Line #32 ArtisticLicensePaleontology/Literature


1	* Jerry Pallota:
2	** ''The Dinosaur Alphabet Book'' zigzags this trope, as on the one hand, none of the dinosaurs are feathered (then again, it was published in 1991), ''Xiaosaurus'' is seen dragging its tail, and the Q page features a sauropod called a "''Questrosaurus''" (properly ''Quaesitosaurus'') that appears to be comically tall compared to the trees (or are those some other kind of plant? The illustration makes it hard to tell) in the background. On the other hand, not only does he use "''Questrosaurus''" to illustrate how dinosaurs may have been brightly colored in real life, by having one picture of it be in grayscale and another show it with psychedelically vibrant magenta, yellow, and blue skin, but he also has several other brightly colored dinosaurs throughout the book, includes a few entries on some non-dinosaurs such as the pterosaur ''Rhamphorynchus'' and marine reptile ''Kronosaurus'' before lampshading it and including an actual dinosaur entry, acknowledges the fact that ''Oviraptor'' was brooding its eggs rather than eating them, and includes several obscure genera such as ''Yangchuanosaurus,'' the aforementioned ''Xiaosaurus'', Korean ''Ultrasaurus'', and ''Riojasaurus''.
3	** ''The Extinct Alphabet Book'' calls the marine reptile ''Henodus'' a turtle (it has no living relatives), calls ''Tanystropheus'' a lizard (it was closer to crocodilians and dinosaurs) and mentions the white dodo (now known to be an ibis).
4	* Eric Garcia's ''Anonymous Rex'' series of novels is just odd but a few things stand out. The trilogy's premise is that {{talking animal}}s walk among us disguised as humans, and that most of these are the few species of dinosaurs who survived the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. They exist in the present day in ''exactly'' the forms they had on the other side of the K-T Boundary (though implicitly smaller or larger as the case may be). His protagonist is a ''Velociraptor'' -- a ''Franchise/JurassicPark''-style nekkid velociraptor with ''external ears'' -- private eye. The other main characters tend to be obvious dinosaurs like tyrannosaurs and hadrosaurs. Garcia's only research (and he openly admits this) is to have read and watched ''Franchise/JurassicPark'' a lot, but there's so much RuleOfFunny going on ("Series/{{Manimal}}: the Musical!") that the lack of research actually serves to make the series funnier. (And did we mention the -- ahem -- {{interspecies romance}}s?)
5	* The ''Literature/{{Animorphs}}'' book ''In the Time of Dinosaurs'' tried pretty hard to avoid this, with the only real anachronism given a HandWave--in an epilogue, Tobias notes that one of the dinosaurs they saw should have actually been extinct at that point, but hey, they saw it, so clearly the paleontologists are wrong, making this more a cross between ShownTheirWork and RuleOfCool. However, even if you accept that, it still commits some major flubs-- namely, ''Deinonychus'' is depicted without feathers, which was already considered doubtful at the time, and ''Spinosaurus'' is shown as a sail-backed "carnosaur" rather than the crocodile-like aquatic dinosaur it is now known to have been.
6	* ''Literature/GodzillaAndGodzillaRaidsAgain'':
7	** In ''Godzilla'', renowned palaeontologist Professor Kyōhei Yamane states that the Jurassic Period was a mere 2 million years ago, and that during the transition to the Cretaceous Period some marine reptiles left the ocean and adapted to life on land.
8	** ''Godzilla Raids Again'' states that ''Ankylosaurus'' -- aka Anguirus -- was a carnivorous dinosaur that was between 45 and 60 meters tall, and lived 150 to 70 million years ago, concurrently with Godzilla. ''Ankylosaurus'' were herbivorous dinosaurs that were between 6 to 8 meters long, and lived between 68 and 66 million years ago.
