Sky Monsters is a 2005 TV Documentary airing on National Geographic Channel, focusing on pterosaurs.
This documentary provides examples of:
- Anachronism Stew: Due to the documentary constantly recycling models, we see animals from the Early Cretaceous mingling with those from the very end of the Cretaceous. Case in point, Anhanguera is twice shown soaring over a pair of T. rex, and the latter, along with the Saurornitholestes and Parasaurolophus, shows up in the opening scene which is stated to take place 100 million years ago. You could say the raptor is meant to be an earlier species like Deinonychus but giant tyrannosaurids and hadrosaurs would not evolve until the Late Cretaceous (a carcharodontosaurid and iguanodont would make more sense).
- Eiffel Tower Effect: It appears in one sequence as a Pterodactylus flies out the window of Paris' National Museum of Natural History.
- Foreshadowing: A Sarcosuchus skeleton is briefly seen in the above sequence. One later shows up in a CG recreation chasing off some pterosaurs raiding its nest.
- Giant Flyer: The giant azhdarchids Quetzalcoatlus and Cryodrakon, which are played by the same model and never cited as separate animals (partially because they were thought to be the same genus at the time). The documentary suggests that there were pterosaurs that would have dwarfed even them (though evidence for that turned out to be in error).
- Graceful Loser: Paleontologist Kevin Padian, who a decade prior still argued that pterosaurs were bipeds like birds while his colleagues envisioned them as quadrupeds (as seen in Paleoworld) admits that his interpretation was wrong and personally showcases fossilized trackways that show how pterosaurs walked and landed.
- Misplaced Wildlife: Again, due to the doc reusing models constantly, we see Parasaurolophus appearing in the same scene as the African anhanguerid, 110 million years ago (again, an iguanodont like Ouranosaurus would make more sense).
- No Name Given: Going hand in hand with the Layman's Terms issue, most of the titular "sky monsters" are properly identified, they are just called pterosaurs, and the same is true for the dinosaurs. Though the paleontologically savvy can identify most of them based on their distinct appearance and/or the time/location they appear in.
- Justified with the anhanguerids found alongside Sarcosuchus, as they still haven't been properly described.
- Perilous Prehistoric Seas: Nyctosaurus is shown getting caught by a Tylosaurus.
- Raptor Attack: The Saurornitholestes in this looks like it leaped straight out of a cheap Jurassic Park tie-in video game, being completely scaly, having slit pupils, broken wrists, no lips (to the point that its entire tooth row and gums are exposed!), and two of them are shown taking down a fully grown Cryodrakon with minimal effort, despite the latter being the size of a giraffe! Note that the fossil on which this scene was based belonged to a juvenile animal, and even then, workers speculated that it was a case of scavenging.
