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Fanfic / Prehistoric Park: Returned from Extinction

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Prehistoric Park: Returned from Extinction, formerly titled Prehistoric Park: Reborn, is a Prehistoric Park fanfic by Flameal15k.

The initial plot is the same as the series: Zoologist Nigel Marven travels back in time to rescue animals on the brink of extinction. The plan is to bring them to the safety of the present and give them a second chance.

While the initial chapters are merely adaptations of the episodes from the original series, from Chapter 32 onwards, the story is original content.

In addition to the main story, there are also two side stories: Inside Their World, which follows the residents of the park when the camera isn't rolling; and The Untold Stories, which follows the lives of the staff off-camera. Additionally, the story has a Spacebattles forum.

The story was completed on August 11, 2023. A sequel, Welcome to Prehistoric Kingdom, was posted on March 10, 2024. Tropes for that story can be found here.

Tropes applying to the main story:

  • Adaptation Expansion:
  • Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: The art the author has posted for the story (so far) is very vibrant. The author has also confirmed that many of the animals rescued in "Demons of the Deep" were very brightly colored.
  • Amphibian at Large: The park has several giant amphibians: Eryops, Crassigyrinus, Anaschisma, Slaugenhopia, and Cosgriffius are just some of them.
  • Always a Bigger Fish: A frequent occurrence in the story, where a predator or other creature that is proving to be an obstacle or danger for Nigel and his team is quickly confronted with a larger, more dangerous creature. Nigel often exploits this to rescue both creatures. It happens enough that it gets a Lampshade Hanging in "Rise of the Mammals".
  • Anticlimax:
    • An interesting one — during "The Tale of the Sail", the team goes back to rescue Dimetrodon, and literally encounters one the minute they step out of the portal, along with a small group of Edaphosaurus. They only need a few minutes to bait it into the portal. Downplayed, though, because there are still plenty of other creatures they still need to rescue. Additionally, they still need to rescue more Dimetrodon in order to estabolish a breeding colony]].
    • A similar example happens during "Sea Lions, Seals, and Walruses, Oh My!", when Elise and Tristan go looking for the Caribbean Monk Seal... only to literally trip over one the minute they step out of the time portal. Once hundred percent Played for Laughs.
  • Artistic License – Paleontology:
    • First off, it is incredibly unlikely that any variety of dinosaurs possessed bioluminescence.
    • The show portrays Desmostylus as being able to move on land, even though all evidence indicates that it was fully aquatic. The series does acknowledge this, though, as it portrays the creatures as having to drag themselves across land instead of actually walking.
  • Berserk Button:
    • Meta example: do not try to tell the author that Montanaspinus is not real. He knows this, but has repeatedly stated that he put it in the story do to Rule of Cool and will not remove it.
    • Another meta one, but the author reacted with extreme rage when the story was plagiarized on the Prehistoric Park Fanon wiki.
  • Beyond the Impossible: The team actually manages to rescue the dinosaurs from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, despite the fact that said film is explicitly stated In-Universe to be fictional.
  • Big Creepy-Crawlies: In addition to the Carboniferous arthropods rescued in the original series, the park is also home to several types of eurypterids, including the earliest known species, Pentecopterus. Chapter 27 sees the rescue of Websteroprion, an animal from the Devonian period that was essentially a giant Bobbit worm. And while it isn't the focus animal, Chapter 31 has the team save a group of palaeodictyopterans.
  • Brick Joke: In the fourth segment of Rise of the Mammals, Alice suggests that the time portal could be used to rescue dinosaurs from movies like Jurassic Park, since the group already rescued as prehistoric dragon. While this is more or less treated as a joke In-Universe, this actually happens in the fourth part of Time of the Titans.
  • Canis Major: Epicyon, the largest species of dog to ever live, is rescued in The Great American Safari.
  • Canon Welding: Per Chapter 135, the events of Walking with Dinosaurs actually happened in this story’s universe. This was the very first time they got the portal to work, and apparently, robots were used to film the creatures. As for all of the inaccuracies, it’s stated that the producers did not want to get criticized for using ideas not supported by paleontology at the time.
  • Crossover: With Walking with Dinosaurs, or at least the specials: the Chased by Dinosaurs and Sea Monsters specials are said to have happened in this story, and were apparently practice missions for the actual rescues. Several animals from those series appear in Chapter 3, with the author stating they are the same animals from those specials.
    • Explicitly becomes one in Chapter 135, as at that point the team goes back to rescue Coelophysis, and ends up encountering the Postosuchus from New Blood.
