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Somewhere A Palaeontologist Is Crying
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alt title(s): Somewhere A Paleontologist Is Crying
Professor Waluigi speaks.
Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. I have drawn dinosaurs and hominids in the same cartoon.
There's nothing like them in the fossil record, I'm sure...Okay, so they predate the fossil record...(not buying it herself) That'd make them a couple of billion years old...and we've just never seen one till now. Right.
In real life, a wide variety of dinosaurs walked the Earth over a period of about 180 million years. Most of them evolved from other dinosaurs and, naturally, when a given dinosaur was walking around, its ancestors were most likely extinct. Also, just like modern animals, different dinosaurs lived in different areas and habitats.
However, most writers don't realise this. Since dinosaurs are inherently cool, any story featuring them will probably have a selection of the most popular dinosaurs, regardless of different habitats or the fact that some went extinct well before others evolved. Other prehistoric creatures tend to be identified as dinosaurs even if they aren't, such as pterosaurs, plesiosaurs and icthyosaurs (all reptiles but not dinosaurs), and Dimetrodon (more closely related to mammals than to dinosaurs).
If the Dinosaur extinction is ever even mentioned, expect it to be shown as an instantaneous cataclysm, despite the fact that their extinction would seem, by our standards, a drawn-out process. Even something as dramatic as a giant asteroid slamming into the Yucatan wouldn't kill off the dinosaurs instantly. Rather, it would start a chain reaction that would gradually kill them off over time. This could be due to confusion on the part of those who do research it — for example, some scientists have referred to the extinction of dinosaurs as geologically instantaneous... which means a couple of hundred thousand years— or a full twenty times longer than the entirety of recorded human history. Geologic time is significantly slower than most people can comfortably comprehend.
If the writer(s) really Did Not Do The Research, the dinosaurs may also interact with monkeys, dodos, or even humans, despite the millions of years separating them. Often, cavemen will be co-existing with dinosaurs, despite the widely accepted fact that dinosaurs and humans never lived together. Maybe we just need humans in fiction to identify with. (This could be kind of justified in the rare case that the story makes no reference to evolutionary theory at all: 7-day Creationists hold that the species really did coexist until the dinosaurs went extinct during/after Noah's Flood.)
Also note that all carnivorous dinosaurs, or even vaguely carnivorous dinosaurs will regard humans as food. Always, even if it's the first time the two species are meeting. Always, even if it's inconvenient to get to the humans as opposed to normal, more viable food sources. Always, even if the dinosaurs were more likely to eat (or exclusively ate) insects, eggs, or fish than land-animals. Occasionally even if the dinosaurs are vegetarians, but they may just be trying to kill the people on principle.
In the absolute worst case scenario, dinosaurs may even be shown to breathe fire.
Note that even well-researched depictions can fall victim to new discoveries; until very recently, no one had any idea that diplodocids had spines along their back, for instance, overturning more than a century of sauropod depictions. Similarly, only quite recently was it proven that dromaeosaurids (better known as "raptors", after the most famous member of the family) and other small dinosaurs were covered in feathers.
In any case, one may begin to suspect that, in fact, the only "research" some dinosaur fiction creators did was... watching other dinosaur movies.
Goes hand-in-hand with Stock Dinosaurs, where only the popular species of dinosaurs (or "dinosaurs") show up. One egregious version overlapping with Special Effect Failure is the Slurpasaur.
See also Everythings Better With Dinosaurs and the grandchild trope, Somewhere An Ornithologist Is Crying. A more ridiculous subtrope of Dan Browned.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- Lampshaded in Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi, when the characters land in "Scientifically Inaccurate Prehistoric Abenobashi".
- Yu-Gi-Oh has a "Dinosaur" type as one of its monster types: the type is mostly made up of the popular dinosaurs listed above, and unfortunately includes a mammoth. An undead mammoth. Fortunately, later, non-zombie Mammoth monsters (such as Big-Tusked Mammoth) are more correctly listed as Beast-Type. They also thankfully averted the "nekkid Raptor" trope with Black Veloci. A lot of the earlier dinos, though, were the classic "nekkid" version. (But see also Dinosaurs Are Dragons.)
- Though it should be noted, many of the monster types are poorly-defined, wide-ranging, and often ill-fitting, especially when you consider translation. For instance, Summoned Skull is a skeletal monster who you might assume would be the undead monster type, "Zombie", until you realize the card was named "Summoned Demon" in Japan. "Fairy" monsters (angels in Japan), while primarily angelic, also include a massive variety of supernatural spirits including fairies and more. "Fiend" monsters (demons in Japan), include many demons, but goblins and other fiendish abominations as well. The fine line between "Warrior" and "Beast-Warrior" also causes its share of problems. And when you consider that "Fish", "Aqua", and "Sea Serpent" are all mutually exclusive monster types, it's not hard to see where imperfect choices could arise, making this more "Somewhere the person who has to assign the monster types is crying."
