Slurpasaur

aka: Miniature Effect

Little known fact: Dinosaurs look just like giant iguanas.

Ian Malcolm: What? What did you expect to document? What did you expect to see?
Nick Van Owen: Animals, maybe... big iguanas.

— The Lost World: Jurassic Park

Making movies about giant monsters (often dinosaurs) is downright awesome. However, sometimes, the filmmakers just don't have the budget to make a somewhat convincing monster suit, or an animatronic puppet, or stop-motion, or, for newer movies, a reasonable-looking CGI monster.

But, all hope is not lost. No.... you can just take an ordinary lizard, alligator or other non-extinct reptile (or, very rarely, other smallish animal), stick it in a costume or glue on a few cardboard fins and horns, and... ta-da! Instant dinosaur!

Of course, having an Adventurer Palaeontologist pointing to an oversized iguana with horns glued to its head and calling it a "Brontosaurus" is just as convincing as it sounds, not to mention a complete and utter mockery of palaeontology. After all, if a five-year-old kid can tell the difference between a Tyrannosaurus rex and an iguana, it's highly unlikely anyone is going to be convinced that your cardboard-taped-to-his-back monitor lizard is supposed to be a dinosaur. Especially if they have any understanding of the Square-Cube Law.

Still, that's what makes these movies such cheesy fun. A good source of Nightmare Retardant, many fans suspect that these films' animal stars are the film-makers' pets. This has been a Discredited Trope since The '60s, with crude CGI having taken over as the go-to monster effect for low-budget filmmaking.. A normal-sized but similarly nonthreatening movie animal is the Terrifying Pet Store Rat. A similar trope in which human actors are dressed as humanoid aliens is the Rubber-Forehead Alien, although it tends to be more convincing. Slurpasaurs are very much a Dead Horse Trope, having died out in the 1960s, and is today only employed as deliberate Retraux kitsch.

Given growing mainstream awareness that many dinosaurs had feathers (possibly even T. rex), and that dinosaurs in general would be better described as proto-birds than as big lizards (to the point where modern biologists actually differentiate between "avian dinosaurs" and "non-avian dinosaurs" rather than between birds and dinosaurs), it would be interesting to see a reconstruction/parody of this trope in the form of a Retraux or Genre Throwback work using a chicken in a toy-sized toothy mask in place of a T. rex.

While rare, mammallian examples have been used, such as dressing a horse up as a Unicorn or dressing dogs up as wolves or canine monsters, or putting fake pelts on elephants to make mammoths. Oddly enough, depending on the example these uses actually fare a bit better in the believablity department.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Parodied in a series of ads for McDonald's in the UK, which showed people running from a superimposed cute Pug in a lizard costume. The idea being that this is what you got if you spent 99p on a special effects budget instead of their Pound saver menu.
• Also in a Heineken ad which showed a tortoise with Stegosaurus plates glued to its shell.

Arts

• Medieval and Renaissance depictions of Saint George fighting the dragon frequently draw the dragon as a large monitor lizard with wings.◊

Comic Strips

• FoxTrot: On more than one occasion, Jason would try to make dinosaur or Godzilla-wannabe movies by filming his pet iguana Quincy, usually with a cardboard fin on his back or some other type of accoutrements. More often than not, this would end with Quincy chewing Jason's toys or sets into unrecognizable hunks of plastic.

Fan Works

• Plan 7 of 9 from Outer Space. Reporter Buster Kincaid accuses Captain Proton of fraud, saying that experts have identified the Slurpasaur that Proton allegedly encountered on an alien world as "an optically-enlarged iguana with a fin stuck to its back."

Films — Animation

• Parodied in Frankenweenie (and in Tim Burton's original short film). The film opens with the projection of the protagonist's homemade film, on it, "dinosaurs" made of handkerchief sock puppets "fight" and then the "monster" appears: the protagonist's dog in a costume.
• In-universe example in The Last Unicorn. Mommy Fortuna takes everyday animals and uses a little bit of trickery to fool people into thinking they're mythical beasts. When she captures the titular unicorn, as the general public can't see her horn, she has to stick a fake horn onto her head.
• The giant Kaiju-like being Meowthra who attacks the city in The LEGO Ninjago Movie turns out to be an ordinary house-cat... which, seeing as she's an ordinary house-cat attacking a city made out of and populated by LEGO, means that she can cause as much destruction as an actual kaiju.
• Spoofed in Team America: World Police — the deadly 'panthers' who threaten our heroes are clearly two young black housecats (with a lot of snarling and growling dubbed in).
• The rotoscoped fantasy movie Fire & Ice plays this one pretty straight, with a giant iguana (with stegosaur-like plates on its back) attacking some of the bad guys in one scene. This is both a cost-cutting measure, since it is easier than having to animate a monster from scratch, and it also just fits the deliberately campy tone of the movie.

