Sink. Not to be confused with Hollywood Prehistory, which involves stereotypical stone-age "cavemen" living alongside creatures such as dinosaurs, or Prehistoria, its video game equivalent. Can contain elements of The Dark Times and The Time of Myths, or Ambiguous Time Period, and Domesticated Dinosaurs.

See also Living Dinosaurs, for when dinosaurs survived all the way up to modern times.

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Examples:

Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering:
  • Dominaria, the setting's original central world and a fairly traditional fantasy setting in most respects, is home to creatures such as woolly mammoths and allosauruses. These were all especially common during a large in-setting ice age, but at least the allosaurs are still around.
  • Ixalan is a continent where the Mayincatec locals coexist with dinosaurs, although the setting isn't technically "medieval" (Ixalan's plane is more of a "conquest of the New World" period, although it's not clear who's conquering who).

Comic Books

• Marvel 1602 has dinosaurs in the seventeenth-century America. Explained by Neil Gaiman (though not in-story) as being because the Savage Land is bigger in this version of the Marvel Universe.

Fan Works

• A Ballad of the Dragon and She-Wolf: Besides the canon examples of dire wolves and mammoths, mastodons are found on the Isle of Faces and Morna mentions there are Megaloceros-like elks Beyond the Wall.
• My Little Chrono Triggers Are Magic: The antagonists of 65,000,000 BC are a civilization of humans with medieval technology.

Films — Animated

• Early Man pitches a Stone Age tribe against a Bronze Age society that has tamed mammoths and muskoxen among other things. Given that the dispute is resolved with a game of football (or soccer, if you're North American), it seems unlikely that accuracy was a major concern — although there are a few clever little jokes for those who do know their prehistory.
• Fire and Ice (1983) sits on the border between this and a traditional Hollywood Prehistory setting, with pterosaurs, giant lizards, and Frazetta Man mooks existing alongside castles, wizards and metal weapons. One scene sees the forces of The Good Kingdom field an entire squadron of pterosaur-mounted flying cavalry.

Films — Live-Action

• 10,000 BC has a pyramid-building culture using mammoths as beasts of burden.
• The 13th Warrior pitches Vikings against relict cavemen in 10th century Denmark, but their nature as relict Neanderthals is not as clear as in the sourcebook.
• Aquaman is set in modern-day, but is really an underwater fantasy epic. King Orm's mount is a Tylosaurus.
• Aztec Rex has the Conquistadors (Spanish explorers and soldiers) battling a pair of Tyrannosaurus rex in a Mayincatec setting in the early 16th century.
• The Lord of the Rings: Technically the story is set in the prehistoric past, but not that prehistoric, only about six thousand years ago.
  • The movies have their share of this. The oliphaunts seem to have been influenced by Gomphotherium, a prehistoric elephant with four tusks. The "great beasts" briefly seen pulling the giant battering ram at the Siege of Gondor are likewise modeled after Megacerops, a large horned herbivore that resembled a rhinoceros but was more closely related to horses. Downplayed in the case of the Naz'gul's mounts, which resemble wyverns in the movies but come across as more pterodactyloid in the books.
  • In The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, Thranduil's mount is pretty clearly a Megaloceros, a kind of large deer with colossal antlers that lived in Europe during the ice ages.
  • If Epileptic Trees apply, people may also see the Eagles as Harpagornis (which actually lived into the Middle Ages, but in New Zealand), and the Wargs could pass for either Hyaenodon or Borophagus, before The Hobbit redesigned them to be more typically wolf-like.
• Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger becomes this trope by way of a Lost World: Sinbad and his "Arabian Nights" Days crew make their way to Hyperborea, where they encounter a proto-human Troglodyte and a sabre-tooth cat.
• Technically classical rather than medieval, but Hercules (1958) goes the Dinosaurs Are Dragons route, with the Golden Fleece guarded by a dragon that looks like a Ceratosaurus and sounds like Godzilla.
  • The same "dragon" appears as Stock Footage in the later Hercules the Invincible, also known by the Market-Based Title Son of Hercules in the Land of Darkness.
• The Jungle Book (2016) changes King Louie's species from an orangutan to a Gigantopithecus to get over the fact that orangutans aren't native to India.