- The manga of Gantz also averts this. Its raptors (actually aliens masquerading as raptor models in a museum) are notably covered in feathers (or maybe fur, but we'll be optimistic). On the other hand, the T. rex shoots fireballs.
- Genesis Climber Mospeada subverts this trope; Stick and Ray fall into an underground cavern, where they see a mishmash of various kinds of dinosaurs from different periods, including Dimetrodons, Apatosauri, and Tyrannosaurs. At first, Ray mentions that something "seems odd" about it, but he can't put his finger on it. Later, he realizes that the dinosaurs are a spattering of dinos from different periods, and the 'cavern' is actually a laboratory where the Inbit are trying to determine the form of life best suited to their "new" planet.
- Dragonball features characters who either have the ability to fly or have a flying device with them. Convenient enough, there are some pteranodons or other prehistoric fliers around. Is someone still unable to fly? No problem, just bring in the T rex. In the same time period as flying cars. To be fair, Dragonball has a whole lot of other weird stuff that the pterosaurs and such fit right in.
Comic Books
- Subversion: In Runaways, Gert has a pet genetically engineered Deinonychus named Old Lace. Everyone calls her a "Raptor" until Victor joins. She does look exactly like a Jurassic Park raptor (as in Velociraptor, for pedants), but if you've read Runaways, you know the MST 3 K Mantra fully applies. Interestingly, they're vague on whether she's a cloned dinosaur a la Jurassic Park or a creature made whole cloth out of Lego Genetics.
- Subverted in a Batman comic. During the Knight Fall storyline, Batman and Commissioner Gordon find a dead man inside the skeleton of a dinosaur. Gordon calls the dinosaur a "brontosaurus" before being corrected as "apatosaurus" by a curator, telling them the story of how the skull of one dinosaur matched the head of another and the other way around, giving its "two-head" clue about the culprit: Two-Face.
- Though the prehistoric beasts in this Batman comic
 seem to be robots of some sort, allowing for some errors, there is one completely unforgivable mistake... They misspell "dinosaur"!
- Cadillacs And Dinosaurs... look at the title. If you're expecting accuracy from a series involving dinosaurs coming back several hundred years in the future, why are you even bothering?
- According to one Chick Tract, the dinosaurs escaped the great flood by getting on the Ark with all the other animals. Unfortunately, the flood destroyed much of the plant life, and the reduced oxygen levels made them sluggish and slow. They were ultimately hunted into extinction by human hunters who considered "dragon meat" to be a delicacy. ...and Jack Chick wonders why
the scientific community humanity won't take him seriously?
- For that matter, Alley Oop. Just put it all down to Rule Of Cool / Rule Of Funny and enjoy the goofiness of it.
- A lesser-known Spider-Man villain is "Stegron The Dinosaur Man", a ripoff of more stalwart villain the Lizard. The rather-too-conveniently-named Dr. Vincent Stegron steals the lizard formula from Curt Connors and (somehow) infuses it with dinosaur DNA, transforming himself into a half-man, half-Stegosaurus creature...which also has a taste for human flesh and is often depicted with sharp, pointy teeth. Stegron's plots have included:
- Bringing Dinosaurs back to life from their skeletons in museums...despite the fact that Dinosaur skeletons in museums are A) Held together with wire and B) Fibreglass replicas of the few bones which actually exist, encased in rock;
- Although this is the case for many fossils on exhibit, particularly those that people can get their grubby little hands on, it is not always the case. Many museums pride themselves on having real fossil skeletons mounted and on display. Certain species - most notably, Triceratops and its cousins - are common enough that if a skeleton is shown, even in smaller museums, it's entirely possible that it's for real. Plus, considering that the paleo-related museum that's getting [Expy] -ized in any given Spider Man story is almost certainly the American Museum of Natural History, which has one of the largest fossil collections in the world, and has an extensive display of fossil pretty-much-whatever-you-want, almost none of which are replicas ... well, let's not slap ol' Stegron down on that front. It's the you-honestly-think-there's-biological-matter-left-in-there-after-ninety-million-years thing that we should be pointing and laughing at him about, Mary Schweitzer's results with a very small number of bones notwithstanding.
- Attempting to free the world for Dinosaurs by having hundreds of humans in New York conveniently start acting more animalistic and killing each other...using a magic piece of meteorite that he found in a jungle.
- 150,000 years ago, the title character of Rahan (a very well know caveman in France) encounter dinosaurs and sees them as survivors of a very distant past.
Film
- The original King Kong and its sequel Son Of Kong features many overly agressive prehistoric animals (Stegosaurus, Styracosaurus)—some mistakenly portrayed as carnivorous (Cave Bear, Apatosaurus), and one dramatically oversized pterodactyl to help ruin the image of its eponymous, misunderstood ape.
- Recent morphological and isotope evidence suggests that the Cave Bear Ursus spelaeus was an opportunistic omnivore, so Science Marches On?
- Peter Jackson's remake does the same, with the justification that they have been evolving the whole time and it's pure coincidence they look like popular depictions. They even came out with a tie-in book exploring the unique fauna of the island.