    • The end of Chapter 140 confirms it is also a crossover with Primeval, following the reveal of an anomaly. This was heavily foreshadowed in the previous chapters, though.
    • The end of Chapter 144 confirms it is also a crossover with Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real, following the appearance of a Prehistoric Dragon. Was foreshadowed in earlier chapters with the carcass of a mosasaur having charred bones.
  • Divergent Character Evolution: In-universe example with the park's Allosaurus, and applied on a species level — since the park rescued multiple species of Allosaurus (some of which are now defunct), they're able to observe the unique nuances that differ between each species in both appearance and behavior. The more common Allosaurus fragilis, for example, really live up to their epithet of being the Lion of the Jurassic, being the Fantastic Fauna Counterpart to lions (including apparently living in prides). A. jimmadseni, meanwhile (the one that Big Al and Alicia belong to) are monogamous and live in mated pairs, though it isn't specified if this is serial monogamy (pairs seek out different partners each season) or a more devoted relationship. Finally, A. lucasi is solitary except during mating season.
  • Establishing Series Moment: The first chapter alone features the rescue of well over one hundred different animals, while also sparing the female T. rex, telling us this series is going to have a much larger cast than the original, and that it will be Lighter and Softer than the source material.
  • Exotic Entree: Inverted. Chapter 171 has Elise and Sean eat red lionfish to help the environment by culling an invasive species' numbers (the fish is native to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, not the Carribean).
  • Extinct Animal Park: Prehistoric Park houses a variety of prehistoric animals retrieved via time travel, and eventually even starts taking in creatures from the future.
  • Foreshadowing: A huge amount of this was use to hint at the story being a crossover with Primeval:
    • One of the park's Edestus wanders into an underwater cave and finds the bones of several animals too large to have entered said cave, and also sees a 'lightshow' that scares it away.
    • Several strange pillars show up that are arranged in circles and are made of magnetite. Magnetite is noted as being capable of containing anomalies in the original series.
    • The park has a natural occurring poison filled valley that contains the carcasses of several dead animals...some of which are dinosaurs. It also has people going through it, some in what appear to be half-tracks.
  • Fluffy the Terrible: Vera ends up naming the park's first Acrocanthosaurus (a carnivorous dinosaur known to hunt the giant sauropods) Finn.
  • Formula-Breaking Episode: Unlike all of the other chapters, The City of Cactus does not focus on Nigel and the team trying to rescue a prehistoric species, but instead follows Tristan and Terence after they accidentally end up in the future due to damage to the portal device.
  • Funny Background Event: While Suzanne and Bob are busy cleaning out sauropod dung in order to gather prehistoric maggots using it as lunch, a confused Haplocanthosaurus watches on, before proceeding to inflict a Groin Attack on an approaching Stegosaurus. A security team watching this cannot help but wince, regardless of gender.
  • Giant Equals Invincible: It's pretty rare for particularly large animals to be threatened by any other creatures in the series.
  • Giant Flyer: On the pterosaurs' side, Quetzalcoatlus. On the birds' side, Cathartornis, a relative of the more well known Teratornis and Argentavis. Teratornis itself shows up later in the story.
  • Groin Attack: Tale of the Sail 4 has an implied one with a Haplocanthosaurus and a male Stegosaurus. The injury isn't specified, but the reactions of a security team make it rather obvious what happened.
  • Hailfire Peaks: It's been stated that the park has tundra on it, despite being in the tropics. Even the narration is confused by this. It's been hinted that this is going to be important in the future.
  • Hemisphere Bias: Most of the chapters focus on animals from North America. Granted, there are a huge number of well-known fossil sites from North America (including Hell Creek, the La Brea Tar Pits, and the Texas Red Beds, among others), but it is still a rather obvious bias.
  • Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: To test the effects of the time portal, people are sent back to — among other things — remove infamous dictators from power. When they come back to the present, nothing changed, confirming that the portal doesn't affect their timeline. Instead, it creates alternate timelines. Because of this, the Park can potentially rescue extinct animals, even famous individuals like Big Al, without the risk of causing a paradox or otherwise damaging the time stream.