Literature

• Atlan places medieval European-style villages adjacent to prehistoric jungles crawling with dinosaurs.
• Clark Ashton Smith wrote tales of The Time of Myths set on the continent of "Hyperborea", which now lies under the ice of Greenland. Dinosaurs, prehistoric animals, and outright monsters all share the setting with a reasonably complex, castle-building human society.
• Codex Alera: A few prehistoric creatures and the descendants thereof appear among the fauna that populates Carna, which is something of a dimensional sinkhole where people and creatures from many different worlds have become stranded over time.
  • The wild creatures the Marat bind themselves to include gargants, which are implied to be giant ground sloths of some kind, and herdbanes, which are terror birds.
  • Leviathans are revealed to be gigantic descendants of Earth's plesiosaurs, which have evolved to become the dominant predators in the world's oceans.
• Dance Of The Tiger, by Finnish paleontologist Björn Kurtén, inverts the trope by bringing elements from Medieval folklore to the Paleolithic, instead of Paleolithic animals to Medieval times. The handwave is, naturally, that this folklore originated from distant memories of the Paleolithic. In the story, set in Sweden as the ice recedes, the Sapiens call Neanderthals "trolls", and the villains are a couple of hybrid brother warlords known as the "troll children" or "troll little devils". There is also a "troll" woman who managed to tame reindeer, but she is an oddball loner and the implication is that this knowledge will die with her, leaving Sapiens to rediscover it thousands of years later. Finally, the book takes the word schelch from the Nibelungenlied and uses it as the characters name for Megaloceros. This is based on Kurtén's own speculation that the "schelch" in the poem was an actual reference to this animal.^note The Nibelungelied says that Siegfried once hunted a Wisent (bison), an Elch (elk/moose), four Ure (aurochs), and a mysterious "single fierce Schelch", which given the context must have been a megaungulate that is none of the other three.
• The Dinosaur Lords: This trope is the main premise of the work: several species of dinosaurs are used as mounts and beasts of burden in a Medieval world, or just appear as wild animals.
• Eaters of the Dead: The High Concept of the story is that Beowulf was actually a fantasy retelling of a conflict between Vikings and relict Neanderthals (called "Wendol") in Medieval Denmark. The limits of Wendol territory are marked by massive bear skulls, implying the late survival of cave bears in the area as well.
• The Elenium: A few times, the villains use time portals to make enemies from the prehistoric past attack the protagonists. These include a Tyrannosaurus rex and a horde of "dawn men" (the common ancestor of humans and trolls in this 'verse).
• The Garrett, P.I. novels, gumshoe-style mysteries set in a fantasy-world city, count both dinosaurs (thunder lizards) and assorted Pleistocene mammals among their Verse's typical fauna.
• Harry Turtledove's extensive work in Alternate History includes several pieces where the premise, or one effect of the POD, is the survival of one or several prehistoric species into historical times:
  • A Different Flesh takes place in a world where the Americas were colonized by more technologically impaired Homo erectus rather than Homo sapiens. Besides the H. erectus themselves, several species of megafauna including "hairy elephants" (mammoths), "spearfang cats" (sabertoothed cats), ground sloths, and glyptodonts all survived to meet European colonists. The British even import Indian mahouts in the 18th century to tame the "hairy elephants" and use them as beasts of burden. The series was inspired by an essay by Stephen J. Gould, wondering what John Smith would have thought if he met Australopithecus in the Americas instead of modern humans.
  • In The Green Buffalo, a gang of 1891 Wyoming hunters (hired by a dinosaur paleontologist, no less) unwittingly wander into the Mesozoic through a ripple in time, then bag a Torosaurus that followed them back into the 19th century. They remain oblivious the whole time and take the dinosaur for a diseased buffalo, hence the title.
  • In Down in the Bottomlands, the Zanclean Flood 5 million years ago never happened; as a result, the Mediterranean Sea doesn't exist and there is an extensive desert miles under sea level in its place, the titular Bottomlands. Despite this distant point of departure, both modern humans and Neanderthals still evolved, but Neanderthals survived and developed their own technologically advanced states in Europe while humans remained in Africa and southern Asia.