9	* ''Literature/JurassicPark1990'' actually doesn't commit this crime ''too'' much. Author Creator/MichaelCrichton took then-current ideas about dinosaurs as his starting point, and the novel builds on them in ways that actually make a lot of sense logically. The mix-and-match assembly of species from different periods is attributed partly to pure luck - after all, they could only revive dinosaurs for which they had found preserved DNA - and partly to the fact that John Hammond, the guy in charge, was just relying on the RuleOfCool. The name of the park was chosen to appeal to investors, and to customers (had it opened for business), and not with any regard for accuracy. The whole "can't see you if you don't move" is actually attributed to ''all'' the dinos, not just the ''T. rex'', as they had to fill in genetic gaps with the DNA of similar modern day reptiles and amphibians, many of which actually ''do'' have motion-based vision. It's true that the ''Velociraptor''s are a lot closer in dimension, even in the books, to really large ''Deinonychus''es, but even this can be partially justified in that Crichton was relying on a classification that called ''Deinonychus'' a kind of ''Velociraptor''. However, this classification was the sole opinion of the famous paleoartist Greg Paul, in his widely-read book, not backed up by paleontologists.
10	** It uses this trope when the dinosaurs are in any way interested in the humans. The idea of a ''Tyrannosaurus'' chasing a human for food is like you chasing a mouse for the same reason. The novel does HandWave the idea for the ''Velociraptors'', though. As Malcolm mentions, somewhere along the line, they must have realized that humans are easy prey -- much as tigers tend to become man-eaters if they kill a human while starving. Easier to kill, that is, as long as they [[PlotArmor aren't the main characters]].
11	*** The idea of a T. Rex chasing a human for food is more along the lines of a house cat chasing a mouse for food. The average T. Rex weighed less than 100 times as much as the average human. Your average house mouse is less than an ounce, your average house cat around 130 ounces. We're actually bigger to the T. Rex than the mouse is to the cat.
12	*** Possibly justified if the dinos are ''smarter'' than the humans gave them credit for, and have learned to associate the appearance and scent of human keepers with their daily delivery of food. Might ''T. rex'' have kept chasing the little squealing scampering things because she was used to them depositing a few hundred pounds of prime rib in front of her?
13	** Mentioned in Stephen Jay Gould's ''Dinosaur in a Haystack'':
14	--->'''Gould:''' Why did you put a Cretaceous dinosaur on the cover of '''''Jurassic''' Park''?\
15	'''Crichton:''' Oh my god, I never thought of that. We were just playing around with different cover designs and [[RuleOfCool this was the one that looked best]].
16	** The sequel lampshades it with a character who points out several of the problems with the original, and comes up with a few guesses on what else could have caused things like the ''T. rex'' acting like it couldn't see them.
17	*** Then again the sequel also has its own share of bizarre mistakes and speculation, most memorably a scene featuring a pair of ''Carnotaurus'' who can change the color of their skin to such a detailed degree that they turn virtually invisible when standing still. While there are real creatures that can change colors, something that large being able to stand out in the open and just vanish to the naked eye is absurd. The notion that a large theropod evolved a natural camouflage system on par with the Franchise/{{Predator}}'s cloaking device is even more outlandish than ''Dilophosaurus'' having a frill and spitting venom, since at least the latter is based on traits of real animals. ''Carnotaurus'' was also an incredibly fast pursuit predator, making camouflage unnecessary.
18	** All of the problems or errors in ''Jurassic Park'' are lampshaded by the characters. They repeatedly criticize John Hammond for his negligence and lack of attention to detail. Henry Wu explicitly points out that the dinosaurs are not authentic, but rather scientific mishmashes of DNA that approximate dinosaurs for the [[{{Pun}} consumption]] of tourists. As with Hammond, Wu is also depicted as being disinterested in the details of his work, and with deadly results.
19	** Many of the species of dinosaur lived millions of years apart even from each other, never even having the chance to interact in the past -- which just messes things up more in the park since they'd lack millenia-old instincts on how to interact with them.
