Trivia / The Monster of Partridge Creek

• Accidentally Correct Zoology:
  • The idea of a dinosaur living in the frozen North would turn out to be accurate in later years, with the fossil discoveries of Arctic dinosaurs from the Prince Creek formation. That said, a ceratosaur, the dinosaur in the story, isn't one of them, but had the story been written in the past ten years, the dinosaur in the story probably would have been a Nanuqsaurus, a large tyrannosaurid whose fossils are found mainly in the Canadian arctic, and one of the dinosaur species believed to be feathered.
  • Besides living in the frozen North, the dinosaur in the story is described to move "with surprising agility". The prevailing view in the first half of the 20th Century was that dinosaurs were sluggish and cold-blooded, particularly after the dinosaur-bird connection theory was pushed aside in the 1920s, until the discovery of Deinonychus in the 1960s caused a shift in views about dinosaurs, that they were active, agile, and warm-blooded instead. That said, even before the 1920s dinosaurs were suspected to have been agile and swift.
• Science Marches On: While it’s now well known that many dinosaurs had feathers, Ceratosaurus, which the monster is supposed to be, has explicitly been confirmed to be scaly via skin impressions (to be specific, we know it had osteoderms which don't generally mesh well with soft integument). Indeed, ceratosaurs and their descendants the abelisaurs are the only theropods that we are certain were actually scaly (the jury is still out regarding whether or not advanced tyrannosaurs were totally scaly).