  • The Maltese Elephant is a pastiche of The Maltese Falcon, except the mcguffin is a living, breathing Maltese dwarf elephant instead of a stone falcon. The elephants are said to have played a decisive role in the Great Siege of 1565.
  • The Atlantis series has the premise that the eastern coast of North America broke off and drifted to the middle Atlantic during the Mesozoic, and as a result remained uninhabited by humans (or any other mammal) until Europeans discovered it in the 15th century. While the local flightless birds are fictional, they draw obvious inspiration from New Zealand's moas and Hawaii's moa-nalos. The largest species are driven to extinction in the 19th century.
  • Running of the Bulls is another pastiche, this time of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Except the bulls are Triceratops. And the final twist is that the "human" characters are evolved dinosaurs and not actually human.
  • An example without alternate history involved is Household Gods, where a modern Austrian woman is transported to Roman times and has the chance to witness a circus game where an aurochs is made to fight against a wolf pack. She sees the fact that the animal is extinct in her own time as an additional horror.
  • Another fantasy example is Birdwitching, which depicts a duel of witches magically summoning increasingly difficult birds. The rarer the bird, the bigger toll it takes on the summoner, and extinct birds are the toughest of all. In the end, a witch passes out from summoning an Archaeopteryx and is acclaimed as the undisputed winner.
• The Lord of the Rings: Downplayed. The Drúedain west of Gondor differ greatly from the normal humans, and from the nonhuman races, and it has been suggested that they are actually Neanderthals.
• Lyonesse and its sequel Green Pearl take place in a pre-Migration Period world with fantasy elements and a vaguely medieval culture.
• North Of The Dragonlands by Stephen Dedman is a medieval fantasy in which the fantastic elements are unfamiliar non-magical things that the characters are trying to understand in terms of familiar concepts; the "dragons" are dinosaurs and pterosaurs that have somehow survived from prehistoric times.
• The Reynard Cycle: In this Low Fantasy series, aurochs, a pre-historic breed of cattle, are used for labor in Calvaria.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • The series has mammoths and direwolves among the beasts living in the Grim Up North, aurochs in the main setting of Westeros, and dwarf elephants in Essos in the east.
  • The "terrible walking lizards" mentioned by Syrio Forel, that kill their prey with hooked claws on their hind legs and are brought from Sothoryos to Braavosi menageries, sound a lot like dromaeosaurid dinosaurs ("raptors"). In the same dialogue, Forel claims to have seen other exotic animals, from more mundane (but still exotic to his audience) zebras and giraffes, to tigers that carry their young in pouches, and "mouse-pigs as big as cows".
  • The mysterious Coldhands, who lives (or un-lives) in the Grim Up North, is said to ride a "great elk". Most illustrators depict it as either an American or European elk, but some have chosen to paint it as a Megaloceros◊.
  • The "giant elk" antlers over Mance Rayder's tent are likely Megaloceros, with Jon even commenting that they belong to an extinct species (but recent enough to be identified by people from a glance). "Giant stags" are also said to have lived in the Riverlands in the past.
  • The Ibbenese are heavily implied to be Neanderthals, albeit ones that eventually developed a civilization, took to the sea, and excelled at whaling. Interestingly, despite everyone noting their physical differences, nobody ever regards them as non-human.
  • The Westerlands had its own species of lion, which only went extinct in recent memory. Given the generally temperate, European climate, they may be actually cave lions, or analogues of Holocene European lions rather than African.
  • A species of dwarf elephant is used as a beast of burden and status symbol in Volantis.
• The Stone Dance of the Chameleon almost exclusively uses prehistoric flora and fauna in place of modern animals, and has them coexisting with a Mayincatec medieval society. Ceratopsids are used as pack animals or something akin to war elephants depending on the species, while various stripes of theropod fill the niche horses fill in our society. At one point the protagonist sees some of the aforementioned war ceratopsians and notes that they are frequently called dragons by commoners, but his father forbids him from using that word in reference to them, feeling that such superstitious language is low-class.

