Trivia / Gertie the Dinosaur

• Accidentally Correct Zoology:
  • At one point in the beginning, Gertie swallows a rock for no apparent reason. Since the cartoon was made, it's become widely accepted that the polished pebbles found in association with many real-life sauropod and other dinosaur fossils were gastroliths that the animals swallowed to aid in digestion, similar to many modern reptiles and birds (they didn't chew their food, so the stones ground the food up for them).
  • Gertie herself is also a pretty active, lively thing spending all her time on land. Of course, at the time paleontologists argued that dinosaurs (especially the long-necked sauropods) were nothing more than dumb lummoxes who spent their lives wallowing in swamps. While we now know that sauropods weren't as cartoonishly playful let alone intelligent as Gertie, she was still a far more accurate dinosaur reconstruction than the sluggish beasts that decorated science books and museums for decades before the short had debuted.
  • At one point a four-winged dinosaur-dragon thing flies by. Nearly a century later, a four-winged dinosaur named Microraptor was discovered (though it was nowhere near the size of the creature in the short).
• Referenced by...: The only known specimen of the Triassic dinosaur Chindesaurus, which was nicknamed Gertie in reference to the cartoon.
• Science Marches On: While Gertie is surprisingly ahead of her time in a few regards, she's also shown dragging her tail on the ground. It's now known that most if not all sauropods held their tails up above the ground.

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