- The "Rite of Spring" sequence in Fantasia may be one of the Trope Makers here. It shows off a random cross-section of prehistoric life in the space of a few minutes.
- 25 years later, the Disney Imagineers created a Primeval World diorama for the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair, with many of the individual scenes apparently inspired by Fantasia. This diorama, which is currently installed at Disneyland in California, is a slight improvement on the film — the first scene shows dimetrodons in a Coal Age forest of giant horsetails (and giant dragonflies), and then moves to a Jurassic swamp with some generic sauropods, followed by scenes featuring Pteranodon, Triceratops, and Struthiomimus (all Cretaceous). So far, so good; the sauropods look ridiculous and should not be munching water weeds in a swamp, but that can be put down to a combination of 1960's paleontological ignorance and artistic license. But then the final scene depicts a Stegosaurus battling some large carnosaur beside a violent lava flow. If the carnosaur is supposed to be a T. rex, as the narrator usually states, why does it have three fingers per hand, and what the heck is the stego doing in the Cretaceous? You could ignore the narrator and assume that the setting has reverted back to the Jurassic for some reason, and the stego is fighting an Allosaurus... but that doesn't explain why stego has five tail spikes on its thagomizer. Sigh. (Also, lava is really more of a Cretaceous thing.)
- Extremely evident in Disney's Dinosaur, which had dinosaurs from the Jurassic and even the Triassic period interacting with Cretaceous-period dinosaurs. In an effort to show that the writers had done some research, they included a Carnotaurus as the main predator — too bad Carnotaurus lived in South America, while all the other dinosaurs were North American species, and furthermore were several times bigger than in reality. There was a Hand Wave when one character was astounded that the carnotaurs had come "this far North" (which doesn't work, since North and South America was separated by a sea at the time), and the Brachiosaur character was explicitly stated to be the only one of her species left. (But don't even get us started on those damned monkeys...)
- Damn prosimians, technically.
- When consulting paleontologists for the movie Ice Age, the writers were reluctant about putting dodos in. They were told "Whatever, just please, no dinosaurs". Though there was a dinosaur in the film, it was frozen in ice, presumably for millions of years. Let's just hope those same paleontologists haven't seen the teaser for part 3...
- So first, the mammals struggle with the onset of the Ice Age... then the same mammals struggle through the end of the Ice Age... Then the dinosaurs show up??
- Subverted with the Godzilla films in that, Toho doesn't even try to even pretend to be remotely accurate in any way whatsoever.
- Every 1950's monster film with a prehistoric monster.
- Somewhere a paleoanthropologist and an archaeologist are crying: in The X-Files movie, we see a Neanderthal in North Texas 60,000 years ago. Not only were there no Neanderthals in the Western Hemisphere ever, there were no hominins of any kind in the Western Hemisphere 60,000 years ago. Unless they were all abducted by aliens.
Literature
- Eric Garcia's Anonymous Rex series of novels is just odd but a few things stand out. The trilogy's premise is that talking animals walk among us disguised as humans, and that most of these are the few species of dinosaurs who survived the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. They exist in the present day in exactly the forms they had on the other side of the K-T Boundary (though implicitly smaller or larger as the case may be). His protagonist is a Velociraptor — a Jurassic Park-style nekkid velociraptor with external ears — private eye. The other main characters tend to be obvious dinosaurs like tyrannosaurs and hadrosaurs. Garcia's only research (and he openly admits this) is to have read and watched Jurassic Park a lot, but there's so much Rule Of Funny going on ("Manimal: the Musical!") that the lack of research actually serves to make the series funnier. (And did we mention the — ahem — Interspecies Romances?)
- The movie adaptation is... less so. While in the books the dinosaurs' disguises are explicitly stated to be really good rubber suits, the movie clearly thought that idea sucked. So the dinosaurs, who did use rubber suits in the past, now use hyper futuristic hologram generators instead — probably because they dig out the old suits to use as a diversion and they're nowhere near as good as they could have been.
- The Animorphs book In The Time of Dinosaurs tried pretty hard to avoid this, with the only real anachronism given a Hand Wave (Tobias: "Who are you gonna believe, some scientist with a bunch of bones, or someone who was actually there?!") in the epilogue. Then again, it starts out with a nuclear explosion causing Time Travel and also had crab-aliens and ant-aliens in a minor war over the Earth at the same time, so...
- The Jurassic Park novel actually doesn't commit this crime TOO much, as it tries to generally depict accepted theories on dinosaur behavior — there's a very good reason why Michael Crichton was a respected science fiction author — and explains everything in a way that actually makes a lot of sense logically. The mix-and-match assembly of species from different periods is attributed to the fact that the geneticists who MADE the dinosaurs just didn't care, and John Hammond, the guy in charge, was just relying on the Rule Of Cool. The whole "can't see you if you don't move" is actually attributed to ALL the dinos, not just the T. Rex, as they had to fill in genetic gaps with the DNA of similar modern day reptiles and amphibians, many of which actually DO have motion-based vision. The Velociraptors, though, are a lot closer in dimension, even in the books, to really large Deinonychuses.