Films — Live-Action

• The Trope Namer example (albeit by fans of the film), and the one where most of this footage comes from, is One Million B.C. with Victor Mature and Carole Landis. This film had a plethora of animals in makeup and/or visually enlarged to make them look monstrous. The image above is from this movie. Other examples from this film include an elephant in fur as a woolly mammoth,^note which is actually quite convincing when you realize woolly mammoths were furry elephants, a pig with glued-on horns and a tail as a Triceratops, alligator with a glued-on fin (enlarged), various enlarged lizards (monitors, iguana, skinks) as dinosaurs, a snake and an enlarged coati which eats the snake on screen, and an (enlarged) armadillo with rubber horns. It also featured a rubbersuit Tyrannosaurus rex which was not enlarged in any way. Yeah, it's So Bad, It's Good.
  • One Million Years B.C., the 1966 remake, generally avoided this (favoring stop-motion instead), although a real lizard and spider were thrown in around the beginning as an homage to the original film, and to make the quality of all the other effects in the movie easier to appreciate by contrast. The Archelon (a giant prehistoric turtle) that attacks Loana's tribe is sometimes mistaken for a slurpasaur effect, which is probably a testament to the quality of Ray Harryhausen's animation.
• The FX from One Million BC got reused from the 1940s through the 1960s in such films as: Tarzan's Desert Mystery, Two Lost Worlds, The Lost Volcano, the American version of Godzilla Raids Again, Jungle Manhunt, Untamed Women, Robot Monster, King Dinosaur, Teenage Caveman, Valley of the Dragons, Journey to the Center of Time, Horror of the Blood Monsters (the stock footage was tinted in color for this film), and the Mexican films Island of the Dinosaurs (La Isla De Los Dinosaurios) and Adventure at the Center of the Earth (Aventura al Centro de la Tierra). If you've seen much MST3K, you've probably seen the footage in question a few times.
• A mammalian example would be the film The Killer Shrews. When the so-called giant shrews were not being played by cheap puppets, they were being played by dogs in very unconvincing costumes. This is hilariously pointed out in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode that featured this movie.
• The Giant Gila Monster more traditionally has a reptile play a reptile. The title monster looks okay — except for the fact that it isn't a Gila monster, it's a Mexican beaded lizard (which is, to be fair, a very closely related species). Seeing the little guy wander around the miniature sets and push matchbox cars around is the high point of the movie.
• * Rebel Moon features riding animals that are clearly horses with something attached to their heads.
• Played for Laughs in Home Movie: The Princess Bride where the Rodent of Unusual Size is portrayed by Sophie Turner's corgi wearing a neck pillow licking her and Joe Jonas to death.
• Irwin Allen's 1960 adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912) is notorious for this. Particularly when poor Claude Rains identifies a monitor lizard with a plastic frill as a brontosaurus. The most definitely not-fake alligator vs. monitor lizard battle shows one of the main reasons why this trope isn't used anymore. This is the last real use of this trope in the classic sense.
  • Daniel Cohen's book Hollywood Dinosaur suggests the brontosaurus line as what really pushes this movie's use of the trope past acceptability. An audience might be willing to suspend their disbelief enough to accept an iguana with fins as a generic, unspecified dinosaur, but asking them to accept it as a Brontosaurus is just an insult to their intelligence.
• In Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), optically enlarged lizards with fins glued to their backs play dimetrodons, a synapsid that actually looks... sort of like a lizard with a fin on its back (though the ones in the film are somewhat larger than their real-life counterparts). They don't actually look too bad. Although, this is later played again with an even bigger lizard in the ruins of Atlantis which they didn't even try to pass off as anything unique (Wikipedia lists it as Megalania, a giant prehistoric monitor lizard — although it's portrayed by a tegu lizard, not a monitor). Technically also applicable for Gertrude, who was originally slated to be a common eider duck, but was played by a white domestic duck in makeup because the trainer couldn't get a real eider through customs in the time available.