  • Improbable Taxonomy Skills: The end-of-chapter notes tend to include the genus and species name of each creature rescued, something that is usually rather rare, even in the source material and other Prehistoric Park fanfiction. Some chapters include this simply for the sake of keeping things clear to the readers — the mission to rescue dinosaurs from Jurassic North America explicitly lists Big Al as an Allosaurus fragilus. That example, though, was also because all Allosaurus species from that time and location were rescued (for reference, North America has five different species of Allosaurus — A. fragilus, A. lucasi, A. jimmadseni, A. atrox, and A. amplus. And ironically, that example was subject to a retcon when the author found out that Big Al was actually an Allosaurus jimmadseni.
  • Last of His Kind: Of all the animals in the park, only Martha, the Elasmotherium, and Finn fulfill this role, as every other prehistoric species in the park had at least a breeding pair rescued. Later, they are joined by the Ice Age jaguar.
  • Meanwhile, in the Future…: The focus will sometimes shift back to the park during a mission.
  • Mega Crossover: In addition to be an explicitly stated crossover between Prehistoric Park and Walking with Dinosaurs, its also one with When Dinosaurs Roamed America, Primeval, Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real, Age of Reptiles, Jurassic Park, and Dinosaur Planet.
  • Misplaced Wildlife: The City of Cactus features antelope in North America. Justified,, though - these are future antelope descendant from the gemsbok, which were introduced to New Mexico and currently have a population of about 3,000 living in that state, as they have no predators to cut down on their numbers.
  • Mundane Utility: In addition to the Titanosaurs, the park has also used Terence as a tow truck.
  • Mushroom Samba: Marcus and Vera start having hallucinations in Double Crested Lizard. It turns out to have been caused by them being sneezed on by a Pachycephalosaurus that had eaten ferns with hallucinogenic properties.
  • Mythology Gag:
    • The final episode of Sea Monsters referred to the Most Dangerous Sea of All Time (The Western Interior Seaway) as Hell's Aquarium. The name of the chapter in this story where Nigel goes to rescue the creatures of that sea is titled Return to Hell's Aquarium.
    • When Big Al find evidence of a female in his territory, he initially feels amorous, before instantly growing cautious, wit the story noting his previous experiences with the opposite sex were responsible for more than few injuries. In The Ballad of Big Al, his impulsiveness in attempting to charm a female resulted in him almost getting torn apart, resulting in multiple broken ribs and an arm injury.
  • Never Smile at a Crocodile:
    • The park has not only Deinosuchus, but also Sarcosuchus. According to Word of God, it's the same one from Chased By Dinosaurs.
    • There's also a bunch of smaller prehistoric crocodilians running around the park, such as Brachychampsa, Borealosuchus, Gaviolosuchus, and Thoracosaurus.
    • And that's not including all the land living crocodilians (such as Diplosaurus, Fruitachampsa, and Carnufex) and crocodilian relatives (such as Smilosuchus, Postosuchus, and Vivaron) that have also been rescued.
  • Oh, Crap!: In Chapter 30, Part 5, the away team has this reaction when they realize that the "pond" a group of animals is running towards is actually a tar pit.
  • Ominous Foreshadowing: There's a lot of hints in this story that the park's time portal isn't the only way to go back in time....
    • Chief among them happens in part five of Kaibab's Hunter, where we see a pit filled with toxic fumes (from natural gas) which has the corpses of many animals in them....including several dinosaurs, with the narration explicitly noting that these aren't creatures that the park rescued.
  • Original Character:
    • Several speculative dinosaurs have been included in the story, including Montanaspinus and Arizonatyrannus.
    • A Gila Monster descendent and Giant Roadrunner are examples of this in The City of Cactus, as both come from a time period in the relative future.
  • Panthera Awesome: Besides Smilodon, the park also has several other species of feliforms, ranging from other machairodonts (Machairodus) to close relatives (Barbourofelis). The American Cheetah, Miracinonyx, is rescued in The Last Supper.
  • Patchwork Map: The tropical island the park is on has a tundra. However, this noted to be very unusual, and adds to the island's mystery.
  • Prehistoric Monster: Defied: the author portrays prehistoric creatures in the same way modern ones are.
  • Running Gag: In Time of the Titans, whenver an animal falls over, it will usually be trampled by several smaller animals. This happens to a Torvosaurus and a Saurophaganax. The only predator to avert this is a Ceratosaurus. Note that both of the trampled animals survived being trampled by other creatures. The Saurophaganax', in particular, only comes out of being stepped on by a Stegosaurus and a Ceratosaurus'' with a few broken ribs.
  • Scary Stinging Swarm: A horde of bees ends up chasing Tristan, Pamela, and a Sinocalliopteryx in the first segment of Sea Lions, Seals, and Walruses, Oh My! Instead of Honey Bees, though, they're actually members of the genus Melipona, a type of stingless bee. They do bite, though. They weren't initially interested in the humans or the dinosaur, but the compsognathid ended up tackling Pamela, who collided with Tristan, who then hit the hive.
  • Shout-Out:
