Pre Historia - Television Tropes & Idioms

The hollywood version of the stone age, where cavemen and women and dinosaurs live side by side. Most of the time, the dinosaurs will live in volcanoes and/or breathe fire. Expect the landscape to be dotted with jungle and lava pits (or perhaps tar pits). You might also have a mix of different prehistoric creatures — like mastodons and triceratops living side by side. Music will usually involve lots of percussion, and, if you listen very carefully, the soft sobs of a palaeontologist.

Named after the cave area of Secret of Evermore.

Compare Lost World, One Million BC.

Examples

The Flintstones
The entire setting of many games:
- Star Fox Adventures
- Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja
- Bonk and its sequels
- Dino City
- Congo's Caper
- Worlds of Ultima: Savage Empire
Dinosaur Jungle in Sonic and the Secret Rings. The game is based on the Arabian Nights, which made a lot of people wonder why there were dinosaurs... it's actually a reference to the story of Sinbad, although very exaggerated.
Much of Dinosaur Land in Super Mario World. Cavepeople were added in the cartoon.
65,000,000 B.C. in Chrono Trigger, with the added touch of humanity fighting against reptilian humanoids called Reptites — essentially dinosaurs with human forms and intelligence. On the party's second visit, they witness Lavos crashing into the earth, causing the mass extinction of dinosaurs and Reptites alike.
Many, many Amiga games. The Chuck Rock series. The Prehistorik series. Bignose the Caveman. Ugh!. And the list goes on.
The Prehistoric Turtlesaurus level from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time.
The GURPS RPG supplement Lands Out Of Time introduces the "World of Banded Night" - which is this trope. It includes dinosaurs, cavemen, ape-men, even lizard-men and the ruins of an ultra-tech civilization.
The premise of the game EVO: The Search For Eden is to evolve your character from tiny fish to mighty land mammal. Needless to say, the whole game is set in a relatively scientifically accurate version of this (except for the aliens meddling with evolution and the dinosaurs living in secluded areas).
- You only become a mammal if you want to. You can also finish the game as a reptile or a bird.
Terrydactyland in Banjo-Tooie has three different tribes of cavemen and several kinds of dinosaurs.
Planet Sargasso in Ratchet And Clank Future: Tools of Destruction.
A few levels of Ecco the Dolphin were a cross of this and Under The Sea. The enemies included a prehistoric version of the common jellyfish enemy, dinicthys fish standing in for the sharks, giant seahorses, and inexplicably vicious trilobites. Seriously.
The Lost Underworld segment of Earthbound. The place (and the monsters in it) are so huge that your party is only a few pixels high by comparison.
Played absolutely straight in the "search for the Quantasaurus Rex" arc of Power Rangers: Time Force, where Wes and Eric see Triceratops, Stegosaurus and get chased by an irate Tyrannosaurus, before Wes finds fairly advanced wall-paintings of the aforementioned Quantasaurus Rex.
Tyrannia in the virtual pets game Neopets.
One of the video game levels in which the Scooby-Doo gang are trapped in the animated movie, "Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase". And it does have a T-rex and Woolly Mammoths co-existing.
- And the characters lampshade the hell out of it.
The first world of the first Lost Vikings game. Its only pretense at actually being a prehistoric world was its dinosaur and human enemies, however, as the stages featured the usual assortment of keys, bombs, and drawbridges found in the other levels.
The world of Jund in the Shards of Alara expansion for Magic The Gathering is pretty clearly based on this trope, though they get away with it by being pure fantasy. Actual dragons replace the dinosaurs, brutal reptilian humanoids lord it over tribes of primitive humans and goblins, and the land itself is scarred by volcanic rifts where it isn't covered in chokingly dense jungle or festering tar pits.
The fifth chapter of Super Paper Mario uses this setting, but with no dinosaurs to be found, just giant wooly mammoth...things.
Obligatory World of Warcraft example: While there are dinosaurs throughout Azeroth (raptors, kodos [cross between a rhino and a Stegosaurus], stegosaurs, and plesiosaurs, and the first two are even bred as mounts), it's the Un'Goro Crater where you can also find T. rex´es, Dimetrodons, and pterosaurs, which are nowhere else in the world. The Crater, with its dinosaur population, offbeat quests, and pop culture references, is popular for questing in the 40-50 range as well as the only place for Beast Master-specced Hunters to tame devilsaurs (the T. rex´es) as pets. As for humans, Un'Goro is actually the only zone in the game without a permanent settlement, just a small camp to the north composed of a modern, politically neutral, mishmash of races.
- The entire area is a Shout Out to Land Of The Lost, including the names of the characters and the camp itself ("Marshall's Refuge"), as well as pylons that one can use power crystals of various colors in.
Pogo's prehistoric chapter in Live A Live.
The Savage Land is a staple in every X-Men game, even when there's no reason for the villains to be there.
The "Uga Buga" chapter in Conkers Bad Fur Day has a T. rex marching down a walkway suspended over lava, eating cavemen as it goes. The game lampshades this trope by having Conker complain about how he can't even visit a "dinosaur-themed world" without being mugged by a bunch of cavemen.
"Cave Cat 3,000,000 BC" in Garfield Caught In The Act (arguably inspired by the book/TV special Garfield: His 9 Lives, one of which is a cave cat).
Billy Hatcher And The Giant Egg has Dino Mountain. With dinosaur skulls that vomit lava.