• In King Dinosaur (from 1955) an iguana plays a Tyrannosaurus rex (which, for some reason, lives on another planet). Hilariously, the biologist identifies the obvious iguana as a tyrannosaur! There's also plenty of requisite One Million BC Stock Footage, and some woolly mammoths which are just elephants clothed in shaggy fur, though that doesn't seem very far-fetched considering woolly mammoths are indeed just elephants covered in long fur. All of these get pointed out in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode featuring the film.
• The large fire-breathing dragon in 1971 Swedish fantasy comedy Äppelkriget/The Apple War is played by a little lizard.
• A similar example appears in the 1970s Czech fairy tale movie Princ a Večernice (The Prince and the Evening Star). During the prince's epic journey to fulfill his quest, he has to climb a high cliff at one moment. When he finally reaches the cliff's edge, a dragon-like monster appears before him... played by the all-time slurpasaur favourite — an iguana! This gets justified and subverted in an amusing way though : The "dragon" immediately vanishes, since it's just another illusion summoned by the evil wizard of the story, who's trying to discourage the prince from continuing further...
• Proving that it's possible to dress up an animal and make it work, the banthas from A New Hope were played by an elephant named Mardji draped with thick furs and a puppet head, and since they could only afford one elephant several scenes with more than one bantha were achieved through optical composing. In a few scenes the elephant's trunk can be barely seen through the furs but it's otherwise a convincing illusion, though she apparently attempted to remove her costume several times during filming and caused a few outtakes. Averted with Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, who was initially conceived as being portrayed by a costumed monkey rather than a puppet.
  • In a rare modern (and convincing) example, the Corellian hounds in Solo were played by actual dogs in full-body costumes, as an homage to the Death Dogs from the earlier Ron Howard/George Lucas production Willow.
• The Land Unknown (1957) had two stegosauruses fighting each other which were obviously photographically enlarged monitor lizards.
• King Kong vs. Godzilla features a giant octopus as a secondary monster on top of the two in the title, who menaces the natives and explorers on Farou Island before Kong comes to the rescue. An unusually-polished example, the giant octopus was for the most part portrayed by real octopi, who were encouraged to clamber over the miniature set by using warm air and studio lighting. A sophisticated puppet was also built, and stop motion animation was additionally used to portray the giant cephalopod.
• In 1963, the Japanese studio Daiei, inspired by the Kaiju film craze which had started by rival studio Toho’s Godzilla attempted to make one of these, titled Nezura, about a horde of giant rats attacking Tokyo. The problems began when the store-bought rats they brought in failed to either rampage around the miniature set, or do much of anything at all. The wild rats they brought in were slightly better, but also brought heaps of parasites, fleas, and other germs which led to the production being shut down. Undeterred, Daiei would go on to make a monster movie about a giant flying turtle instead.
• Nosferatu used a striped hyena to pose as a werewolf, which is pretty clever given that it's superficially dog-like but also alien to viewers in the 1920s.
• Alien³ attempted to put an alien suit on a small whippet dog for a brief scene when the xenomorph is still at small size, but when they looked at the result, it looked exactly like a small dog wearing an alien suit. Adorable, but not exactly threatening, so they ended up using a puppet.
• Kung Fury has a wolf who's clearly portrayed by a regular dog digitally made larger, part of the film's general tone. A peculiar case of Shallow Parody, since Kung Fury is supposed to be a spoof of 1980s movies, but this technique in so blatant a form was already long discredited by the '80s.
• A fairly recent and surprisingly convincing example are the aurochs from Beasts of the Southern Wild, which are actual pigs wearing a makeup of fur and horns (nevermind the fact that the aurochs in Real Life were prehistoric cattle rather than pig-monsters).