- Commits the crime when the dinosaurs are in any way interested in the humans. The idea of a tyrannosaurus chasing a human for food is like you chasing a roach for the same reason. AKA stupid.
- Actually it's closer to you chasing a mouse (experts think they topped out at 6.8 tonnes, so you can use a simple factor of 100 to drop it to 68 kg, and then to 680 grammes), but it comes to the same thing in the end I suppose.
- Mentioned in Stephen Jay Gould's Dinosaur In A Haystack:
Gould: Why did you put a Cretaceous dinosaur on the cover of Jurassic Park? Crichton: Oh my god, I never thought of that. We were just playing around with different cover designs and this was the one that looked best.
- Steven Baxter's book Evolution. While most of the time he gets the science right, and the speculative leaps he takes are somewhat within the bounds of plausibility, a few examples must be mentioned. First of all, in the story about the sapient Ornitholestes, he mentions that the only evidence humans had of these species is the disappearance of sauropods in the Late Jurassic, since the sapient species bones and technology are too fragile to preserve. Problem is, sauropods didn't go extinct in the Late Jurassic, not even in the Northern Hemisphere. There were as many sauropods infesting North America in the Early Cretaceous as there were in the Late Jurassic, including Paluxysaurus, Sauroposeidon, and Sonorasaurus.
- The story about primates coming to North America has some anachronistic and Misplaced Wildlife in it too. Not only does it have indricotherid rhinos (native only to Asia), camels (who were only found in North America at this time), and such, it has gastornid birds inhabiting Oligocene-Miocene Africa...yes, even after these animals were supposed to have died out in the middle Eocene.
- In addition, the story involving Purgatorius has some flaws too. While Baxter does get it right by cloaking his troodonts in feathers, he leaves them off his dromaeosaurs. To add insult to injury, he makes the raptors cold-blooded, despite the fact that raptors are the very dinosaurs which ignited the cold blood, warm blood debate. In fact, even paleontologists who doubt endothermy in ornithischians and sauropods don't deny that raptors were most likely endothermic. And then there are the Giganotosauruses and Suchomimus in North America. Not only are these animals in the wrong place (Giganotosaurus was from South America, Suchomimus from Africa), but they are from the wrong time, both speces were Early Cretaceous.
- Both used and lovingly averted in James Gurney's Dinotopia. Okay, yes, basically every prehistoric creature from Opabinia to woolly mammoths is coexisting in a continent the size of Australia, and the reason for this is Hand Waveed, roughly anything that walks on land is smart enough to have a language and participate in a totally peaceful utopia alongside humans, large not-quite-lingual pterosaurs can take off and fly while carrying humans, and small ceratopsians can speak any language. But Gurney is also up-to-date on the world of paleontology, and although his raptors were naked in early books, he painted them with feathers in later ones. And everything has the right physiology. Dinotopia is a children's story with enourmous detail in the dinosaurs.
- While they aren't about dinosaurs, Steve Alten'sMeg novels will make paleontology enthusiasts cringe. The opening scene of the first book has a T. rex chasing some hadrosaurs into the water, where it is eaten by a Megalodon explicitly stated to be twice its size. *sigh* Carcharodon megalodon was not twice the length of a T. rex; Megalodon did not live during the Cretaceous (the giant shark appeared 47 million years after the dinosaurs died out) and it would not have been the top oceanic predator if it had lived in the Cretaceous (the big Mosasaurs would have been serious competition).
- Sure, Alten just had ol' Rex take a swim and get chomped on for The Worf Effect (that and He Just Didn't Care), but even so, it's one of the poorest examples of that trope EVER. What would happen if (in Alten's twisted prehistory) a 'Meg' accidentally washed up on shore while a Tyrannosaurus was passing by? Rex is gonna have itself a nice seaside meal, that's what.
- As for the comment relating to the Mosasaurs, Alten does have other giant carnivourous marine reptiles show in his series; Kronosaurus (Pliosaurs, aka; short-necked Plesiosaurs). Only when they show up; they are not only PREY to the Megalodon (Pliosaurs were known to have eaten sharks quite often, judging by their remains and quite a few were larger than 'Meg') but they have somehow evolved gills. Thats TWO innacurracies of nature in one!
- Alten wouldn't be the only one to greatly exaggerate Megalodon's size (the most realistic estimates place it at 50-60 feet long at maximum, Alten goes above and beyond 80-90 feet) and place it in the Dinosaurs era. It seems these two traits go hand in hand when attempting to write fiction for these things (yeah, because a Shark as large as certain Whales isn't interesting enough, they need to insert Dinosaurs).
- Mentioned in the sci-fi novel In the Courts of the Crimson Kings by S.M. Stirling, due to Ancient Astronauts terraforming and seeding Venus with Earth lifeforms. There are also beautiful cave princesses in fur bikinis, much to everyone's delight.
