Somewhere A Palaeontologist Is Crying - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Somewhere A Paleontologist Is Crying

Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. I have drawn dinosaurs and hominids in the same cartoon.

—Gary Larson

It's not in the fossil record. It must predate the fossil record!

"Now, hold on," you keep saying. "Aren't bows and arrows primitive and harmless?" Why don't you ask the dinosaurs? Except you can't, because the cavemen bow and arrowed them to death.

—Team Fortress 2

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, icthyosaurs, and Dimetrodon. (To be fair, biologists themselves have gone back and forth on whether dinosaurs are just another group of reptiles or something else entirely, but the flyers and swimmers previously mentioned weren't dinosaurs and you and I are closer to Dimetrodon by virtue of it being an early mammal-like reptile.)

If the Dinosaur extinction is ever even mentioned, expect it to be shown as an instantaneous cataclysm, despite evidence that it was probably more gradual and perhaps excruciatingly so. 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.

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. Of course, there is no mention of dinosaurs in the Bible, either (unless one interprets the various monsters that way, like this creationist website does

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 theropods 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.)
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).
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 flying Dinosaurs around. Is someone still unable to fly? No problem, just bring in the T-rex. In the same time period as flying cars.

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, 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.
- Actually is an wrong subversion, since Deinonychus is part of a group called Maniraptora, thus calling it a raptor is acceptable.
  - The lack of feathers, however, is completely unacceptable
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?
- Well, the dinosaurs were apparently created by human genetic engineers before the cataclysm, so paleontologists might not cry so badly over it. Population biologists, no doubt, are better off avoiding it.
- Wait, wait... Several HUNDRED?! FROM THE DINOSAURS?! 65,000,000 YEARS IS SEVERAL HUNDRED?!
  - Several hundred years from now, right? Calm down, dry those palaeontologist-tears-of-rage!
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 won't take him seriously?
- Along similar lines, Kent Hovind has made a career out of "evidence" that dinosaurs existed alongside humans before the Great Flood. Or, at least, he did until he was sent to jail for tax evasion, the obnoxious greedy slimeball.
- Among the incidents that derailed Stockwell Day's career as leader of Canada's Canadian Alliance Party was his claim that Adam and Eve were historical persons and coexisted with dinosaurs.
- Carl Baugh, another creationist, used to have a traveling road show where he carted around a selection of lizards. Lizards, according to Baugh, are dinosaurs, just small ones. Because everyone knows that if you let an iguana grow big, it will look like a T-Rex.
- The believe can work in common sense, so long as Jack Chick doesn't talk. Ever! Reasonable considering that adult dinosaurs wouldn't be able to fit in Noah's Ark (thus young versions...well, you can figure it out) and that we are well aware of what plant-life grows in the area of Mt. Ararat. The young herbivores would have difficulty adapting, and likely go extinct. The carnivores would adapt by eating livestock. And, take a guess how humans would take that?
  - That assumes that A: A Great Flood capable of covering all but 1% of the world's land area, let alone there be a wooden ark capable of surviving such a flood, B: Said Ark landed on Mount Ararat.
  - The Ark did not land on modern day Mt. Ararat, a dormant volcano, but "the mountains of Ararat", a mountain range.
  - Goddidit
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;
- 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.