• In Quest for Fire, the sabre-toothed cats are played by trained lions with prosthetic teeth. It looks okay.
• Beginning of the End revolves around giant mutant grasshoppers attacking Chicago, and naturally said bugs are played by actual grasshoppers composited into the shot - or in some cases, crawling around on postcards.
• In Amazon Women on the Moon, the astronauts are attacked a dinosaur that is some kind of lizard with horns attached.
• Both Earth vs. the Spider and Tarantula! used real spiders on miniature sets or with rear projection to represent their respective Giant Spider antagonists. On the miniature sets they look pretty good by '50s standards, although Tarantula in particular has some pretty shaky Chroma Key shots.
• The Devil Rides Out has a scene where the protagonists are terrorised by a powerful warlock. He summons a Giant Spider to frighten them, and it's a tarantula enlarged on screen.
• The original Flash Gordon (serial) features "dragons of death", which are actually iguanas on a miniature set of Bronson Canyon and Caves. You could also apply this to Vultan's pet "Ursul" and the "tigron" used by Princess Aura's trackers, which are supposed to be alien creatures but are played, respectively, by a bear and a tiger, though they're portrayed as more akin to regular animals than to monsters - sort of the animal equivalent to all the Human Aliens in the serial.
• As the page quote indicates, the trope is referred to but not actually shown in The Lost World: Jurassic Park: Nick Van Owen's prior experience with dinosaurs was clearly dependent on the likes of One Million B.C.. It also serves as a nice contrast between the old standard and the new presentation of dinosaurs in media in general, which Jurassic Park had a big hand in establishing, both the effects themselves—stop-motion and animals in costumes vs. digital effects and giant animatronics—and the appearance of the dinosaurs, contrasting something which only superficially resembles a real dinosaur with a (mostly) then-accurate representation of the fossil animal.
• Women of the Prehistoric Planet features an unconvincing shot of an iguana as one of the "monsters" on the eponymous Prehistoric Planet. Mystery Science Theater 3000 wasted no time mocking it.
  Servo: Oh my god, it's an insert shot of an iguana!
  Joel: Their technology must be light-years ahead of ours. Their use of stock footage is amazing!
• The Neanderthal Man: Aside from a rather moth-eaten looking prop head used in closeups, the saber-tooth cat is played by a regular non-saber-tooth tiger, making all the skepticism over whether such a beast could actually exist seem very silly. In a few shots you can even see the chain around its neck. You could even call this an aversion since they don't even bother to give it plastic fangs.
• Night of the Lepus combines this with Terrifying Pet Store Rat, with the monsters portrayed by cute bunnies wandering around a miniature set.
• Bride of the Monster's giant octopus is portrayed in some shots by an actual octopus, and in others by a very unconvincing puppet.
• Brotherhood of the Wolf is a kind of meta-example. The mysterious "Beast of Gévaudan", which the locals initially thought was either a particularly large wolf or some outright supernatural monster, turns out to be something else: A lion wearing a set of leather-and-iron barding with some Spikes Of Villany, trained as an Attack Animal by the antagonist.
• Ingagi, about an expedition into Darkest Africa, features the "tortadillo", allegedly a venomous reptile previously unknown to science. It's really just a tortoise with fake wings and a tail glued onto it.
• An early example in The Secret Of The Loch, a 1934 movie about where Nessie is portrayed by an iguana.
• In A*P*E, at one point the giant ape encounters a giant snake in a tree, played by a python placed in a miniature set.
• In the Shaw Brothers movie Dragon Swamp, the dragons are monitor lizards made to look enormous through rather shoddy rear projection.
• Some scenes from Razorback used a real boar dressed up with extra-long prosthetic tusks and bristles.
• Willow uses dogs wearing costumes for the "death dogs."
• Abbott And Costello Go To Mars: Shortly after landing on Venus, Orville gets chased by a "giant" monster played rather blatantly by a small breed of dog that's been made to look big.