- Kronos. It rapidly becomes apparent that the author did not do any research whatsoever on plesiosaur biology. Among the worst is the eponymous Kronosaurus swimming in an up-and-down body motion like a whale, complete with flukes. The problem? Plesiosaurs had a stiff spine and were virtually forced to swim sealion or penguin style. Of course, seeing as the author has a severe creationist lean, this F in biology could be due to not doing any research at all and trying to Dan Brown it. The author has several other books involving prehistoric life, which likely contain other WallBangers
- The titular creature was pretty much stated outright to be specifically engineered by God to allow humans to survive in its stomach and that is the part that bothered you?
- Yes. Well, both did, but the latter sounds like its drifting into the Natter region. Its not its stomach, its some kind of throat pouch. And genetic engineering isn't all that fantastic. Probably violates Lego Genetics (and don't even get me started on how Kronos is apparently five million years old), but an animal genetically engineered to serve a certain purpose isn't exactly a new concept in...
speculative fiction. Although it would probably sound a lot better if the author wasn't so Anvilicious in his message. And tries to justify the existence of God with particle physics Techno Babble.
- Partially justified in the Conan story Red Nails. Conan encounters a "dragon" (which is obviously a dinosaur) - but despite the fact that the story is set "only" ten or twenty thousand years ago, the dinosaur is not a natural survival, but an extinct creature reanimated from fossils by powerful wizards. (This still doesn't explain why what is clearly a Stegosaurus is an aggressive carnivore, though!)
- Anything re-animated in the Conan stories is an aggressive carnivore.
- The back cover of the novelization of Doctor Who and the Silurians boasts that the story contains "a 40 ft. high Tyrannosaurus rex, the biggest, most savage mammal which ever trod the earth!" No T. rex fossil ever found has been that big; the largest one is 40 feet long from nose to tail. I shouldn't have to explain what the other error is.
Live Action TV
- Super Sentai and Power Rangers mostly avoid this, as they don't even bother with any kind of dinosaur facts (and therefore can't screw them up). Their main failure is merely falling into the Stock Dinosaurs trap; in Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger/Mighty Morphin Power Rangers season 1, only two of the Five Man Band had their powers from actual dinosaurs. Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger/Power Rangers Dino Thunder also failed to correctly identify the Sixth Ranger's mecha - a Tupuxuara pterosaur, but called "Top Galer" in Abaranger and "Drago zord" in Dino Thunder. The latter also referred to a Styracosaurus zord as the "Mezodon".
- The biggest goof actually occurs in the time-travel themed series, Power Rangers Time Force, rather than either of the dinosaur-themed ones. In a trip to prehistoric times, the Rangers both get chased by a Tyrannosaurus and find a caveman painting of a time-tossed zord.
- Zordon might argue that he called them "Dino-zords" because it sounded better than "prestori-zords".
- It should also be noted that the rangers in Zyuranger supposedly come from 170 million years ago, during the Jurassic period- a time at which none of the animals they represent lived. (Neither did humans, of course, which means it's probably meant to be some sort of Alternate History in which they all did live at the same time.)
- The Dragonzord/Dragon Caesar isn't even a prehistoric animal. It's more of... er... Godzilla?
- The Dinosaurs sitcom had an... unusual take on this concept. The writers consciously Did Not Do The Research in order to get in more jokes. As such, we have things like Allosaurs and Tyrannosaurs living together, carnivorous Triceratops, and cavemen. (There were no mammoths, though.) They also live in 60,000,000 B.C., 5 million years after the dinosaurs should have become extinct. (Oddly enough, the last episode of the series features them going extinct.) Of course, they are living in houses complete with refrigerators and eight-track tape players, so we really can't fault them.
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. That is all.
- Jurassic Fight Club, the Poor Man's Walking With Dinosaurs on The History Channel. Sadly, this does not involve lines like "you are not your hairlike primitive feathers" or a tyrannosaur trying to punch itself in the face with those scrawny little arms. It's pretty much just a bit of paleontological pretext and then some Cretaceous predators having dust-ups. Let's take a look at the errors:
- They have the same naked generic "raptor" dromaeosaurs and improbably fierce dinosaurs that have been hanging around since Jurassic Park, plus the weird, unfounded suppositions about how dinosaurs behaved ("raptors" coordinated their hunts by using hand signals? Okay, then...) from Walking With Dinosaurs without quite the special effects quality of either.
- Juvenile T rexes did NOT look like exact miniature copies of the adults and, in fact, looked more like Nanotyrannus. Oh, and also, there is a debate among paleontologists as to whether or not Nanotyrannus was even a separate genus of dinosaur at all or if the specimens found were really that of juvenile T rex skeletons. However, for all its other flaws, the series does dedicate a portion of that episode to the controversy over whether or not Nanotyrannus was its own genus.
