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Somewhere A Palaeontologist Is Crying
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"Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. I have drawn dinosaurs and hominids in the same cartoon."
Gary Larson
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 a small group of prehistoric reptiles regardless of different habitats or the fact that some went extinct well before others evolved. Other prehistoric reptiles tend to be identified as dinosaurs even if they aren't, such as pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, icthyosaurs, and Dimetrodon. 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: Biblical creationism holds that 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. Occassionally 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. See also Everythings Better With Dinosaurs, MST 3 K Mantra.
Examples:
- 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.
- Regarding The Flintstones... it's just a lot easier to say They Just Didnt Care.
- 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!"
- 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. Sigh. (Also, lava is really more of a Cretaceous thing.)
- Extremely evident in Disney's Dinosaur, which had dinosaurs from the Jurassic and even 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", 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...) The thing is, audiences might have let some of this slide if the movie hadn't been released so close on the heels of...
- ...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 conciously avoid this trope no matter what it takes. They even knew enough not to show grass during the Mesozoic!
- Unfortunately, the series does mess up when Utahraptors show up in Europe, which the writers attempt to justify by mentioning a land bridge through Greenland. However, this is still nowhere near Utah.
- 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. Little bastard.
- This has happened twice (or four times) in the history of Super Sentai and Power Rangers.
- The first season of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, adapted from Kyouryuu Sentai Zyuranger, had five "Dinozords", of which only two were actual dinosaurs — Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops. The others were a mastodon, a "sabre-toothed tiger", and a Pteranodon (named so in Zyuranger, but called "Pterodactyl" in the American version).
- Things were better in Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger, which was adapted into Power Rangers Dino Thunder. The main characters did have powers stemming from the Stock Dinosaurs Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, Pteranodon and Brachiosaurus; but eventually got assistance from Stegosaurus, Dimetrodon, (Pachy-) Cephalosaurus, Parasaur(-olophus), and Ankylosaurus zords (though the Pteranodon and Dimetrodon technically aren't dinos). AbareKiller/the White Ranger was cool, since his animal was the obscure pterosaur Tupuxuara. Never named as such in either show, though (Dino Thunder used "Drago zord"). Abaranger also had an appearance by Evil Twins of the Tyranno and Tricera zords in the form of Carnotaurus and Chasmosaurus zords, but these hardly showed up in Dino Thunder.
- Subversion: In Runaways, Gert has a pet 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.
- 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.
- 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 does unfortunately include 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.
- 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. 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!
- There's also the house, car, and woman getting stepped on to indicate something's not right with the timing.
- 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.
- While we're in the darkest depths: 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. 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 hava a 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 ususal 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. No Really. This troper — an Education major — can only assume that some people hate teachers and want to make their jobs even harder.
- 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.
- The "naked Velociraptors" subtrope is happily averted in FlashBang's Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, of all places. Bonus points for the Perpetual Molt effects.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 embarassing. 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 then 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.
- 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 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...
- 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. No Seriously. 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.
- 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 hope those same paleontologists haven't seen the poster for part 3...
- 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"!
- 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 [[Rule Of Cool 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.
- 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.
- 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. And, of course, hominids evolved when dinosaurs somehow didn't go extinct.
- Dinosaurs are in the manual in case the GM wants to use them. Nothing says that the GM can't use them in a temporally sensitive manner.
- 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.
- 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?
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyles The Lost World. That is all.
- Transformers Beast Wars is guilty of this on numerous counts. The Predacon characters Megatron, Terrorsaur, and Dinobot, assume the forms of a Tyrannosaurus, Pteranodon, and Dromaeosaur (respectively) by scanning DNA from fossils. Not only is it unlikely that any DNA would remain intact, but all three skeletons were found in close proximity of each other, despite being from different time periods and places. At least they didn't try to claim dinosaurs were still alive, though...
- All three were also found around an area filled with lava and volcanic rock, which would normally destroy fossils.
- Dinobot looks as though he came from the set of Jurassic Park, and is referred to as a Velociraptor in both the show and his toy. He still bears closer resemblance to a Utahraptor.
- Those three animals were in fact around at relatively the same time. Thus, the main problem is how a Velociraptor ended up with a Tyrannosaurus and a Pteranodon.
- The show takes place in prehistoric Earth, where the ancestors of humans are hairy and simian. Almost all other animals are from the present day, and no other prehistoric beasts are ever seen.
- 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.
- 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?
- Literally 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 belived 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.
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Good old Iguanodon. Sort of.