Literature

• Played for horror in The Dream of Perpetual Motion. Prospero Taligent, a fabulously wealthy inventor, promises his daughter Miranda she can have anything she wants for her birthday. She asks for a unicorn, knowing it's something he can't give her. Instead she's Forced to Watch while her Mad Scientist father drills a hole into a horse's head and inserts a horn.
• In More Information Than You Require, the mole-men ride around on "pseudosaurs", enormous iguanas that they think are dinosaurs.
• Bruce Coville's Camp Haunted Hills trilogy is set at a camp where the attendees learn how to make movies. Harry Housen (ironically, named for an effects artist who specialized in averting this trope), who teaches special effects, specializes in holographic projection and is always painting his pet iguana Myron different colors, or pasting wings, fins or other things on the lizard, even figuring out how to make smoke come out of Myron's nostrils at one point, and then uses the altered iguana as a model for said holograms. Fortunately, the lizard is very patient about all this. The resulting holograms are more effective than one would think — they terrify both humans AND, in the finale, a family of Bigfoots holding the heroes captive.
• In Julian Comstock the protagonists are making a silent film about naturalist Charles Darwin without much concern for historical accuracy, so the naturalist confronts a ferocious Lion that The Narrator tells us is "really a mastiff dressed up in a carpet and a wig, but very convincing for all that."
• Inverted in the original Jurassic Park novel, where the Procompsognathus that attacked the little girl on the beach is misidentified by a reptile expert as a basilisk lizard, a present-day lizard that is known for occasionally standing and running on 2 legs.
• One briefly appears in Stielauge Der Urkrebs, but it is called a dragon.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who:
  • Played straight:
    • Used very effectively with the giant maggots in "The Green Death", which were real maggots on miniature sets when not puppets made of condoms and taxidermy supplies.
    • One of the more infamous examples is from "The Talons of Weng-Chiang", in which close-ups of a rat in a model sewer are meant to suggest a terrifying giant rat. A man in a rat costume is also used. Sadly, and predictably, the real rat and the rat suit of course look nothing alike.
  • Subverted:
    • Invoked in the story "Colony in Space". A robot with claws plus a hologram simulates a giant lizard attack, in a plot to drive the colonists off the planet.
    • Also invoked in the later story "Vengeance on Varos", only with a hologram (stock footage) of a fly instead of an iguana.
• Parodied in a Little Red Riding Hood-based skit on Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus (also seen in Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl) in which the Big Bad Wolf is played by a tired-looking dachshund with a piece of faux fur tied to its back.
• The Adventures of Sinbad, used superimposed crows and iguanas as giant monsters for its first season.
• One of the Time Travel episodes in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The Series has the family being transported to "prehistoric times" and being promptly chased by a giant monitor lizard. The alleged Child Prodigy identifies it as a Tenontosaurus, which in reality was a vegetarian dinosaur. And then a caveman shows up.
• An interesting case where this actually works is the BBC documentary series Monsters We Met. The giant Haast eagle is played by an enlarged Harpy eagle, and it's downright creepy.
• The Life of Birds attempted the same thing by using a Harris's hawk to play a Haast's eagle. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite as convincing.
• An America's Funniest Home Videos submission spoofing Jurassic Park used dinosaurs played by guinea pigs. GUINEA PIGS.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • "The Enemy Within" has a lovable alien creature played by... a cocker spaniel with a horn stuck between its eyes and an extra-long fur coat and tail. Granted, it fulfilled its main requirement: it was cute, and could alternately be lovable/evil.
    • Klingon targs throughout the various series were generally played by largish dogs in costume, although since the targ was supposed to be roughly that size and mammalian (vaguely like a small, angry boar), it didn't go too poorly.
  • The Star Trek: Voyager episode "Resolutions" used a spider monkey that had been trained to walk on its hind legs. Unfortunately the first time we see it is in a tree, so the effect is ruined. Even when it's standing, it's still recognizable as a monkey.
• Merlin occasionally has Arthur fighting giant underground monsters, vaguely mammalian but with no hair and huge front teeth. They are actually naked mole rats filmed close-up and superimposed on the action. And this from a series that routinely includes a convincing CGI dragon.
• Despite being created with CGI, the Ancestral Komodo Dragon from Terra Nova may be a subtle parody of this trope.
• In a shout-out to the Doctor Who example above, Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible uses miniature footage of an ordinary crab superimposed on footage of a sewer, as well as some footage of a claw puppet, in order to give the impression of a Giant Enemy Crab.
• Space: 1999: in the episode "New Adam, New Eve", in a change from the usual People in Rubber Suits, giant lizards are encountered in a cave. Commander Koenig makes short work of them with his laser.
• Goosebumps (1995): The adaptation of "Deep Trouble" dealt with animals being enlarged thanks to Applied Phlebotinum. They use normal-sized iguanas, ants, spiders zoomed in and enlarged with CGI.
• Played for laughs on Galavant, where King Richard purchases something he insists is a baby dragon like on Game of Thrones, and he gives it the mighty name of Tad Cooper. It's clear to every other character that Tad is really just a bearded dragon until The Stinger suggests he has finally grown into a full-size (offscreen) dragon.

Pinballs

• There's one on the middle of the playfield for Atari's Middle Earth pinball, right next to the Tyrannosaurus rex.
• The "Pangea" table in Epic Pinball prominently features a dinosaur that resembles an oversized alligator more than anything else.

