Trivia / Spec World

• Science Marches On: In general, this was what "killed" the project— after 2008 or so, despite the writers' best efforts to stay up to date, the sheer number of new discoveries about dinosaurs meant that much of the project had become outdated since it began.
  • The site refers to a branch of the Therizinosauria as the Ceratonychidae. However, the name Ceratonykus is now used for a Real Life member of the Alvarezsauridae.^note Luckily, this is barely even a borderline case, as the spelling difference means that there's no name conflict even if they're pronounced the same way.
    • More Hilarious in Hindsight are the hesperonychid dromaeosaurids. There's now a real dromaeosaurid named Hesperonychus, though fortunately it appears that none of the Spec hesperonychids actually use that as a genus name. Ironically, Hesperonychus was a small relative of Microraptor, while the hesperonychids (with one exception, the small and slender djanada) are some of the largest and most robust of the Spec dromaeosaurids.
  • The magnoraptor, a giant dromaeosaurid, was intended to be a descendant of what was once thought to be a real life giant dromaeosaurid, Megaraptor, which is now known to have been either a non-dromaeosaurid coelurosaur (possibly a tyrannosaur) or a carnosaur. The magnoraptor is also portrayed as being almost entirely featherless, something that would be unthinkable for a dromaeosaur nowadays.
  • Related to the above, true megaraptorids are completely absent. More recent fossils show that they were actually the southern hemisphere's top predators at the end of the Cretaceous, and therefore would almost certainly have been included, or at least mentioned, if the project were being made today.
  • Rahonavis was thought to have been a relative of Archeaopteryx and as thus the descendant group the rahonavids were classed as such. Turns out Rahonavis is a type of unenlagiinae dromaeosaurid. Oops. Though considering new finds (namely, a recent paper that placed Rahonavis closer to true birds than to other deinonychosaurs), this may not be far off.
  • It turns out the digestive systems of monotremes are too simple to digest meat (or plants) without major changes. Guess what most of Spec's platypuses eat? ^note That said, there is a prehistoric platypus that is thought to have preyed upon turtles, so the idea of a hyper-carnivorous platypus isn't too implausible. Also, several monotreme relatives turned out to not have beaks, so "glue a platypus beak to a badger/rat/whatever" is probably not the best idea to come up with speculative monotremes.
  • It turns out that Cretaceous mosasaurs already had tail flukes (and ventured into freshwater). In Spec's timeline, they don't evolve these features until the Eocene. Spec also portrays them as cold-blooded, and therefore barred from polar waters, but more recent studies have indicated they were true endotherms.
  • Very few of Spec's maniraptorans have the fully formed wings that real maniraptorans would have had.
  • The most crushing one to this project is probably the discovery that ornithischians could have plumage. Hehehehe... Oh, Crap!.
  • Along with the discovery crocodilians may have been out-competing theropods at least regionally in the Maastrichtian. At any rate, large, carnivorous crocodilians were very common in the Cretaceous, and Spec originally had too few of those (though ultimately averted in the Yahoo group, where several terrestrial crocodilian concepts do exist).
  • The hoeks and baskervilles are stagodonts based on old reconstructions of Didelphodon before more complete remains showed that it was an aquatic animal more similar to otters than Tasmanian devils. In fact at least one post in the Yahoo group notes that deltatheroidean selkies and stagodontids should probably be switched around, since stagodontids would more likely become marine mammals while deltatheroideans were pretty diverse and ranged from small insectivores (Gurbanodelta) to saberteeth (Lotheridium).
  • A major one happened with azhdarchid pterosaurs. In the original iteration, they were portrayed as albatross-like soarers that died out in the Palaeocene due to changing marine climates. Flashforward to 2008, and the mainstream publication that they were terrestrial and extremely diverse has pretty much ensured their stay, culminating in concepts for flightless predators.
  • The noasaurid cain was originally depicted with huge sickle claws on its feet similar to a dromaeosaur, because Noasaurus was originally identified with a claw that was thought to have been on the foot, but was actually on its hand.
  • Many of Spec's ornithopods belong to a made-up group known as "antarctornithopods" which originates from the numerous unsorted Gondwanan ornithopods of the Cretaceous, such as Gasparinisaura and Leaellynasaura. Nowadays, that group would probably just be known as Elasmaria.
  • Several other groups have questionable or ambiguous classification because at the time the affiliations of certain species was unresolved, so the project either fails to come any real conclusion. This is the case with groups like the deinonychosaurs, enantiornithes, and titanosaurs, where all the modern groups suddenly sprung into existence in the Early Cenozoic with no specific Mesozoic ancestors.
  • Most of the carnivores are drawn with the teeth protruding, which was a very common style of the time, but chances are good that if the project were made nowadays, they would've been drawn with lips concealing the teeth.
  • The introduction for the neohadrosaurs state that three claws re-emerged from the clawless forelimbs of their Cretaceous ancestors. A later fossil indicates that hadrosaurs actually had a single hoof-like claw on each forefoot, like a horse.
  • The cedunasaurs are primitive coelurosaurs with mysterious origins suggested to have descended from the then-unclassified coelurosaur Nqwebasaurus. By the 2010s, studies had placed Nqwebasaurus as being a basal ornithomimosaur, which are supposed to be extinct in Spec's timeline.
  • All of the ammonoids are portrayed with operculum-like hoods similar to nautili, but we now know that they did not have them.
  • Spec classifies gondwanatheres as being relatives of monotremes (and therefore laying eggs) due to having to pick some kind of classification for them, but most recent studies put them either as multituberculate relatives or possibly haramiyids (which would render them non-mammalian mammaliforms).
  • Multituberculates are also depicted with a "primitive" reproductive strategy, laying small eggs (something that was speculative, even at the time, since their reproduction was little known), but a study in 2022 suggests multituberculates gave birth to relatively large and well-developed young similar to placental mammals.
  • The project generally uses the older and now largely defunct name of "segnosaurs" (which was more common in the late 20th century) over the now universally accepted name of therizinosaurs (once the group was swapped from Segnosauria to the clade-based Therizinosauria) for members of the group.

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