  • Shown Their Work: The author goes to extreme lengths to make sure that each chapter is up to date with recent discoveries in the fossil record.
    • All dinosaurs are accurately feathered.
    • It's explicitly noted that terror birds died out due to climate change and not due to being outcompeted by mammalian predators. Contrary to popular belief, terror birds would not have competed with saber-toothed cats for food, as they are specialized in hunting completely different prey.
    • That being said, the author has admitted to keeping any artistic license that were present in the original series (namely, having Smilodon live side-by-side with Phorusrhacos when the latter disappeared before the former evolved, and having Nyctosaurus, Deinosuchus and Albertosaurus appear in the same mission).
    • On the non-paleontological side of things, the author mentions that whenever the team goes diving, they always make a safety stop to let nitrogen gas filter out of their blood so that they do not suffer decompression sickness. According to the author, this is because he has actually been Scuba diving and knows all of the rules associated with it.
    • Additionally, after accidentally colliding with a bee hive, Tristan, Pamela, and a ''Sinocalliopteryx immediately run toward a nearby cave. Hiding in a dark place is one of the recommendations when being chased by bees, who depend heavily on sight in addition to smell.
  • Spared by the Adaptation: The female Tyrannosaurus, four of the Mei long from Dino Birds, and the second Smilodon cub are all successfully rescued and are doing fine in the park.
    • As of the end of New Blood, the female Postosuchus and the baby cynodonts can be added to this list as well.
    • ''Time of the Titans sees the saving of Big Al.
    • EVERYONE from Death of A Dynasty.
  • Swiss-Cheese Security: The park's security teams seem to be rather inept, seeing how they completely fail to notice that Terence and Matilda have escaped their exhibits multiple times. Per Word of God, this is because they are regularly trying to deal with the smaller animals of the park, who tend to escape their exhibits with annoying regularity. They finally catch onto the fences being broken in Chapter 22, and immediately set to work repairing them. That being said, they do tend to place a bit of thought into the enclosures and what goes in them — the tyrannosaur exhibit, at the very least, has a moat around it, in addition to the obvious fencing. Then again, nobody knew that tyrannosaurs could swim.
  • Theme Naming: Just about every chapter is named after the target animal of the chapter's rescue. The only exception to the rule is The Great American Safari, and even this is a Downplayed example, as there is no real target animal of the episode - it instead focuses on rescuing animals from all over North America.
  • Toilet Humour: There's been a few scenes where the park has had some of the staff clean through the droppings of residents in order to retrieve prehistoric insects that were...well, eating the animal waste.
  • Too Dumb to Live: Subverted with an (as yet) unnamed Alvarezsaur; he goes inside the enclosure at T-rex Hill after sneaking out and wakes Terence up by chirping, but it turns out he was there to clean Terence's teeth.
  • Wham Episode:
    • Chapter 135: New Blood Part 1: Not only is it revealed that the events of ''Walking with Dinosaurs actually happened in this series (it was the first time that the time portal was used), but the team actually ends up encountering the dinosaurs from said series, officially making it a crossover with said series.
    • Chapter 140: New Blood Part 6: An anomaly appears, confirming this story is a crossover with Primeval. Additionally, It's also revealed that the natives of the island the park is on are aware of the animalies, and that the stone pillars they have built out of magnetite are meant to contain them.
    • Chapter 144: Dinosaurs from the East 4: just as a hadrosaur is about to be killed by a pack of Dryptosaurus, a Prehistoric Dragon interrupts the hunt.
    • The Land Outside of Time: Where to begin?! Not only do creatures from Monster Hunter and The Witcher show up, but so does Commander Flame and Vivian, confirming this story to be part of the Conquest in the Name of Advancement! Mythos. Interactions with Commander Flame also reveal that the park itself is actually part of a Land Outside of Time. Then, just as they see Flame and Vivian off to finish their business in the Zero Dawn world, a machine unburies itself and knocks them all out. Afer waking up in and subsequently escaping the Sun Ring, the group has to deal with a massive number of portals opening simultaneously when one of Flame's enemeis arrives to tie up loose ends. Finally, the very last part of the chapter confirms that Nigel was at least partially aware of what happened, indicating that the Saurus family patriarch is also aware of his children's misadventures.
  • Wham Line:
    • Chapter 177 has this bit of description regarding an injured Allosaurus Tristan encounters:
      More interesting to Tristan, though, was the large swollen spot on the dinosaur's middle toe on its right foot...
    • Additionally, there's this gem from the rescue list for The Last Supper:
      Passenger Pigeon: 20 individuals