Live-Action TV

• Game of Thrones: Mammoths and direwolves prowl beyond the Wall. Giants are also more Neanderthal-like in this version than the books' Bigfoot-like creatures, although they are still 4 meters tall.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Entelodont-like creatures exist at the same time as the kingdoms of the Men, Elves, and Dwarves.
• Primeval suggests that many mythical creatures were actually inspired by dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals ending up in historical times through time anomalies. It's specifically invoked with the Pristichampsus in the first episode of Season 3, which is suggested as being the true identity of Ammit from Egyptian mythology, and at the end, the team all throw out suggestions for other legendary creatures that could have come from anomalies. A more literal example happens later in the same season, when a Dracorex dinosaur has gone through an anomaly into Medieval England, is mistaken for a dragon, and goes through another anomaly to modern-day London with a Knight In Shining Armour intending to kill it in tow.
• The Terror: The Tuunbag is loosely similar to an Arctodus short-faced bear in size and proportions. This is in contrast to the book where the Tuunbaq is an Eldritch Abomination, and may have been inspired by claims of short-faced bear survival in the Arctic by cryptozoologists.

Mythology and Religion

• The Bible has several references to Iron Age people living side by side with animals that a reader would have trouble imagining in modern-day Israel: oryx, addax, hartebeest, onager, lion, leopard, bear. Some, like the lion, survived there until the literal Middle Ages. Others even later. And then there are the weird cases:
  • The re'em is a creature said to be untameable to anyone but God; it later morphed in Jewish folklore into a gigantic, mountain-sized animal with horns. It was translated as "unicorn" in the King James's Version, though some believe that the translator had a rhinoceros in mind when he used that word. Modern consensus is that the re'em is an aurochs, due to its etymological affinity with the Akkadian word rimu.
  • Book of Job: The behemoth is a massive vegetarian animal, mentioned by God to Job as an example of His power. Most theologians note clear mammalian traits, including but not limited to a large nose and penis, and debate if it is a buffalo, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, or Syrian Elephant, a giant subspecies of Asian elephant larger than the extant forms.
  • The leviathan is mentioned as a large serpentine sea creature that can breathe fire and has seven heads according to some verses. It is also mentioned with scales strong enough to not be penetrated by Bronze and Iron Age spears, and that Bronze and Iron is like straw and rotten wood to them. Some think that it is a Nile crocodile with the fire-breathing being a possible mistranslation and some of those weirder verses referring to the Devil.
• The Book of Mormon mentions war horses and elephants in pre-Columbian North America. Believers claim either that they are late surviving American horses and mastodons that were tamed by people, or other American animals, like tapirs (which also went extinct in North America in prehistoric times, and now live in South America and Central America up to the Yucatan).
• Medieval folklore has the Woodwose or "Wild Man", an abstraction of what a man untouched by civilization would be. The Woodwose is bearded and naked, but has a hairy body like an animal, and lives in the deep woods. He has no tools except a big wooden club, which is probably why cavemen are often depicted with them in media, despite no archaeological evidence of prehistoric clubs being ever found. There are people who claim that such creatures were actually neanderthals or other extinct hominids who survived into more recent times.

Podcast

• Twilight Histories: The mini-episode "Beyond the Indus" takes place in a world where Alexander the Great continued to push into India. He and his army discover that the Indians have domesticated dinosaurs, who somehow survived the K-T Extinction and never spread elsewhere in the world. The dinosaurs are used as sources of food and beasts of burden.