Puppet Shows

• Team America: World Police:
  • All the characters are puppets, so when they need the characters to get attacked by panthers, they use regular black cats with Mighty Roars dubbed over them. Played for Laughs.
  • And the Shark Pool is full of little nurse sharks — you can't say they aren't sharks!
• Thunderbirds episode "Attack of the Alligators" features an accident with some kind of Super Serum getting into the water table near a laboratory somewhere in Louisiana. Live baby alligators were employed on model sets alongside miniatures of the characters, but since working around the limitations of models and miniatures was what Gerry Anderson Productions did, it actually worked fairly well. Have a look. It doesn't hurt that alligators are actually scary on their own. (Although it's rather easy for reptile aficionados to tell that they're babies.)

Tabletop Games

• In a joke Dragon Magazine contest in which gamers had to write about why they love Giant Space Hamsters, one entry claimed to love how, instead of using a miniature, they could set their pet hamster loose on the gaming table and have a really random encounter.
• The Lost Valley expansion for the fourth Reaper Miniatures kickstarter set includes a slurpasaur-esque 'horned lizard' monster as part of the expansion's homage to 1950s caveman movies.
• The Call of Cthulhu book Blood Brothers offers a series of one-off adventures, using the game's rules but unrelated to the main Cthulhu Mythos setting, and mostly pastiching various horror subgenres. One of these, The Land That Time Ignored, opens thus:
  The Land That Time Ignored tells of explorers' adventures in 1932, in a valley filled with giant dinosaurs which just happen to look like iguanas with rubber stuff cemented onto them. The purpose of this scenario is to attempt to recapture the spirit and style of the Lost World type of movie, in which all dinosaurs are flesh-eaters, and there are always beautiful cave-girls to rescue.

Video Games

• An in-universe example in Red Dead Redemption II, when Arthur helps a low-grade traveling circus recover its lost animals: namely, a zebra, two lions, and a tiger. The zebra and tiger are just, respectively, a mule and a cougar with painted-on stripes, and the first lion is just a dog with hair trimmed to broadly resemble a mane. Subverted in the case of the other lion, which turns out to be extremely real and very dangerous.
• An odd inversion appears in ARK: Survival Evolved: Extinction. The Velonasaur is an apparent theropod dinosaur that looks more like a large, spiky frilled lizard. According to the dossier, it actually is a large, spiky frilled lizard that convergently evolved the body plan of a theropod dinosaur.
• The titular creatures from "Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon" are obviously modeled on monitor lizards.

Web Comics

• Made fun of in Girls with Slingshots, during Maureen and Jameson's honeymoon when they travel to a Dinosaur theme park with a "Brachiosaurus" which is a just a giraffe painted green and a "Triceratops" which is a rhinoceros with a glued frill.

Web Videos

• Midnight Movie, the fifth episode of the Analog Horror series Eventide Media Center, presents a scenario where this went horribly wrong; a film crew working on a horror film entitled Attack of the Somberville Spiders! decided to use an actual giant species of venomous spider in the production, only for the spiders to break free, killing a large number of the people in the crew before rampaging through Somberville, killing presumably more people in the process. A Freeze-Frame Bonus confirms that the whole accident was then 'disguised' as the final product.

  The characters and events depicted in this photoplay may represent reality, and any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, may be indicative of historical events.

• There's a quite funny YouTube video claiming to be of "A GIANT SPIDER". It's a dachshund in a spider suit.
• A sort-of Let's Play featuring every single way there is to hack, glitch and otherwise mess with Pokémon Blue has one joke entry where the cartridge is put through various abuse themed around the Pokemon types. When they get to the Dragon type, they settle for taping a bunch of spikes and wings to a cat.
• Spoofed in The Adventures of Captain Bucky and his Space Marshals, in Outer Space where the terrifying Moon monster is a Chihuahua (the same one used for the Series Mascot) with additions.
• At least one website has over-analysed the biology behind these, including a Speculative Biology paper on the subject by the legendary Professor Challenger.
• A prankster dressed up his dog as a giant mutant spider, then went around using it to scare people and posting footage of the encounters on Facebook.
• 2016 Webby Award: Tiny Hamster Is a Giant Monster!! Making part of the miniature scenery out of hamster treats sure helps. Not remotely convincing, but that's the fun of it.
• Dino Diego made a documentary video about the trope and the unfortunate implications regarding animal abuse and forced fighting between the reptiles, deconstructing the trope.

