Trivia / Dink, the Little Dinosaur

• Accidentally Correct Zoology:
  • In "Sea Rescue" the protagonists have to help two plesiosaurs who are stranded on a beach after a tidal wave. We now know this is exactly what would happen to plesiosaurs if they ended up out of the water, but back when the show aired they were thought to be able to crawl onto beaches in the style of a seal or a sea turtle.
  • One episode featured Quetzalcoatlus (called "big wings") attacking the cast. Back then, Quetzalcoatlus was thought to have been either a scavenger or a piscivorous skim-feeder depending on who you asked, but years later it would turn out to be a predator of smaller animals, including young dinosaurs. However, it would have hunted on the ground like a stork rather than in the air like an eagle as portrayed in the episode.
  • The predatory pterosaurs referred to as "Scavengers" combine a toothy snout with a Pteranodon-like head crest (a common depiction of fictional pterosaurs at the time, despite its apparent inaccuracy). Just over a decade after the series ended, the pterosaur Ludodactylus was discovered which shows precisely this combination of features.
• Follow the Leader: Conspicuously, the series premiered one year after The Land Before Time (the 1988 original), and is also about a group of young prehistoric animals with a sauropod protagonist.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Released in 2017 after being in limbo for years.
• Real-Life Relative: In the Mexican Spanish dub, Scat and Flapper's voice actors (Israel and Carlos Magaña) are brothers in Real Life, while Crusty's voice actor (the late Carlos Magaña) was their father.
• Science Marches On: Most of the prehistoric animals in the show are generally fairly outdated by today's standards, though being up to date with '80s paleontological consensus didn't seem to be a priority in the show either.
  • Many of the theropods and hadrosaurs walk in the classic tripod stance, and the latter (like Amber) are perpetually bipedal instead of being facultative bipeds, both of which would already have been very outdated at the time.
  • The quadrupedal dinosaurs are also depicted with their tails on the ground, when they should be elevated.
  • Whenever dromaeosaurs show up, they are of the old-fashion scaly variety. Forgivable for the time, but less forgivable is how they often lack their sickle claw and also walk fully erect, even though their killing claw and avian-like posture/anatomy are the features that made them famous in the first place.
  • One episode features a pack of Spinosaurus that are just generic tyrannosaur-like theropods with a sail, a far cry from the crocodile-like and amphibious modern depiction. Another episode features the related Baryonyx, here shown as a quadruped, which was actually a semi-common depiction of the animal at the time, and also as a turtle-eater with a generic theropod skull instead of the fish-eater with a crocodile-like head that it was well-known for being (however, it could be the therizinosaur Segnosaurus, which was also portrayed as a quadruped with a large claw at the time, but there is still no excuse for the turtle-eating).
  • Quetzalcoatlus (called “big wings”) show up in one episode, and besides being eagle-like predators, they also look like generic, oversized '80s Pteranodon, in sharp contrast to the stork-like animals we now know them as. Ironically though, Quetzalcoatlus did actually prey on young dinosaurs, but on the ground.
  • One episode features an Oviraptor character who, besides being featherless, also sports a small, rhino-like horn which, like the four-legged Baryonyx, was also a common portrayal of the animal in vintage paleoart.
  • "Dry River" features a Supersaurus (or an Ultrasaurus, which is now synonymous with Supersaurus) that is portrayed as a brachiosaurid, as was commonly depicted at the time. The real animal is now known to have been a diplodocid.
• Screwed by the Network: Dink in terms of Cartoon Network and Boomerang reruns is one that in the earliest of days ran here and there before being dumped fairly quickly. The entry above on circulation before the dvd release made the joke you could see it on Boomerang at 4 in the morning, and that hadn't been true for several years before that.

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