Tabletop Games

• Champions: Fantasy Hero has multiple settings taking place in Earth's distant past.
  • The Turakian Age is a Standard Fantasy Setting that takes place between 73,000 and 65,000 BC, ending with a war against a Lich that reshapes the world.
  • The Valdorian Age follows the Turakian, and is a Sword and Sorcery setting modeled after Conan the Barbarian, where the gods have abandoned man, magic is dangerous, rare, and corrupting, and life and morality are cheap.
  • The Atlantean Age is a High Fantasy setting focusing on Atlantis at the height of its power.
• The Dark Eye: Dere is for the most part a typical modern fantasy world, but its fauna includes such things as mammoths, mastodons, wooly rhinos, saber-toothed tigers, horned saurians (generic ceratopsians) and gorgers (scaly, cold-blooded giant theropods).
• Dungeons & Dragons has stats for dinosaurs, dire wolves (among other "dire" beasts), woolly mammoths, terror birds (as "axe beaks"), and megalodons, plus several others. Whether or not they're actually part of the setting depends on the campaign.
  • This dates back to Gary Gygax's original Greyhawk campaign from the 1970s (which was heavily altered prior to its commercial release in 1980). Since he didn't have time to run gaming sessions on an almost nightly basis and create a detailed fantasy world, he set his adventures in an alternate version of North America. The Great Lakes region was a civilized area (the cities of Greyhawk and Dyvers were expys of Chicago and Milwaukee, respectively), while the western part of the continent was considered a "land that time forgot" full of cavemen, dinosaurs, and other prehistoric creatures.
  • The Eberron setting has the Talenta Plains, where nomadic tribes of halflings travel on the backs of dinosaurs.
  • Mystara: The Hollow World is home to several classical- or early medieval civilizations, existing alongside vast tracts of dinosaur-populated wilderness. Invoked, in a sense, as the Immortals (the gods of the setting) use the Hollow World as a place to preserve creatures and cultures that would have gone extinct in the outside world, and they've been at it for a long time.
  • For all the traditional fantasy critters to be found in it, the original, AD&D 1st Edition Monster Manual had no sea serpents, as such. Under the "dinosaur" listing, it did have plesiosaurs, though, which are functionally nearly the same thing. No doubt a lot of homespun campaigns used them for precisely that purpose.
• Exalted: A variety of dinosaurs and Cenozoic megafauna inhabits Creation alongside humans, elementals and weirder things. Among others, there are tyrant lizards (Tyrannosaurus rex), raptors (originally featherless, which was later corrected), ox-dragons (non-specific ceratopsids), siege lizards (Stegosaurus), sky titans (giant pterosaurs), mammoths and saber-toothed tigers in the far North, emperor sloths (megatheres) in the jungles of the East, ferocious hellboars (entelodonts), and predatory austrech (terror birds with clawed wings) that roam deserts and plains.
• GURPS: The bestiary in Banestorm includes "bushwolves", "paladins", and "treetippers" — from their descriptions and illustrations, they're evidently thylacines, glyptodonts, and giant ground sloths by other names. "Striders" may be one of the many species of flightless predatory bird that appear from time to time in the fossil record.
• Pathfinder:
  • Dinosaurs exist as powerful apex predators in the primeval Realm of the Mammoth Lords and the trackless Mwangi Expanse, as well as in the swamps and jungles of the Lost World of Deep Tolguth, deep Beneath the Earth. They serve as the most powerful animals to exist without magical backing.
  • The game tends to describe Dire Beasts as larger, more powerful prehistoric versions of their smaller counterparts when possible. Dire apes, for instance, are Gigantopithecus, while dire bears are cave and short-faced bears, dire hyenas are Hyaenodon, dire boars are Daeodon, dire crocodiles are Sarcosuchus and so on^note This isn't always correct — Hyaenodon had no particular relationship with hyenas, as it wasn't a true carnivoran, while Daeodon and its relatives were most closely related to whales and hippos.
  • "Megafauna" serves as a catch-all term for large, prehistoric animals that are neither dinosaurs nor dire versions of something else, and include the giant turtle Archelon, the primitive whale Basilosaurus, axe beaks (flightless predator birds such as phorusracids and Diatryma), and a variety of large, prehistoric mammals — including mammoths. Giant prehistoric fish, such as Dunkleosteus, as well as trilobites and eurypterids/sea scorpions appear as well. Many of these creatures are found in the Realm of the Mammoth Lords, the Mwangi Expanse, and Deep Tolguth alongside dinosaurs, but they're more likely to be encountered elsewhere in the world.
• RuneQuest: In addition to fantasy creatures such as trolls, elves and spirits, Glorantha is home to a variety of prehistoric beasts. Most are what we would consider Cenozoic megafauna, such as terror birds and "shovel-tuskers" (primitive proboscideans like Platybelodon), but Mesozoic creatures such as tyrannosaurs are present as well.
• Warhammer:
  • The continent of Lustria is inhabited by dinosaurs and pterosaurs that are used as war mounts by the Lizardmen. The Cold Ones are one such species that happen to also be employed by the Dark Elves.
  • The far northern regions of the planet are home to woolly mammoths, some of which have been corrupted by Chaos and are trained for battle by the northern tribes.
  • Among the mountain beasts that are found in the Ogre Kingdoms, Sabretusks are based on sabre-tooth cats, only with their prominent canines extending from their lower jaws, while the Rhinoxen resemble woolly rhinos or Elasmotherium with extra horns. Cave bears are also mentioned to inhabit the mountains, and the area is generally meant to resemble a particularly barbaric and savage take on the ice age.
  • Man O War is a maritime spin-off that features megalodon as one of the many sea monsters lurking beneath the waves.