- There is some anachronism in the series as well. Episode 8, "Raptor's Last Stand", has a flock of pterosaurs standing on the back of a Gastonia. Only problem, they were miniature azdarchid pterosaurs, pterosaurs who in some cases were the size of a giraffe, and were at least condor sized. And of course there is the little fact that azdarchid pterosaurs didn't appear until the Late Cretaceous, which began at the earliest 90 MYA, while Gastonia and Utahraptor lived a full thirty-five million years earlier. To clarify, that is the equivalent of a Uintathere being labelled a contemporary of man.
- Majungasaurus, just Majungasaurus. Not only did the show not get the memo that the dinosaur had gotten a name change from Majungatholus to Majungasaurus, but the host goes on to state that Majungasaurus' ugly appearance was caused by inbreeding, leading to horrible mutations. Apparently "Dinosaur George" doesn't know that Majungasaurus was the pretty member of the abelisaur family, and in fact other species like Carnotaurus were a lot more ugly looking.
- They fail animal behavior pretty hard, too. The Nannotyrannus episode, for example—large predators kill competing species and their young all the time. Just look at the interactions between lions, leopards, spotted hyenas, and cheetahs on the African savannah. It isn't even unheard of for a predator to continue to maul the carcass of a threat or rival long after such attacks are necessary. But the mother tyrannosaur tearing up the remains of the Nannotyrannus and scattering them around as a warning to other predators? That's probably giving them credit for a little too sophisticated of thinking.
- This comes up in the episode where the "raptor" pack takes on an Edmontosaurus. The narrator repeatedly says that normally wouldn't take on such large prey, but they're driven to protect their territory. That's not quite how territoriality works. Have you ever heard of a family of foxes attacking a moose to drive it out of their territory? Carnivores defend their territories from other members of the same species. They don't care about keeping every living thing out of their space. After all, what would they eat if they did that? If it was near a den/young or if they were desperately hungry that would be one thing, but it makes no sense for them to keep attacking such a formidable animal because it's in their territory.
- Lost Tapes has several of its monsters portrayed as Prehistoric Animals. None of them make sense. Goofs includes a surviving Azhdarchid Pterrosaur behaving as a modern (albeit giant) Shrike; a people-eating Elasmosaur and a Megalania living in rainforest.
Newspaper Comics
- An early series of Fox Trot comic strips had Jason filming a dinosaur movie, with his pet iguana Quincy as the dinosaur. He called the film "Iguanadon Terror", even though Quincy looked nothing like an actual iguanodon (Jason was aiming for something like a Dimetrodon, though when asking if Quincy could pass for a dinosaur he was told that Quincy only looked like an iguana with a fan taped to its back).
- A later strip had Jason doing a claymation movie called "Mesozoic Park"; he pointed out that Jurassic Park was mostly about dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period.
- In another strip, he was seen writing a letter explaining the brontosaur/apatosaur controversy to a cookie manufacturer that used the former term in the "Fun Facts" of their dinosaur cookie boxes. He then immediately tries to blackmail them into sending him free cookies.
- Bill Watterson, the author of Calvin And Hobbes, admits that his earliest strips involving dinosaurs were pretty embarrassing. After doing some research, and getting as excited about dinosaurs as Calvin, his drawings of dinosaurs became more and more accurate and realistic (as an aside, tellingly, most fantasy sequences in Calvin And Hobbes are drawn in a more realistic way than Calvin's day-to-day life). If you have a collection of Calvin and Hobbes anthologies, note that by around 1994, it's obvious that Watterson invested in a Gregory S. Paul book for anatomy and in a set of "Jurassic Park" action figures for posing and staging.
- Let's not forget about BC, perhaps one of the most egregious examples of a newspaper comic that has both dinosaurs and humans.
- Alley Oop, starting in 1932, with his pet, Dino. Before Television!
Tabletop Games
- Prior editions of Dungeons And Dragons handle the various species of dinosaur better than it does mythology, even pointing out the differences between the velociraptor and the deinonychus. They still list pteranodons and elasmosaurus under the same catchall of "dinosaurs", though; in the Fourth Edition, however, they are renamed Behemoths.
Toys
- The DinoRiders franchise had dinosaurs from virtually everywhere, plus the obligatory pterosaurs and Dimetrodon. A spinoff line of prehistoric mammals provided another example of this trope, with an entelodont (giant pig-thing) alongside a giant ground sloth, saber-toothed cat, and wooly mammoth. Then again, this is a series that concerns the exploits of aliens waging war on prehistoric Earth with the help — voluntary in the case of the good guys, not so much in the case of the bad guys — of the animals. Rule Of Cool heals many a wound.
- Playschool had a toy line called Definitely Dinosaurs. It featured fully articulated prehistoric creatures, and was meant to be educational... so what are the cavepeople doing there?
- Tyco's ImagiNext line does the same thing, though it has no pretensions of being educational. Bonus no-prize for the Carnivores Are Mean storyline.
