Walking With Dinosaurs: The Next Chapter is a Walking with Dinosaurs fanfic by Flameal15k.
The story is meant to be, per Word of God, a soft reboot of the original series, accounting for how much Science has marched on since the original.
Spacebattles Thread.
Fanfiction.net link
This series provides examples of:
- Adaptational Expansion:
- In the original series' companion books, while a temnospondylid and phytosaur are both mentioned, neither is named nor given any major scenes. Here, they are respectively referred to as Koskinodon and Smilosuchus, and both get an entire scene to themselves.
- Coelururs, which also appeared in the companion book, gets a few scenes here as well.
- Adaptational Species Change:
- The Plateosaurus from the original is changed into a generic prosauropod, as Plateosaurus is not native to North America and lived earlier than the rest of the cast in New Blood.
- The cynodont from that episode was changed from an undescribed species to Boreogomphodon, a traversodont from that time and place.
- Always a Bigger Fish: Shows up practically Once an Episode. Among others:
- Smilosuchus, to Postosuchus, in New Blood.
- Sinosaurus, to Panguraptor, in Land of Dragons.
- Megalneusaurus, to Allosaurus, in Titans of Land and Sea.
- Sinocalliopteryx, to Boreopterus, in Spirits of the Frozen Forest.
- Sauroniops, to an indeterminate abelisaur, in The Sail Backed Pharaoh.
- Ambiguous Ending: For The Sail Backed Pharaoh, it's never actually stated whether or not the Kaprosuchus horde killed the female Spinosaurus. That being said, the text implies she won't live for very long either way, given her injuries.
- Bittersweet Ending: The majority of the dinosaurs die out (what did you expect?), but one group, the birds, lives on, and with the dinosaurs now gone, the mammals can now rise to take over the world.
- The Cameo: Big Al from the original makes an appearance in chapter three, where he scavenges off the female Allosaurus' kill.
- Compressed Adaptation: Spirits of the Ice Forest and Giant of the Skies from the original are combined into Spirits of the Frozen Forest, while Time of the Titans and Cruel Sea are combined into Titans of Land and Sea.
- Foreshadowing: Spirits of the Frozen Forest ends with an asteroid colliding with another of its kind, sending it on a collision course with Earth.
- Four Lines, All Waiting: The plot of the final episode is divided between animals living in New Mexico, Montana, the Eastern United States, Madagascar, Romania, and Antarctica. All of the plots end in tragedy, implied or outright stated.
- Shown Their Work:
- Postosuchus is capable of standing upright.
- Liopleurodon is correctly portrayed as being contemporary to Juratyrant, instead of Eustreptospondylus.
- Spinosaurus is correctly portrayed as having short legs, though still implied to be bipedal (which is far more plausible than the quadrupedal model initially proposed). Later becomes
Accidentally-Correct Writing when it becomes clear Spinosaurus really was bipedal.
- The Stinger: Has one that reveals the fates of some of the protagonists from Demise of the Dinosaurs. They ran into a blue light and escaped into the present, in the process revealing this story is also a crossover with the author's other dinosaur themed work, Prehistoric Park: Returned from Extinction.
- Whole-Plot Reference:
- New Blood, to the episode of the same name from the original.
- Spirits of the Frozen Forest, to Spirits of the Ice Forest of the original.
- The Sail Backed Pharaoh to The Ballad of Big Al.
- Zerg Rush: A Rugops pack does this to the protagonist female Spinosaurus in The Sail Backed Pharaoh. She fights them off, but takes heavy injuries doing so.