Film

The original King Kong features a laughable cast of carnivorous stegasaurs and and sauropods (both were herbivores), and one dramatically oversized pterydactyl to help ruin the image of its titular, misunderstood ape.
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.)
  - It's also a very hot thing.
  - Walt thought that three finger looked cooler than two fingers despite knowing full well that they only had two fingers, and, well... the company has his name on it.
  - Also, Dimetrodon didn't live in the "Coal Age", or Carboniferous, it lived in the Permian, which was characterizd by, amongst other things, deserts, not swamps. Oops.
  - Later pushed to surrealism and Affectionate Parody in AllegroNonTroppo.
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. 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...)
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...
- Slightly justified by the fact that the dinosaurs in the third movie apparently live in a Journey To The Center Of The Earth-esque world.
  - Another point is much more unjustified. The baby tyrannosaurs that follow Sid around in the previews hatch in eggs that are exponentially bigger than the biggest dinosaur egg ever known (that of the elephant bird, the largest non-avian dinosaur egg was the size of a basketball), they have squat, short faces like adult T-rexes, as opposed to the leaner bodies scientists now know juvenile tyrannosaurs had, and they have no feathers. In fact, none of the dinosaurs have feathers (as far as one can tell from the previews) in the movie. In fact the producers specifically went out of their way to cut feathered dinosaurs from the move because they were "too weird".
Among the many other things in the movie already making history teachers cry at night, 10,000 B.C. has a herd of Woolly Mammoths roped into building the pyramids in ancient Egypt. Probably the most epic (and awesome) case of Misplaced Wildlife so far this year. Granted, this is probably one of those "they know it doesn't make sense, it's not suppose to" case.
- The last Mammoth was thought to have died out around 4,000 BCE, it's the Egypt that's misplaced, not the mammoths.
  - Egypt did have mammoths in the Ice Age. They called them elephants.
The trailer for the 1992 film Adventures In Dinosaur City boasts that the film's main characters lived millions of years before turtles (A Take That directed at the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles popular at the time) even though turtles actually did live during the time of the dinosaurs. This is a film about talking, upright-walking dinosaurs (in a style similar to the Jim Henson Dinosaurs series) who live alongside cavemen, so this is mostly likely another case of They Just Didnt Care.
- As much as it galls me to admit I've actually seen this movie, the plot actually has the protagonists warped into their favorite cartoon show, Dinosaurs. So it's really the Show Within A Show that this trope applies to, as the plot is never portrayed as anything but fiction, even within the film itself.
In the new 2009 Star Trek film, a dinosaur-like creature drops its meal and chases Kirk, even though it already had a MUCH bigger meal already in its jaws.
- Judging by the way it stopped to roar at him several times, it's much more likely the creature was simply territorial and saw Kirk (and the other creature) as an intruder on its turf. That would also explain why Spock Prime was able to drive it off when it entered his territory.
  - It also ate said previous creature and swallowed it whole. However I think this would be better under Super Persistant Predator than this trope.

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 In The Time of Dinosaurs book tried pretty hard to avoid this, with the only real anachronism given a Hand Wave 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.
- When Jurassic Park was first published Gregory Paul interpreted Deinonychus as a species of Velociraptor (Velociraptor antirrhops). Crichton did a lot of his theropod dinosaur research off of Paul's book "Predatory Dinosaurs of the World" hence the classification in the book. The idea of the Tyrannosaurus speeds also came from this book, though whether or not T-rex could run at these speeds was not even investigated until after the movie was filmed (and mostly because the movie was filmed), although the matter as to whether it was more of a scavenger is still heavily debated ... by the sort of paleontologist who might also insist that the Enterprise would easily beat a Star Destroyer, or vice versa. Everybody else in the field knows that there's very very few predators who only eat fresh kills, and the overwhelming majority of them will scavenge whatever they can, whenever the opportunity presents itself. The paleontologists who insist that there is a controversy, in passing, are also generally regarded by their peers as obsessive nuts. The irony of this is not lost on the peers, either.
  - Ironically, right after the movie came out a new species of raptor, Utahraptor ostrommaysi, was discovered that was even bigger than the unrealistically huge raptors in the film.
- The movie, at least, contains a character who is supposed to be a paleontologist saying "Dinosaurs and man. Two species separated by sixty-five million years." See if you can spot the problem.
- Another scene has him holding a baby dinosaur in his hands. "What species is it?" he hisses to a nearby geneticist. "It's a velociraptor," responds the geneticist. Neither of these trained scientists who really ought to know these things picked up on the fact that Velociraptor is the genus name.
  - Velociraptor is the genus name and therefore also half of the species name, but besides that it is also considered a "common name" for the species shown and therefore would not be strange for either scientist to refer to the species in such a way.
- Spielberg stated that, when graduating from California State University, he used Amistad and Schindler's List as references for college works, but had to write a paper on paleontology, because "Jurassic Park was too apocryphal to count for credit."
- Crichton gets away with his Dilophosaurs, because he actually made them the correct size in his book and his explanation for why they spat poison did sound plausible (coelophysoid jaws were not that strong, and so Crichton felt there must have been some other way that they were killing their prey). Spielberg, however, takes this way over the line. First off, he shrinks the Dilophosaurs down from twenty feet to four feet. Then, he gives them a gaudy frilled lizard-like frill (something that was not present on Crichton's Dilos, by the way). In an ultimate irony, this was to distinguish them from the Velociraptors, though in reality Velociraptors were the size Dilophosaurus was in the film, and vice versa. I suppose this could be explained by the Dilophosaurus being a juvenile, but...Epic Fail man, like Epic Fail.
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 dissapearance of sauropods in the Late Jurassic, since the sapient species bones and technology are too fragile to preserve. Problem is, sauropod 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 additon, 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 Giganotosaurs 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's "Meg" 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).
- There had been big nasty sharks like Squalicorax and Cretoxyrhina during the Cretaceous. The predominant theories regarding them is that the mosasaurs ate them out of existence when they became dominant (Cretoxyrhina), or the sharks became scavengers and stayed the hell out of the way (Squalicorax). So...hell yeah to the mosasaurs.
- Except that the largest known Mosasaurs, Hainosaurus, are estimated to be roughly the same size as a Megalodon. While the two would certainly have been very competitive, it would have been a close one (if the two had lived at the same time, which they didn't).
- The new book (Hell's Aquarium) also has all sorts of aquatic prehistoric beasties living in Panthallasa, a gigantic underground sea beneath the Earth in a manner of Journey to the Center of the Earth. Only problem is that Panthalassa is the giant sea which covered the world during the Triassic, way before mosasaurs and the like and unbelivable older than Megalodon. And it was on the surface.