- Fisher-Price has a line called Imaginext Dinosaurs which is basically various dinosaur toys (IE: Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, Brontosaurus (sic) along with some commonly-used non-dinosaurs (IE: Sabre-Toothed Tigers, Woolly Mammoths, Dimetrodons, Pteranodons, etc.)...Oh, and cavemen. Considering it's meant to be a science fiction-fantasy-action line of toys for kids, it's somewhat forgiveable. However, the real Wall Banger is that one of the toys (which is supposed to be a Dilophosaurus, including the cliched Jurassic Park-inspired frill...which it NEVER had) is called a "Frilled Raptor". Can you hear your inner paleontologist sobbing now?
- And then, there's Topps' insane Dinosaurs Attack! trading card series. It's probably a lot easier just to say this: any question as to whether or not they were pointedly invoking the Dinosaurs Are Dragons trope were gone the minute it turned out that the (all carnivorous and homicidal regardless of species) dinosaurs were sent by Dinosaur Satan. 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 writ large.
- Aiming for? They overshot that so hard they looped back around and hit it again!
Video Games
- In Dungeon Siege II, there is a type of enemy called the Terrak, which (except for the small tail) looks very much like Pteranodon. What makes the paleontologists and dinosaur enthusiasts cry is the violation of the Rule Of Cool that comes with these animals, which can be summed up in this question: "If they have wings, why are they always walking?"
- Averted in Jetpack Brontosaurus. As the game acknowledges, the title character is an Apatosaurus. Brontosaurus is just his name. It also takes pains to use the Order name Pterosaurs in the introduction, some of which were contemporary with the Apatosaurus, rather than a specific genus that might not have been. All other weirdness can be written off to it taking place in a surreal dream world. Then again, it's made by the same people as Raptor Safari, below, which similarly delights in being much, much more scientifically accurate than such a blatantly ridiculous game needs to be.
- The "naked Velociraptors" subtrope is happily averted in FlashBang's Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, of all places. Bonus points for the Perpetual Molt effects.
- Yoshi, anyone? Super Mario World featured Dinosaur Land, which was inhabited by Yoshis (who are variously referred to as dinosaurs and dragons, depending who you talk to). So within the whole Mario canon, we have dinosaurs who live among humans, fly or spit fire, swallow other creatures amphibian-style and turn them into eggs, which they then use as missile weapons! And later on they had a limited form of speech.
- How about World Of Warcraft? In the Barrens and Durotar, there are the most stereotypical predatory dinosaurs in the world. Raptors (the dinos, not the birds) are even the racial mount of trolls. To be fair, if there are dragons, yetis, green-skinned shamanistic weird people, and giant blue satyrs with tentacles growing out of their faces, there may as well be dinosaurs.
- Un'Goro Crater is an entire zone devoted to a mashing-together of various popular "dinosaurs" with no regard for geological timelines. Pterosaurs, raptors, stegosaurs, dimetrodons, and renamed T. Rexish critters all hang out within a few city blocks of each other. Along with gorillas.
- Oh come on, now, people, let's be fair here. It's not even earth, for crying out loud! It's Azeroth, a fantasy world with a totally different geological timeline. For all we know they could be primitive forms of dragons. After all, Azerothian raptors have horns, the stegosaurs are basically thunderlizards, the rexes have spines on their backs, and the dimetrodons have four fins. And the plesiosaurs (threshadons) have crests. They even give their dinos different names. I don't know about you, but I've never heard of a "Ravasaurus" outside of World Of Warcraft. Besides, I'm fairly sure the developers weren't trying to be realistic, nor were they expecting us to expect them to be realistic. They were fully aware they were delving deep into fantasy.
- Guild Wars has dinosaurs on the Tarnished Coast in Eye of the North. The Tyrannus and Raptors are relatively accurate, the Ceratodon somewhat less so (it's an armored ceratopsian with one horn on its forehead and two more on its shoulders). I don't even know what the hell the Ferothrax and Angorodon are supposed to be, though...
- One of the recurring enemies in Final Fantasy VIII is a red T-Rexaur(Tyrannosaurus Rex). Odds are that many first-time players got offed by one during their first hour of playing by accidentally wandering into the forest area right by Balamb Garden.
Webcomics
- There's another "Raptor" who looks like he's just walked off the set of Jurassic Park in the Webcomic The Adventures Of Doctor Mc Ninja. However, given that the story that introduces Yoshi also includes Raptor-riding banditos, a conspiracy involving Ronald McDonald and MySpace, and a man whose incredible abdominal muscles have somehow transformed into a built-in jetpack (not to mention the eponymous character, the only physician in a long line of legendary Irish Ninjas whose office is in the middle of a haunted forest and whose secretary is a gorilla), once again, the MST 3 K Mantra is in full effect.
- Dinosaur Comics has a T-Rex, a Dromiceiomimus, and a Utahraptor, grossly out of scale. The fact that they're talking is a good sign that it's not supposed to be exactly realistic. There's also the house, car, and woman getting stepped on to indicate something's not right with the timing. It often lampshades the concept, as well:
T-Rex: Guess what I got last night? A dog! Did you know that dogs and dinosaurs co-existed?
Dromiceiomimus: Yes, I accepted it without questioning!