Tropes applying to Inside Their World:

  • A Day In The Lime Light: This story functions as one for the various animals in the park, and usually focuses on how they react to the modern world.
  • Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: In Zhao's chapter, she meets a Richardoestesia, a very poorly known species of theropod, that is purple and yellow.
  • Artistic License – Paleontology: One corrected with a Retcon — Martha's chapter has her react with confusion to seeing an American Bison, even though she would have lived side by side with Steppe Bison. After a reviewer pointed this out, her confusion regarding that particular creature was removed.
  • Humans Through Alien Eyes: Humans are frequently noted to be odd in many of the animal POVs, leaving many of the animals unsure about how they should act toward them. This can also be extended to any other prehistoric creature that appears in each chapter, as creatures we can recognize are completely alien to the temporally displaced residents of the park.
  • Locked Out of the Loop: It's made very clear in several chapters of this sidestory that many of the prehistoric inhabitants of the park have no idea what to make about each other and the modern residents of the park, leading many to be overly cautious around creatures most people would find familiar.
  • Perspective Flip: The main story and The Untold Stories focus on the human cast rescuing animals from extinction. Inside Their World focuses on the rescued animals that now have to adapt to the present.
  • Prehistoric Monster: Defied with extreme prejudice: while the main story already tries to subvert or defy this trope, Inside Their World goes out of its way to make all of the animals at the park sympathetic, while trying to eliminate an monstrous traits the animals might possess.
  • Shout-Out: The title is one to the app Walking with Dinosaurs: Inside Their World.
  • Stock Animal Diet: Averted with Zhao, who is portrayed as eating clay among other things. Word of God is that this is based on Macaws and elephants, which do this in real life. In fact, several macaws are shown eating from the same clay deposit as Zhao.
  • Xenofiction: The animals aren't humanized at all in this story, and it shows. A big result of this is that we get to see how strange many modern animals are to extinct ones. This is especially true in the case of Ben, because as an arthropod from the Carboniferous, the only vertebrates he would have seen were (essentially) lizards and amphibians, yet now he is seeing some creatures that are bigger than he is.

Tropes applying to the Untold Stories

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