20	* Creator/StephenBaxter's book ''Literature/{{Evolution}}''. While most of the time he gets the science right, and the speculative leaps he takes are somewhat within the bounds of plausibility, a few examples must be mentioned. The story about primates coming to North America has some anachronism and MisplacedWildlife in it. Not only does it have indricothere rhinos (native only to Asia), camels (who were only found in North America at this time), and such, it has gastornithid birds inhabiting Oligocene-Miocene Africa... yes, even after these animals were supposed to have died out in the middle Eocene. The story involving ''Purgatorius'' has some flaws too. While Baxter does get it right by cloaking his troodonts in feathers, he leaves them off his dromaeosaurs. To add insult to injury, he makes the raptors cold-blooded, despite the fact that raptors are the very dinosaurs which ignited the ectothermy/endothermy debate. In fact, even paleontologists who doubt endothermy in ornithischians, sauropodomorphs and carnosaurs don't deny that raptors were most likely endothermic. And then there are the ''Giganotosaurus'' and ''Suchomimus'' in North America, many millions of years late and/or on the wrong continent; though this could be handwaved as them being different, not-yet-discovered species from those genera. In the story about the sapient Ornitholestes, he mentions that the only evidence humans had of these species is the disappearance of "the giant sauropods" in the Late Jurassic, since the sapient species bones and technology are too fragile to preserve. Now it's true that ''Diplodocus'', the only species depicted in the story, did become extinct at the end of the Jurassic; but there were other giants, such as ''Sauroposeidon'' and ''Argentinosaurus'', right through the Cretaceous.
21	* Both used and lovingly averted in James Gurney's ''Literature/{{Dinotopia}}''. Okay, yes, every prehistoric creature from ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opabinia Opabinia]]'' to woolly mammoths is coexisting in an island continent the size of Australia, and the reason for this is {{hand wave}}d, roughly anything that walks on land is smart enough to have a language and participate in a peaceful {{Utopia}} alongside humans, large not-quite-lingual pterosaurs can take off and fly while carrying humans, and small ceratopsians can speak any language. But Gurney is also up-to-date on the world of paleontology, and although his raptors were naked in early books, he painted them with feathers in later ones. And everything has the right physiology. Dinotopia is a children's story with enormous detail in the dinosaurs.
22	** The first ''Dinotopia'' book has the island be several times smaller both north-south and east-west than in the later books. Gurney simply scaled it up to give enough space to fit all of the additional creatures in.
23	* While they aren't about dinosaurs, Steve Alten's ''Literature/{{Meg}}'' novels will make paleontology enthusiasts cringe. The opening scene of the first book has a ''T. rex'' chasing some hadrosaurs into the water, [[TheWorfEffect where it is eaten by a]] ''Megalodon'' [[TheWorfEffect explicitly stated to be twice its size]]. sigh ''Carcharodon megalodon'' did '''not''' live during the Cretaceous (the giant shark appeared 47 million years '''after''' the dinosaurs died out).
24	** Interestingly, though, there ''was'' a giant shark species that did live contemporaneously with the Cretaceous mosasaurs, and ''did'' prey on them, with ample fossil evidence from mosasaur bones (though the big Mosasaurs also preyed on them in return as well). It was ''Cretoxyrhina'', the Ginsu Shark, and could grow over 30 feet long, and a 30 foot marine animal could potentially reach up to twice the mass of a ''T. rex'', if not twice the length. Though the Ginsu Shark did go extinct before the end of the Cretaceous and would not have been contemporary to ''T. rex''.
25	* Mentioned in the sci-fi novel ''[[Literature/TheLordsOfCreation The Sky People]]'' by S. M. Stirling, due to AncientAstronauts terraforming and seeding Venus with Earth lifeforms. There are also [[NubileSavage beautiful cave princesses]] in {{fur bikini}}s, much to everyone's delight.
26	* ''Kronos''. It rapidly becomes apparent that the author did not do any research whatsoever on plesiosaur biology. Among the worst is the eponymous ''Kronosaurus'' swimming in an up-and-down body motion like a whale, complete with flukes. The problem? Plesiosaurs had a stiff spine and were virtually forced to swim sealion or penguin style. Seeing as the author has a severe creationist lean, this [[ArtisticLicenseBiology F in biology]] could be due to not doing any research at all. The author has several other books involving prehistoric life, which likely contain other issues.
27	* At the end of ''Literature/TheLostWorld1995'', Malcolm talks about the extinction events at the end of the Triassic and Jurassic. While the Triassic did end with an extinction event (one of the big five, in fact), the Jurassic didn't.
