Artistic License Paleontology / Live-Action Films

A caveman fighting an Allosaurus. Truly a palentologically accurate scene.

Movies with their own page

• Jurassic World Dominion

Other movies

• Parodied in Caveman. Yes, there are cavemen and dinosaurs in the same film, but few scientists would be able to cry for the laughter. Not only does the movie occur "One Zillion Years Ago", but the main dinosaur seen in the movie is a geriatric T. rex that is alternately denied delectable cavewoman meat, stoned off a burning cannabis plant, and fondled and then smacked where it counts by a blind caveman (dinosaurs would have their goolies internal, like everything other than mammals does). The other prehistoric creatures include a pteranodon which has its (10ft long! Ouch!) egg stolen and a stop-motion creature resembling some outlandish Slurpasaur.
• The original King Kong (1933) and its sequel The Son of Kong feature many prehistoric animals portrayed as overly aggressive carnivores even if they were herbivorous (Apatosaurus, Styracosaurus, and Stegosaurus, to name a few) and one dramatically oversized pterodactyl to help ruin the image of its eponymous, misunderstood ape.
• Peter Jackson's remake does the same, with the justification that they have been evolving the whole time and it's pure coincidence they look like popular depictions (but some don't, like the Ferrucutus or the Atercurisaurus). They even came out with a tie-in book exploring the unique fauna of the island — which shows the usual errors like the lack of any plumage on any non-avian dinosaurs - even the birds seem to have as little feathers as possible, pronated hands, live birth etc.; as well as many non-dinosaurian biological impossibilities.
• Toho's Godzilla films try to get around this by not even trying to pretend to be remotely accurate in any way whatsoever.
  • A case can however be made for the first movie, Gojira, which was to be taken seriously. In it, a paleontologist deduces that the titular monster hails from the Jurassic period by finding a trilobite in one of its footprints. Trilobites died out about 50 million years before that period, but this can be hand waved, given that in the movie's universe, prehistoric creatures still exist in modern times. The true error is that the supposed paleontologist places the Jurassic at 2 million years BC. He's off by about 150 million years. Even in 1954, scientists knew a lot better than this. And yes, there was serious paleontology done in Japan. He also states that mammals evolved during the Cretaceous from marine reptiles, which is completely wrong.
    • In the film's defense, in 1954 the idea that the Earth was billions of years old was less than thirty years old. It's comparable to someone making a movie today that used outdated science from the mid-90s. The writers were probably taught in school that the Earth was only about a hundred million years.
  • There is one thing Toho got right, probably by coincidence: Godzilla (as well as his pre-mutated form Godzillasaurus) is often portrayed with his hands facing inwards, which is now known to be the normal position for theropods and other bipedal dinosaurs.
  • Paleontological accuracy was actually discussed behind the scenes during the production of the second generation of Godzilla films. Special effects director Koichi Kawakita suggested redesigning Godzilla into a more realistic dinosaur in tune with 90s science, an idea that producer Tomoyuki Tanaka angrily shot down, arguing that he's supposed to be a monster. Some critics take the somewhat more realistic-looking Godzillasaurus' transformation into the highly unrealistic, upright Godzilla as the studio declaring their stance on the matter, making it clear that he's unrealistic on purpose.
• Somewhere a paleoanthropologist and an archaeologist are crying: in The X-Files: Fight the Future movie, we see a Neanderthal in North Texas 60,000 years ago. Not only were there no Neanderthals in the Western Hemisphere ever, there is strong dispute about whether there were hominids of any kind in the Western Hemisphere 60,000 years ago. Maybe they were all abducted by aliens?
  • Ice Age Texas also probably would not have looked anything like that scene depicted it as. The Ice Age glaciers never got anywhere near that far south.
• 10,000 BC: An Androcles' Lion type situation with a Smilodon. "Terror Birds" about 2 million years after they went extinct.^note Though, we should at least be grateful that Roland Emmerich didn't use a Deinonychus or Utahraptor. And woolly mammoths being used to move bricks to build the Pyramids in Ancient Egypt. Rule of Cool taken to the very limit.
  • Neither Smilodon (clearly the species/genus being represented on film^note Though either the main character is really small, or this particular cat has gigantism) nor "Terror Birds" ever lived in Africa. Both animals were restricted to North and South America. Then again, given how the characters seem to WALK from South America to Africa...
    • In the beginning when hunting the mammoths; they refer to the head of the herd as the "Lead Bull", meaning that the leader of the herd is male. All indications are that mammoths behaved very similarly to modern elephants... who are led by matriarch females. The males travel separately from the herd.