- XKCD has Jurassic Park-style Velociraptors, which the author found traumatizing upon seeing said film.
- Eight Bit Theatre does a brilliant LampshadeHanging in this strip. Also counts as a Crowning Momentof Awesome.
Western Animation
- Dinosaucers used Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus confusion as a Running Gag. When told that "Brontosaurus" was an incorrect designation and that Apatosaurus was the correct one, Bronto Thunder would immediately reply "That's a girl's name!"
- But in the darkest depths lurks Dino-Squad. It's the tale of a pair of (nekkid) Velociraptors who hide from the (instantaneous Kill Em All style) extinction in a cave. And they live in that cave for well over sixty million years. (Yeah...) Finally, they emerge into the modern world with psychic powers, including the convenient ability to pass as humans. The bad 'raptor becomes a Corrupt Corporate Executive who wishes to use some kind of chemical to "return the animals of the world to the creatures they once were: DINOSAURS!" (We already have one hell of a Wall Banger on our hands.) The good 'raptor poses as a teacher, and in this position, she is able to mentor the ragtag bunch of teenagers who are affected by the bad 'raptor's chemicals, allowing them to transform into the usual dinosaur suspects. For his first experiment, the bad 'raptor uses the stuff to "revert" a shark into what everyone on the show insists on calling a "Mutated Megalodon◊" — except that it's a Tylosaur◊, an ocean-going lizard. If you know that neither of these animals are dinosaurs, that neither lizards nor sharks have anything to do with the dinosaur family tree at all and are both far, far older families of animals, and that — you know — sharks aren't frikkin' lizards, give yourself a round of applause. You're smarter than the people paid to write this.
- Transformers: Beast Wars is okay in terms of accuracy. Megatron, Terrorsaur, and Dinobot turn into a Tyrannosaurus, a Pteranodon and some kind of Velociraptor or Utahraptor respectively, but they get their alt modes by scanning fossils rather than living creatures. Then again, all three were found around an area filled with lava and volcanic rock, which would normally destroy fossils. They're also very odd colours for dinosaurs, but this can be hand waved by personal preference.
- You have a point on Megatron and Dinobot, but Terrorsaur is an awful pteranodon by virtue of being hairless and having a beak full of teeth.
- Magmatron from the Japanese Beast Wars series is a multi-component transformer who consists of a Giganotosaurus, a Quetzalcoatlus, and an Elasmosaurus. The Beast Wars Sourcebook, which adapts the characters for American continuity, apparently didn't get the memo, as they say the three have "only loose connections to actual reptilian lifeforms."
- Speaking of Magmatron, the series contains an entire assortment of dinosaurs as alternate modes for the various villain characters. Most of them were excellent in terms of accuracy... save for Hardhead◊, who was a remold of Beast Wars Dinobot and was a Pachycephalosaurus with a jaw full of razor sharp teeth and the toe talons of a velociraptor. Keep in mind that pachys were herbivores.
- The Jimmy Neutron series was guilty of this in several episodes. One, in particular, had Cindy giving a presentation on a raptor-like dinosaur, using a model skeleton as a visual aide... and she refers to it as a plesiosaurus, which, to make matters worse, wasn't even a dinosaur. Somewhat subverted when Jimmy calls her out on it, but he manages to uphold the trope by claiming that the dinosaur was in fact a megalasaurus, which it looked absolutely nothing like. Then of course there's "200 million years ago" = "the late Cretaceous era" ... and all of the issues THAT brings up. *twitch*
- Flintstones, people... Flintstones?!
- We're Back: A Dinosaur's Story, refers to a duckbill dinosaur as an Apatosaurus, and features a Triceratops that enjoys hot dogs. (Tricertops was a herbivore)
- Extreme Dinosaurs, in which a handful of dinosaurs (one group of heros and one group of bad guys) are evolved into humanoid intelligent versions of themselves thanks to an outlaw blue elf alien from another dimension. Did you know that the dinosaurs were killed off because a blue outlaw alien accidentally triggered a huge earthquake? Or that the evolved dinos survived to modern times via a conveniently located hibernation chamber to protect them?
Miscellaneous
- There is a Soviet cartoon called Mother for a Little Mammoth. It is about the eponymous mammoth who thawed out in our age searching for his mom. He finds one, an elephant in Africa. A truly happy ending, except one of the traits by which she accepts him is the fact that, like her, he has big ears - and the mammoth is pictured with such. Now, an elephant's big ears are heat sinks - mammoths didn't need nor have them.
Real Life
- Several "Creation Museums" exist throughout the United States, purporting to contain exhibits of the Biblical accounts of the origins of the world. The "Dinosaur Adventure Land" in South Carolina had several exhibits showing that, since the Earth was only 6000 years old according to the Bible, not only did humans and dinosaurs coexist but humans(set up by God as having dominion over other animals) must have domesticated them. And rode them like horses! The US government seized control of the museum and closed it permanently when its managers were convicted of not paying half a million in back taxes. And There Was Much Rejoicing!
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