28	* The back cover of the [[Literature/DoctorWhoNovelisations novelisation]] of "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS7E2DoctorWhoAndTheSilurians The Silurians]]" (''Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters'') boasts that the story contains "a 40 ft. high ''Tyrannosaurus rex'', the biggest, most savage mammal which ever trod the earth!" No ''T. rex'' fossil ever found has been that big; the largest one is 40 feet ''long'' from nose to tail. And then there's that other bit -- while most of us aren't experts on the subject, we could probably tell you that T. rex was not a mammal.
29	* In the Creator/EdgarRiceBurroughs ''Literature/{{Tarzan}} at the Earth's Core'', a ''Stegosaurus'' is described as jumping from a height and using its plates as a gliding mechanism. Funnily enough, there was a [[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-fantastic-gliding-stegosaurus-107838636/?no-ist hypothesis in 1920]] which proposed that ''Stegosaurus'' used its plates to glide. This may have inspired Burroughs as his novel was published in 1930.
30	* There is a children's book called ''[[http://www.amazon.com/Day-Dinosaur-First-Time-Books/dp/0394891309 Day of the Dinosaur]]'' which commits this sin in spades. None of the dinos are illustrated correctly and [[AnachronismStew they all are depicted as living around the same time]] (assuming it isn’t meant to just be showcasing them from various points in history). Also, ''[[UsefulNotes/PrehistoricLifeNonDinosaurianReptiles Dimetrodon]]'', ''Mesosaurus'' and ''[[UsefulNotes/PrehistoricLifeOtherExtinctCreatures Eryops]]'' are called dinosaurs. (For those who don't know, ''Eryops'' was a newt-like amphibian that was roughly contemporary of ''Dimetrodon''. It's portrayed as a land animal in the book. Also, the three foot-long ''Mesosaurus'' resembled a crocodile and lived at the same time as ''Dimetrodon'' and ''Eryops'', but farther south. A filter-feeder, it was one of the first reptiles to return to an aquatic existence. A related coloring book makes it out to be a predator about thirty feet long, probably getting it mixed up with ''Mosasaurus''. The book also mentions ''Archaeopteryx'' and moas, but this is AccidentallyCorrectWriting.) To be fair, the book was from the eighties, so some of this is ScienceMarchesOn, but the rest is simply inexplicable, as [[http://www.amazon.com/review/RSJQ7KJ0HH8RW/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#RSJQ7KJ0HH8RW this review]] points out. Granted, it’s a prose poem, but a lot of lines could have been altered to include correct information without messing up the meter.
31	** The sequel book ''After the Dinosaurs'' fares a lot better, aside from some AnachronismStew and ScienceMarchesOn. It does, however, make the glaring mistake of claiming tigers are descended from ''Smilodon''.
32	* ''Literature/TheBerenstainBears'' book "At the Dinosaur Dig" averts this for the most part (humorously it’s written by the same people as the above work. Presumably they learned from their mistakes) save for four major mistakes: the bears discover a ''Spinosaurus'' skeleton [[MisplacedWildlife despite in North America]], ''Dimetrodon'' was referred to as a reptile, ''Apatosaurus'' is confused with ''Diplodocus'', and ''Mosasaurus'' was described as being bigger than any shark (''C. megalodon'' was larger).
33	* ''Literature/TheBerenstainBearsBigChapterBooks'': InUniverse in ''The Berenstain Bears and the G-Rex Bones'', where this trope is what exposes the titular G-Rex (short for Gigantosaurus rex) as a hoax ''because'' the hoaxers took too much artistic license with the design -- the dinosaur is twice the height of ''Tyrannosaurus Rex'', but its bones are only twice as thick, and [[SquareCubeLaw the laws of physics suggest]] that it would be impossible for animal with ''T. rex'''s body shape to be twice its height -- otherwise its bones would have to be so thick that there would be no room for flesh and internal organs.
34	* A ''WesternAnimation/ThomasAndFriends'' picture book was actually about Thomas and Stepney finding a ''UsefulNotes/TyrannosaurusRex'' skeleton on Sodor, despite that dinosaur being native to North America. The corresponding episode of the TV show didn't have this problem, since the dinosaur skeleton in it is a stegosaur instead, and Britain did have stegosaurs.