    • It would seem that sometimes Science Marches Backwards. A partial specimen of what appears to be a small relative of the terror birds was recently discovered in North Africa. So that one "mistake" might not be as wrong as it seemed at the time... if we ignore that it lived several million years before the beginning of mankind anyway.
• The Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie (which should give you a hint as to its quality) 100 Million BC has the humans unable to detect the rampaging Giganotosaurus through a heat sensor because "dinosaurs are ectothermal" (sic). Even if Giganotosaurus was an ectotherm, an animal that size would have a much higher body temperature than its environment by virtue of gigantothermy. It would have showed up on a thermal sensor.
  • Also, the heroes visit South America 70 million years ago (despite the fact it's 100 Million BC...) and Giganotosaurus became extinct around 90 million years ago. Somewhere, a palaeontologist is facepalming.
• Jurassic Park:
  • Jurassic Park (1993):
    • Film-only issues include the Dilophosaurus being too small (though Nedry's line "I thought you were one of your big brothers!" suggests the only one we see is a juvenile) and having an incorrectly-shaped snout and a retractable frill (for the practical purpose of distinguishing them from the Velociraptors, which are actually Deinonychuses; see below)—a frill that could flap like that would require supporting structures that would show up in fossils—and repeatedly misspelling the dinosaurs' names.
    • The first time we see Grant and Sattler is at a dig in Montana uncovering a Velociraptor skeleton, which never existed anywhere near there. There's a reason for this, though: the Velociraptors in the Jurassic Park franchise are actually based on Deinonychus, which did live in Montana, and in the 1980s when Michael Crichton was developing the original novel, there was a proposal to fold the Deinonychus genus into Velociraptor. What's more, the skeleton is still assembled correctly. It's very rare to find fossils of big vertebrates like that; the bones are usually scattered all over the place.
    • T. Rexes in the films' universe have really poor eyesight, so much that they can't see someone at all if they are holding still. It is now known that T. Rex had excellent vision, 5 times as sharp as that of a falcon and 13 times as sharp as a human's, with excellent color vision. Stands to reason, they had eyes the size of grapefruits.
    • Five things you probably have wrong about the T. Rex shown in this link.
  • Jurassic Park III:
    • Pteranodon (literally "toothless wing") are given tooth-filled beaks, grasping feet, and the ability to pick up a grown man that had to outweigh them by a good fifty pounds at least. Meanwhile, the raptors are "smarter than primates".
    • While the Spinosaurus was indeed bigger than the T. rex, it would never have been able to take one on in a fight. A rex's heavy jaws and thick teeth were built for crushing bone while a Spinosaurus's thin jaws and teeth were better suited for hunting fish. The first time the rex clamped down on its slim bony neck should have crippled it, if not outright decapitated it.
  • Jurassic World: This film retroactively justifies all instances with the park dinosaurs when Dr. Wu reminds Masrani that his and the team's orders were to engineer the animals based on Rule of Cool, not scientific accuracy.
    Wu: Nothing in Jurassic World in natural. We have always filled gaps in the genome with the DNA of other animals. And, if their genetic code was pure, many of them would look quite different. But you didn't ask for reality. You asked for more teeth.
    • While it's exact size is inconsistent, it is very clear that the film's Mosasaurus is far too large
    • The tails of the Stegosaurus are incorrectly shown being dragged along the ground instead of being held in the air. What makes this especially odd is the fact that their previous appearance in the franchise showed them with accurate tails.
  • Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom:
    • On top of having elephantine feet like the other ceratopsids of the franchise, the skull of the Sinoceratops is incredibly different from the real animal, with several traits, such as the extra two spikes in the middle and the holes at the top, seemingly being remnants of earlier in production when the animal was supposed to be Pachyrhinosaurus.
    • This film also explicitly refers to Blue as a "Velociraptor mongoliensis", meaning that the real-life explanation for the Velociraptors' large size and boxy skull does not apply in-universe, turning a decent Deinonychus depiction (bar the lack of feathers), into a horrible Velociraptor depiction.