Live Action TV

The Doctor Who episode "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" had a large, placid, and stupid Apatosaurus, which the UNIT commander insisted on calling a Brontosaurus. The Doctor called it by its proper name at first, but later switched to Brontosaurus for convenience.
- Many people are quite aware that Apatosaurus is the proper name, but simply prefer the name Brontosaurus - initially the name for a fossil that was later shown to be an Apatosaur. The most popular argument is that it's simply a cooler word. Besides, what Homo Sapian uses only the Linnaean taxonomy of beasts in their idiolect?
  - Not convenient enough for the Brigadier's men, who'd use the word "steggie" instead of Stegosaurus.
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 Doyles The Lost World. That is all.
There's this Poor Man's "Walking With Dinosaurs" on The History Channel called "Jurassic Fight Club." 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. 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. For example, one "fight" features a Nanotyrannus that, according to the narration, knows the juvenile T. rex it's stalking has a mouthful of bacteria that will give it a nasty infection if it gets bit. That's right, ladies and gentlemen: dinosaurs understood germ theory of disease.
- Not as far-fetched as it may first seem. When the narrator said 'knows', he meant in an intuitive fashion. Many modern animals use the same weapon. the Komodo dragon for instance, will bite prey and then instinctively wait until it succumbs to infection. Even humans have intuitive microbiology; we develop an aversion to food that appears contaminated at a very young age, when nearly anyone would not yet have been taught germ theory.
- It gets worse. 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.
  - To put it bluntly, this is "Jane" a juvenile T-rex that was discovered not too long ago.◊. Paleontologists are currently comparing "her" to the Nanotyrannus specimens to see whether or not Nanotyrannus really was a valid genus or not. Too bad History Channel never got the memo....
  - They did. 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 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.

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).
- Of course, this was also a parody of a weird little genre of monster movies where the "monsters" in question were probably the cast's pets.
- Of course people did think Iguanodons looked like that◊ for a while.
- 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.
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.
- One strip involved such realistic Dromeosaurs that they would scare small children. It didn't help that Calvin was talking about them eating small children. The little freak!
  - Shortly after that strip, Jurassic Park came out, and Watterson stopped putting dinosaurs in the strip for a time so that they wouldn't be negatively compared to the CGI.
- Of course, Watterson doesn't let accuracy get in the way of Rule Of Cool. Say it with me: TYRANNOSAURS IN F-14s!
  Calvin: "This is so cool!"
  Hobbes: "This is so stupid."