Toys

• The cancelled Powers Of Grayskull! prequel toyline to Masters of the Universe would have had He-Man going back in time to an ancient Eternia inhabited by dinosaurs with guns attached to them in a Sword and Sorcery setting with wizards and kings.

Video Games

• Age of Conan has mammoths and woolly rhinos along with civilized humans. It takes place in the Hyborian Age.
• Age of Empires II has a downplayed example in the form of dire wolves available in the scenario editor.
• The spinoff Age of Mythology foregoes the grounded historical setting of its parent franchise in favour of Time of Myths and has a few myth units inspired by prehistoric life:
  • The Greek hydra and scylla respectively resemble a sauropod and a plesiosaur but with the ability to grow extra heads with each kill.
  • The Egyptian leviathan resembles a Devonian placoderm like Dunkleosteus.
  • The Atlantean behemoth is given the scientific name Glyptodon coelodontu, referencing the true Glyptodon (which it superficially resembles) as well as the woolly rhino "Coelodonta". It also has a pair of mastodon-like tusks.
  • On the more mundane end of the spectrum there are aurochs in northern maps (which actually lived in Europe through the Ancient and Medieval period), and a domesticated muskox caravan unit for the Norse, despite muskoxen becoming extinct in Scandinavia around 9,000 years ago. A wild muskox unit was also planned at one point but was left unfinished, likely to be featured in tundra maps instead of the misplaced aurochs. Some fan mods take it up a notch and add mammoths edited from the game's elephants.
• Conan Exiles also has mammoths (more realistic-looking this time unlike the Mûmakil-like version in Age of Conan) in the north, in addition to sabertooths and dire wolves. The aggressive "jungle birds" are either oversized shoebills or terror birds.
• Chrono Trigger:
  • One area added to the DS version is a hidden village of pacifist Reptites, who not only survived Lavos' crash and the subsequent multi-million-year winter, they survived until at least the Middle Ages, the other time period you can find them in.
  • The prehistoric era is home to the Tyranno and Reptite Lairs, vast sprawling castles that wouldn't look out of place in the game's medieval period.
• Dinolords is a realtime strategy about defending a historic English village from invading Danes that use dinosaurs as mounts.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has sabre-toothed cats, cave bears, and mammoths, as well as humans/cat people/lizard people/elves with a culture/tech level equivalent to the late Roman Empire with clear influence from medieval history and Norse mythology.
• The Legend of Zelda has dabbled in this here and there. The fire-breathing Dodongos are sometimes referred to as dinosaurs, although later games have leaned more into the Fiery Salamander trope for them; similarly, the Helmasaur enemies and their boss variants tend to resemble squat, Protoceratops-like dinosaurs. There's also a stronger variant of the Lizalfos enemy called a Dinolfos in a few games. Finally, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has a species of woolly rhino (called Great-Horned Rhinoceros) living in the icy north.
• Paraworld has a trio of heroic scientists go on an expedition to another dimension where electricity is impossible to generate and humans similar to the Vikings, the Far East and Northern Africa co-exist with dinosaurs while using a mish-mash of steampunk, medieval and Clock Punk technology. And yeah these scientists later learn that those extinct dinosaurs on Earth are actually lost migrants from this other dimension, and not the other way around.
• Despite Sonic and the Secret Rings being mainly an "Arabian Nights" Days setting, Sonic visits a jungle inhabited by dinosaurs and pterosaurs.
• World of Warcraft is a Fantasy Kitchen Sink setting with many medieval and Tolkienesque elements. Many creatures resemble or are directly based on prehistoric animals: there are raptors, sabretooth cats, woolly rhinos, and mammoths; the kodo beast resembles a brontothere and the plainstrider look like a terror bird. Also, there is Un'Goro crater, a Lost World filled with pterosaurs, stegosaurs, and Devilsaurs (which are, essentially, Tyrannosaurus rex).