• Among the less-discussed howling scientific errors in Lucy comes when Professor Norman states that Lucy is the name of "the first woman." This is presumably a reference to an Australopithecus fossil discovered in the 1970s, named "Lucy" by its discoverers after the Beatles song. While it is one of the earliest known female hominids, calling it “the first woman” is a laughable misunderstanding that no scientist of Norman’s supposed caliber would ever make. For starters, fossils are nothing more than random snapshots in time (only a tiny percentage of earth's organisms are ever preserved as fossils), and paleontologists have no reason to assume that any particular fossil they happen to find is literally the first member of a species, even if it's the oldest one known. Indeed, the very concept of a "first" of any type of organism is almost meaningless, since evolution is a gradual process of continuous change, and there's never any specific point when one type of organism became something else. In other words, there never existed any individual creature that could be definitively called the first man or woman—especially if we're defining humans more broadly than Homo sapiens (a species the Austrolopithecines long predated). The movie's misconception gets even sillier at the end, when in her time-travel journey to the distant past, she encounters an ape-like creature implied to be the original "Lucy," with a possible implication that the encounter, like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, is a crucial event that pushes humans toward higher consciousness.
• Super Mario Bros. (1993) hits a few common dinosaur-related errors, though the filmmakers seemed to be going for Rule of Cool. These include:
  • The meteorite that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs is implied to have done so immediately, while also hitting Earth where present-day New York City is located. To be fair, this was before the actual location of the meteorite's impact and its affect were commonly known or proven.
  • The humanoid dinosaurs in the parallel world, such as Koopa and Lena, display qualities and behaviors more typical of modern lizards, such as tongue-flicking and prehensile tongue-use. However, it is implied that the dino-humans developed these traits over time as they became more like modern reptiles, while the prehensile tongue-use was taken from the games (Yoshi).
  • There's also the idea of a race of intelligent dinosaur-descendants looking exactly like humans, not withstanding the very fact that there are even dinosaurs at all given that the original Koopas were turtles.
• Pioneering filmmaker D. W. Griffith's 1914 film Brute Force shows a group of cavemen attacked by a dinosaur.
• A throw-away line of dialogue from The Pumaman:
  So dinosaurs became extinct because they no longer knew how to love each other?
• In Batman & Robin, Mr. Freeze knows absolute zero about what killed the dinosaurs.
  Freeze: The Ice Age!
  • Ironically, as That Other Wiki points out, the climate in the epochs immediately following the K-T extinction was substantially warmer.
• The main villain of Devil Fish is a mutated Dunkleosteus/octopus hybrid. In the movie, ignoring the obvious issues, Dunkleosteus is described as a prehistoric shark. Real Dunkleosteus were members of a now-extinct family, the Arthrodira, which left no surviving descendants and was only distantly related to sharks. They also claimed that the pliosaur Kronosaurus was a shark that lived during the "Cetaceous period" [sic], which was about 200 years ago (the 1770s?). Another fish that they describe as a prehistoric shark is a very modern, harmless basking shark.
• The 1960 movie Dinosaurus! featured the discovery and unintentional revival of a Brontosaurus, a Tyrannosaurus rex, and a caveman. Obviously these are the most well-known prehistoric creatures today, but lived tens of millions of years apart.
• One M Illion Years BC features creatures from many prehistoric eras, most of them much older than 1 million years. The humans are all Nubile Savages, including a Fur Bikini-clad, well-groomed Raquel Welch. Some creatures, like the giant turtle Archelon, are vastly oversized, whereas others, like the kangaroo-stance Allosaurus (pictured above) are undersized, standing only slightly taller than a human (in real life, even the smallest Allosaurus would stand about a foot and a half taller than an average-sized human being). And let's not get started on the scaly, bat-winged, grasping-footed pterosaurs...
• In Noah, a lizard-dog is presented as an example of an animal that could have escaped the fossil record due to being lost in the flood.
• In Pacific Rim, the Kaiju are stated to be so big that they require two brains "like a dinosaur". While some early paleontologists thought some dinosaurs (particularly the stegosaurs and sauropods) had two brains, virtually no paleontologist believes it today.
  • This is a special case though, since it's just a line spoken by a scientist (but not a paleontologist) to a crime lord and thus it's possible that neither of them know that it's incorrect. The film never actually shows a two-brained dinosaur. Though it does imply that either the Kaiju killed the dinosaurs, or were the dinosaurs, and Kaiju do have two brains in the movie.
• In the comedy Bringing Up Baby, one of the main subplots involves paleontologist Cary Grant retrieving a missing dinosaur bone with the help of Manic Pixie Dream Girl Katharine Hepburn. The bone in question is described as an "Intercostal clavicle". There is no such thing as an "intercostal clavicle". Intercostal means "between the ribs" and the clavicle is a collar bone.
  • The dinosaur in question is called a Brontosaurus. At the time the film was made, the scientific community would have considered it a species of Apatosaurus.