35	* [[http://www.amazon.com/Dinosaurs-Mission-Xtreme-Chris-Madsen/dp/1902626842/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1305751385&sr=1-3 this one]]. For starters, it has ''herbivorous plesiosaurs'', states that ''Ceratosaurus'' was a tyrannosaur (right, and you're a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarsier tarsier]]), claims that ''Tyrannosaurus rex'' grew to 65 feet long (try 42 feet), has naked raptors, claims that ''Oviraptor'' lived on eggs (discarded in the nineties), has ''aquatic sauropods'' (disproven in the sixties, while the book was written in 2003), says that ''Archaeopteryx'' evolved after the raptors and [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking has really lame 3D]].
36	* ''{{Literature/Dinoverse}}'', while mostly suffering from ScienceMarchesOn, has a weird disconnect between the illustrations and the text. The illustrations are all accurate for the time, but in the text Tyrannosaurs can casually slap their tails on the ground and are twenty feet or so tall, as if they were the archaic tripod-bodied types and not the horizontally-oriented ones in the illustrations. Mentions are also made of the ''lips'' of creatures which are beaked.
37	* The ''Literature/GeronimoStilton'' book "Valley of the Giant Skeletons" managed to pass off a ''Psittacosaurus'' skeleton as a ''Tarbosaurus'' skeleton. Most of the palaeontology stuff is okay, though.
38	** Played painfully straight, however, in the spin-off series ''Cavemice'', which is just another version of ''WesternAnimation/TheFlintstones'' with mice.
39	** The spin-off graphic novel ''Dinosaurs in Action'' has the main cast go back 140 million years ago in the Cretaceous Period, but they encounter [[MisplacedWildlife both North American and Asian]] genera that lived [[AnachronismStew 80 to 66 million years ago]]. The genera featured include a flexible-necked ''Elasmosaurus'', a ''Quetzalcoatlus'' more closely resembling an oversized ''Pteranodon'', and a sparsely-feathered egg-stealing ''Oviraptor'' (though it was at least described as an omnivore). On the other hand, ''Velociraptor'' is surprisingly anatomically accurate, even [[ShownTheirWork being coated in feathers]].
40	** Both the ''Cavemice'' and the ''Journey Through Time'' spin-offs erroneously portray cave bears as carnivores instead of herbivores.
41	* Jane Gaskell's ''Literature/{{Atlan}}'' novels take place in a fantasy prehistory that includes, among other oddities, people using dinosaurs (which are simply referred to as "dinosaurs" with no other description) [[DomesticatedDinosaurs as transportation]]. The conceit of the series is that it's humanity's ''true'' origin story, which makes the anachronisms stick out all the more. While the narrative is indeed based on [[http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/twg.htm long]]-[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Churchward outdated]] [[http://www.anandgholap.net/Story_Of_Atlantis_And_The_Lost_Lemuria-W_Scott-Elliot.pdf sources]], humans coexisting with dinosaurs does not feature in any of them. More likely, this element comes from the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
42	* Played with in the ''Annals of Improbable Research'' article ''[[http://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume1/v1i1/barney.htm The Taxonomy of Barney]]'', which, after noting Barney's un-dinosaur-like behavior and revealing through an X-ray photograph that Barney's skeletal structure is indistinguishable from that of ''Homo sapiens'', rules out the hypotheses that Barney is more closely related to dinosaurs or dead fish than humans.
43	* In 2010, National Geographic published ''The Ultimate Dinopedia: The Most Complete Dinosaur Reference Ever'', which, despite it being written by children's paleontology writer "Dino" Don Lessem, is full of errors (which were fixed in the second edition seven years later). Observe:
44	** Classification brainfarts abound (ceratosaurs are often confused with ceratopsians, while dromaeosaurids are said to include many non-dromaeosaurids and some non-theropods).
45	** Several long-discredited theories (placement of coelophysoids in Ceratosauria) are treated as fact, as well as hypotheses that are questionable (synonymizing ''Triceratops'' and ''Torosaurus'').
46	** Inaccurate size estimates (the giant carnosaur ''Chilantaisaurus'' is listed as being 10 feet long).