Webcomics

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: The raptor-riding banditos deliberately invoke this. They were paleontologists who discovered actual living Velociraptor, and after their leader's girlfriend dumped him for a man with incredible abs, they dressed up as banditos and took to riding the raptors, sustaining themselves by robbing people as they made their way to Cumberland to kill the ab man who stole Pedro's girlfriend, just because no one would believe that. Their youngest member Gordito, who becomes the titular doctor's sidekick, points out that it really isn't so strange in Cumberland, where the local doctor is a ninja, his receptionist is a gorilla, the supermarket is run by a HULK MASH!-Up that looks like a fantasy ogre and is the son of Dr. Birding, and the mayor is a time traveler whose Alternate Self is both the king of a dimension that runs on Rule of Cool and the local mafia boss.
• The Order of the Stick: The Empire of Blood makes extensive use of domesticated dinosaurs as mounts, beasts of burden, and war animals. Specifically, Allosaurus, Pteranodon and Brontosaurus^note  when Elan remarks that Brontosaurus is technically the body of one dinosaur with the head of another (whether in the real world this is the case or they were actually a separate genus is disputed), Tarquin says that hippogriffs are hardly less chimerical, but he still has several armed divisions mounted on them are all seen at various points.

Web Original

• The Yorkshire Mammoth, by Harry Turtledove, is an essay written in the style of a James Herriot story but set in a world where woolly mammoths survived to become farm animals in northern Great Britain. Several other glacial megafauna are mentioned to have survived until the Roman, Norman, or Elizabethan times.

Western Animation

• Conan the Adventurer: In one episode, Zula uses his taming ritual on a woolly mammoth herd. Interestingly they are not treated differently from other wild animals in the series (other than being called powerful) and averting Mammoths Mean Ice Age, they don't appear in a snowy environment.
• Phineas and Ferb: Parodied in "Excaliferb" when Phineas rides on the giant cursorial owl Ornimegalonyx and a Pteranodon is seen amongst the ten thousand monsters.
• Love, Death & Robots: Lampshaded in "Ice Age" when Gail points out how strange it is that they investigated a frozen mammoth from their freezer and discovered a tiny medieval city. However, this is soon explained as they witness society continue to advance incredibly quickly.
• Primal (2019): While the first season is a Hollywood Prehistory setting with some supernatural elements, the second season is this trope, with Fantasy Counterpart Cultures to Celts, Vikings, Egyptians, and Babylonians interacting with the Neanderthal protagonist, his Tyrannosaurus rex companion, and other prehistoric beasts.

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