• 65:
  • While pop-culture has immortalized 65 million years ago as the time when the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event that killed the non-avian dinosaurs occurred, according to radiometric dating it happened closer to 66 million years ago — about a million years before the movie's events, supposedly, take place.
  • Almost none of the dinosaurs in the trailer are feathered, despite research having known for decades that plenty of them were. The raptors do have a faint covering of proto-feathers along the back, when they should have proper bird-like plumage covering their body.
  • Additionally, several carnivorous dinosaurs are quadrupedal, which no known theropods were.^note The idea that spinosaurids, at least, may have been semi-quadrupedal has surfaced several times on account of some members of the group having proportionally short legs coupled with unusually robust arms, but most current researchers regard this as highly unlikely.
  • The cave dwelling oviraptorid (besides being scaly) has teeth. Oviraptorids all had toothless beaks.
  • Most of the dinosaurs are amalgamations of generic saurian features mushed together rather than anything recognizable from the fossil record. Most obviously with the giant quadruped carnivore, which is like nothing known to have existed during the Cretaceous Period.
    • The late quadruped might be an attempt to depict a rauisuchian, prehistoric crocodile relatives with erect gaits and strikingly tyrannosaur-like skulls, some of which like Fasolasuchus could get to pretty large sizes. Many of them were likely capable of semi-quadrupedal locomotion as well (though some are thought to have been obligate bipeds). If that's the case, then they are still inaccurate in that it looks too much like a Tyrannosaurus and has the wrong body anatomy, and it is still much too large. They also lived in the Triassic with the very first dinosaurs, not at the end of the Cretaceous.
  • The raptor-like quadrupeds are identified in the soundtrack as Lagosuchus. This opens a huge can of worms, considering the fact that (A) Lagosuchus was not a dinosaur (B) the animals depicted are several times larger than Lagosuchus (C) Lagosuchus hailed from the Mid Triassic, not the Late Cretaceous.
  • At the end, the asteroid is shown striking the exact area the characters just were. The meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs is thought to have struck in an ocean region (an area now known as the Gulf of Mexico), not dry land.
  • The pterosaurs, although fairly good for what is ostensibly a mid-budget B-movie, have teeth and long tails; long-tailed pterosaurs are last known from the Late Jurassic, while pterosaurs with teeth are last known from about ninety million years ago, long before the K-Pg boundary. Furthermore, closer inspection reveals their eyes are modeled in their nostrils.
  • The quadruped dinosaurs (the raptor-like ones and the tyrannosaur-like one) are both modelled with bulging rib cages with noticeable waists and mobile shoulders, as though they were mammals, but they are things that dinosaurs, or any reptiles for that matter, do not have.
• Alpha (2018):
  • Alpha features a sabertooth cat that looks like a Smilodon as indicated by its size. But it should have a short bobcat-like tail instead of the long tiger-like one it has in the film, and none of the three species were found in Europe. Alternatively, it could be a Machairodus, which was just as large and actually did live in Europe - except that the last members of this genus died out during the middle Pleistocene, millennia before the film's time period of 20,000 years ago. The visual effects supervisor confirmed it was a cave lion, which actually did live in Europe 20,000 years ago, but it certainly didn't have those long canines.
  • The film takes place 20,000 years ago and is a "Boy and His Dog" story, except the "dog" is actually a wolf. It tells a fictionalized tale of the origin of dogs. Alas, real wolves are not dogs and aren't tame. Wolf domestication isn't as easy as a human just bonding with an unusually tame wolf.
• Journey to the Center of the Earth:
  • The 1959 film feature egregious use of Slurpasaurs to depict its prehistoric reptiles. Two rhinoceros iguanas with sails glued on become massively oversized Dimetrodon, while a red tegu becomes a giant chameleon(?).
  • The 2008 film features a giant theropod identified in supplementary material as a Giganotosaurus. Aside from being about twice the size of the largest known theropods, it looks a lot more like a Tyrannosaurus with three fingered hands.
• The Valley of Gwangi: What do you expect from a premise of cowboys fighting prehistoric life?
  • The titular Gwangi as a carnivorous therapod with a confusing taxonomy. Supposedly, it's an Allosaurus according to the original script and it has three fingers on each hand and it barely towers over the cowboys on horses like its real-life counterpart. But its design heavily borrows from the Tyrannosaurus rex, specifically from Charles R. Knight's famous painting, and Ray Harryhausen often mixes the two when discussing about Gwangi, stating that to him, they were both "meat eaters, they're both Tyrants... one was just a bit larger than the other."
  • The Pteranodon again has bat-like wings and tries to carry its victims with its talons.