47	** Hit-and-miss illustrations (inaccurately feathered coelurosaurs are persistent).
48	** An incomplete dinosaur list (the tyrannosaur ''Bistahieversor'' is listed, although the megalosaur ''Leshansaurus'', which was published a month before, is absent).
49	* Zig-zagged in ''Literature/TheMagicTreeHouse'' movie. [[ShownTheirWork On one hand]], the dinosaurs featured lived at the same time and place, ''Pteranodon'' is anatomically accurate (toothless, quadrupedal, described as fuzzy, bulky, and has pteroid bones) and takes off with its wings, ''Alamosaurus'' has a brachiosaurid-like body instead of a diplodocid-like one, and ''Tyrannosaurus'' has non-pronated hands. On the other, ''Pteranodon'' is too big and is shown living inland and at the end of the Cretaceous, ''Alamosaurus'' is missing its body armor, the hadrosaurs have visible fingers, the ornithomimids are seemingly featherless (though it may be because of the art style) and lacking wings, ''Tyrannosaurus'''s skull is shrink-wrapped, and pterosaurs were referred to as dinosaurs in a book.
50	* ''Dinosaurology'' (a 2013 installment in Dugald Steer's ''[[Literature/OlogySeries Dragonology]]'' series) attempted to subvert this trope, with the inaccuracies that may pop up being HandWaved in that the book is meant to be the translated copy of a traveler's journal.
51	* Referenced in an ''Literature/EncyclopediaBrown'' story. The con artist Wilford Wiggins claims to have discovered caveman drawings in an old cave. He almost becomes rich and famous for the "discovery", but Encyclopedia notices a drawing of a caveman fighting a dinosaur. He points out the dinosaurs went extinct long before the age of man, and Wilford's con is exposed.
52	* Averted in ''Literature/TheDinosaurLords'' when it comes to names confusion and biology. The many dinosaurs from different eras co-existing are explained by the fact that Paradise is likely an artificially-colonised world, and the premise of the story - medieval knights on dinosaurs - is just pure RuleOfCool.
53	* A running theme in the massive coffee table artbook ''Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past'' is showing how many artists over the decades have decided to ignore or contort scientific evidence in favor of sheer artistic expression. Incidentally, the book also contains some clunkers of its own, like referring to mammal-relatives such as ''Dimetrodon'' and ''Cynognathus'' as dinosaurs and mis-identifying some pterosaurs as plesiosaurs in one caption. However, the author does make it clear that the book is about the examination of art, and is not a science volume.
54	* Given the patchy record of prehistory available in 1911, ''Literature/QuestForFire'' naturally takes many liberties for the sake of a compelling story. [[AccidentallyCorrectWriting Some have aged surprisingly well]]. [[ScienceMarchesOn Others not so much]]:
55	** The [[PantheraAwesome cave lion]] is portrayed as [[EndangeredSpecies a species on the brink of extinction]]. 100,000 years ago which [[AnachronisticAnimal predates the earliest known cave lion remains]]. It's "colossal" size also appears to be based on the then better known American lion (cave lions were a newly discovered species at the time).
56	** The chief of mammoths is apparently male. [[AnimalGenderBender Mammoths likely lived in matriarchal societies like modern elephants do]].
57	** There are a couple instances of mammoths impaling people and other animals with their tusks. This would have been difficult if not impossible for a woolly mammoth given the curvature of said tusks.
58	* Usborne:
59	** The first page of ''The Great Animal Search'' is set during North America during the late Cretaceous period. Much of the stuff is chalked up by ScienceMarchesOn. The presence of ''Stegosaurus'', on the other hand...
60	** ''The Great Dinosaur Search'' includes the Triassic amphibian ''Gerrothorax'' in a Carboniferous panorama (75 million years before it actually lived).
61	** ''The Great Prehistoric Search'' illustrates the dog-sized armadillo ''Peltephilus'' as an elephant-sized giant and places the Asian ape ''Sivapithecus'' in Africa.
62	* The ''Literature/DinosaurVs'' books feature a dinosaur living with humans.

Context ArtisticLicensePaleontology / Literature