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.
- In the Eberron campaign setting, halflings ride deinonychus — the setting has local names for many species as well, mostly of the form "adjectivebodypart". On the other hand, there are also fictional dinosaurs who are, basically, dragons.
  - Most notably, the fleshraker, with its venomous claws and tail, stretches the definition of "animal" so far it must have been designed by a munchkin who likes to play druids.
- Since the first edition Monster Manual had no specific listing for "sea serpent" (except for the weird Dragon Turtle), many DM's used plesiosaurs for that purpose. And really, since plesiosaurs are so close to our popular conception of sea serpents anyway, why not?

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?
- Forget the cavemen! Is that a saddle on the T-Rex!?
Tyco's ImagiNext line does the same thing, though it has no pretensions of being educational. Bonus no-priize 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 (Ok, technically Apatosaurus, but the idea is there), etc. 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?
- What gets me is that their Styracosaurus figure was labeled a "Stracosaurus" and all of their dinosaur roars were the Godzilla roar.
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.

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?"
- And then there's the Raptors, which don't look anything like the dromaeosaurs they're named after, but more like a bulked-up version of the Australian Frilled Dragon.
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.
- It's hard to tell if they're the right size or not, though, because the only thing to compare them to is a jeep... that's being driven by another velociraptor, and would thus be scaled to it if they are properly small. This may be an intentional dodge.
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.
- Oddly, this trope is averted in Super Paper Mario, where the Prehistoria level has nothing (except for a Yoshi statue) looking remotely like dinosaurs around.
  - Actually, there's a Palette Swap of the fairly dinosaur-like Jawbus enemy, though these do show up in other places.
How about ''WorldOfWarcraft''? 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. Somewhat justified in that, 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 as well.

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 titular 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.
- A lampshade was hung upon this trope in the alt text of this strip.
- And this one. With apologies.
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.
- Just to twist the knife, there is an E/I ("Educational/Informational") symbol in the upper corner throughout this show.
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.
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.
Flintstones, people... Flintstones?!
We're Back: A Dinosaur's Story, refers to a duckbill dinosaur as an apatosaurus (in reality, apatosaurus is the alternate name of brontosaurus, the best known saurapod), and features a triceratops that enjoys hot dogs. (Tricertops was a vegetarian)

Miscellaneous

The BBC's Walking With Dinosaurs documentary series. It and the other Walking With... series are just about the only notable productions that very, very consciously avoid this trope no matter what it takes. They even knew enough not to show grass during the Mesozoic!
- Sadly, Walking with Monsters was subject to within-series march-on of science, but that really was nobody's fault except Megarachne, for being a scorpion that looks a whole lot like a Giant Spider. And you know that Euparkeria? Might not actually be a dinosaur relative. Little bastards.
  - And Petrolacosaurus - a primitive diapsid reptile - definitely wasn't an ancestor of basal synapsids ("mammal-like reptiles" if you don't like cladistics).
  - And it turns out that there actually was grass in the Cretaceous.

Real Life

Literal Truth In Television: in one of his early books, Palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould told the story of having an argument with another boy at camp when he was (let's say) 8 years old, as to whether or not dinosaurs and humans ever coexisted. They agreed to ask an adult and the adult's opinion/decision was binding. (Gould believed that any random adult would know everything about this, since adults know everything about everything.) The adult they consulted said, of course dinosaurs and humans coexisted: after all, just look at Alley Oop. Cue the (8-year-old, future) palaeontologist crying.
One spectacular aversion worth mentioning: Dinosaur Not-So-National Park, a roadside attraction in the middle-of-nowhere Erie, Kansas. For an amazing attraction featuring dinosaur skeleton replications made entirely of car-parts, that thing was pretty well accurate.
One of this troper's classmates asked our Theology teacher whether or not Jesus lived with dinosaurs. And he was dead serious.
- Of course he was. We have photographic◊ evidence!◊
  - Even though that second picture is an insult to the entire Enlightenment legacy of rationality, it remains pretty cool.
- we know Jesus lived with the dinosaurs for somewhat different reasons◊.
- And let's not forget that he had to preach the word of God to them.
- And they helped the Egyptians build the pyramids.