Western Animation

• Parodied by Olive Jar Animation's Gila Monster! Each episode of this stop-motion animation series ended with the director letting his pet iguana (obviously not Gila monster) wander through the dollhouse-sized sets, and one episode even ended with the iguana "tasting" part of the scenery.
• Parodied in South Park, "The Startling" story arc, in which the mass arrest and deportation of Peruvian flute bands unleashes monsters everywhere, or green screened guinea pigs who just kind of placidly walk through the scenes.
  "Guinea pirate!!!"
  "It's a Guinessaurus rex!"
• In one episode of Doug, Doug and Skeeter were making a monster movie in their backyard. They attached a cardboard shark fin, tail, and jaws to Porkchop, to make him into a "shark dog".
• Parodied in an episode of The Angry Beavers in which Norb, Dag, and Stump go spelunking. They see the massive shadow of a ferocious dimetrodon-like animal approaching them... which turns out to be a tiny lizard with a fin conspicuously taped to its back.
• In the Microscopic Milton episode "Milton and the Dog That Ate New York," the inch-tall Milton uses the dog Douglas to play an alien monster for a video.

Real Life

• Leonardo da Vinci supposedly glued some wings onto a lizard and told his friends he'd found a real dragon, before revealing the truth. Imagine him telling them all they'd been punk'd.
• The Fiji Mermaid, a hoax created by sewing together the mummified corpses of a fish and a monkey, albeit much more convincingly in most cases.
• When platypus specimens were sent to Europe shortly after Australia was settled they were widely believed to be an example of this.
• Pandas also got this treatment; until one was brought back to Europe alive, they were believed to be the work of a joking taxidermist.
• Another hoax was the Jenny Haniver; it's actually just a mangled carcass of a skate or ray, but they got paraded around by curiosity-cabinets and such for years as some kind of bizarre new monster.
• The De Loys Ape was a spider monkey corpse propped up in a picture to hide its tail, with Forced Perspective used to make it look larger than it was.
• Ever wonder why you know exactly what a unicorn horn looks like, with the spiral running down it? It's because during the Middle Ages, "unicorn horns" were common both in Wonder Cabinets and in rich people's home-remedies (mostly for impotency) — they actually came from narwhals.
• Not even people are exempt! During the 1800s especially, actors would be pretend to be "wild men" from jungles, islands, and so on. One from the San Francisco Barbary Coast era was known only as Oofty Goofty, the only words he spoke while in costume; his handlers first covered him in tar, then stuck horse hair into it. In the end, he had to go to the hospital because it wouldn't come off, and he wound up having to soak in chemical thinners on the hospital roof for a few days.
• The Pleistocene varanid lizard Megalania could be seen by some as nature's example of this trope.
• Same for its contemporary Meiolania a.k.a. the tortoise that wished it was an ankylosaur.
• With the recent evidence that it might be quadrupedal, we can add Spinosaurus, who now looks less like a sailed dinosaur with a crocodile head and more like a giant crocodile with a sail on its back. Some '50s slurpasaurs were exactly that.
• Draco lizards look like they're this trope, when they have their gliding-flaps extended. They're real lizards that can protrude their ribs outwards to support sail-like structures along their sides.
• As well as lizards from the genus Basiliscus, who are known to run on two legs like dinosaurs.
• Inverted with the very first named dinosaur. Megalosaurus means "big lizard", because that's what it was believed to have been back in 1824. It was known only from a fraction of the lower jaw, which resembled a scaled-up version of the jaw of a carnivorous monitor lizard, so this wasn't a bad guess.
• Shringasaurus, a Triassic reptile with a strong resemblance to the "tyrannosaur" in the 1960 Lost World film.
• Plenty of Living Dinosaurs cryptids around the world (in particular Africa) are this because their descriptions are based on the outdated versions of dinosaurs. As revealed by TREY the Explainer in this video, all of these have turned out to be hoaxes and/or poor communication with the local people fueled by the sensationalism of white explorers.
• The early Triassic in general fits well this trope and also the landscape of vast rocky deserts and active volcanoes. After over 90% of land lifeforms died in the Permian extinction but before dinosaurs learned to walk upright, the dominant creatures were quadrupedal cocodriliforms, sometimes of massive size and with extravagant crests, horns, and shells.

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