Destination Truth, the 'flying dinosaur' episode. Let’s see, they identify the creature from the descriptions as a pterodactyl, yet never, not ONCE say its a flying reptile, not a flying dinosaur. The only flying dinosaurs are the birds, NOT the pterosaurs, which are a completely separate taxon.
Super Sentai and Power Rangers have two major traps that they generally fall into, and then each individual series usually has more inaccuracies on top of that.
The first issue is the reliance on Small Taxonomy Pools, and they include creatures that technically aren't dinosaurs. Of the four dinosaur-based series all include pterosaurs, Zyuranger/Mighty Morphin' has two mammals (a mammoth and a sabertooth tiger) and a Not Zilla, Abaranger/Dino Thunder has a Dimetrodon, Kyoryuger/Dino Charge has a plesiosaur, and Ryusoulger/Dino Fury has another sabertooth, another Dimetrodon, and a Mosasaurus. Go-Onger/RPM also has a set of dino mecha with a mammoth.
Most of these series also tend to show all the dinosaur species existing together regardless of the fact that they were from different locations and eras; though at least in Abaranger's case this coexistence is explicitly an Alternate Dimension where they survived the extinction event(s). (The few that do dodge this issue, including Mighty Morphin', Dino Thunder, and Ryusoulger, only do so by not actually showing prehistoric times onscreen.)
Individually by series:
Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger/Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers depicts the Tyrannosaurus mech as dragging its tail, though that might have more to do with it being the only individual Guardian Beast/Zord portrayed by a guy in a suit.
Outside of the dinosaur-themed series, the time-travel themed Power Rangers Time Force has a trip to prehistoric times where the Rangers both get chased by a Tyrannosaurus and find a cave painting of a time-tossed zord. They also have Cretaceous fauna in the Jurassic period (the only dinosaur that should be there is the Stegosaurus).
Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger/Power Rangers Dino Charge seems to be pretty far behind. While the Tyrannosaurus doesn't drag his tail, almost every bipedal dinosaur has scaly skin and pronated hands. The Tyranno even has three fingers on each hand! And while the T. rex is feathered in Kyoryuger, Dino Charge has been known to forget that detail in its original footage; and neither show includes feathers on the Velociraptor. Kyoryuger also makes the mistake of showing a Spinosaurus as a completely land-based creature, though in the show's defense, the major pile of evidence towards it being partially if not completely water-based didn't drop until shortly after it ended. Dino Charge doesn't include the Spinosaurus, but adds another inaccuracy by identifying the Brachiosaur as a "Titanosaur" (likely as a Mythology Gag to Mighty Morphin''s Brachiosaur, Titanus).
Kishiryu Sentai Ryusoulger includes two species made up for the purposes of the show. One is a "Tigersaurus", which is a reptilian version of a Smilodon (allowing them to include one without having to deal with shoehorning a mammal where it doesn't fit). The other is a "Needlesaurus", a fictional member of the Stegosaur family. Power Rangers Dino Fury fixes this by just designating them as a Saber-Toothed Tiger and Stegosaur, though that does bring back the problem of treating a mammal as a dinosaur. Even the dinosaurs that are identifiable as real species are heavily caricatured, and in Ryusoulger they're treated on the whole as creatures that are similar to actual dinosaurs but not the same thing.
The Dinosaurssitcom had an... unusual take on this concept. The writers consciously did no research in order to get in more jokes. As such, we have things like Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus living together, carnivorous Triceratops (although the theory that they may have been omnivorous is getting more currency, of late), and cavemen (and mammoths and mastodons are mentioned). They also live in 60,000,000 B.C., 5 million years after the dinosaurs should have become extinct (oddly enough, the last episode of the series features them going extinct). They are living in houses complete with refrigerators and eight-track tape players, so we really can't fault them. Interestingly, pterosaurs seem to be acknowledged as something separate from dinosaurs for once, as they are treated as wild or domesticated animals by the dinosaurs.
Lost Tapes has several of its monsters portrayed as prehistoric animals. None of them make sense. Goofs includes a surviving azhdarchid pterosaur behaving as a modern (albeit giant) shrike; a people-eating (and flexible-necked) elasmosaurid, and a Megalania living in rainforest.
The Little Howard's Big Question episode "Could The Dinosaurs Ever Come Back" is a carnival of this. To list a few; a T. rex is shown with three fingers, as well as implying that all dinosaurs lived at the same time (using stock footage from Walking With Dinosaurs) and mentioning "Brontosaurus" like it's still a valid genus.
Doctor Who is guilty of a number of egregious examples of this. Its most notable flub is its creation of the "Silurians", a race of humanoid-reptilian beings who coexisted with the dinosaurs, despite the fact the Silurian Period (called the "Silurian Era") ended about 200 million years before the dinosaurs evolved, a span of time that tests the limits of the Rule of Cool to breaking point. A later serial attempted to correct this by saying they should properly be called "Eocenes", which is certainly better, but no more right, as the Eocene began about 10 million years after the dinosaurs went extinct. A third attempt to give them a name decided on Homo reptilia, which inadvertently placed them in the same genus as us.
One of the main plotlines of the Silurians' oddly-nameddebut serial relies on humans experiencing "primal fear" when faced with the reptilian monster of the day, even going so far as to regress to a caveman mentality and start painting on walls. But by the time the higher monkeys had split off and begun expansion, the age of the reptiles was long gone.
In a rather strange case of Science Marches On, the original introduction of the Silurians occurred in 1970, before evidence from the Moon landings had disproven the idea that the Moon was a captured body from another part of the Solar System. As such, the arrival of the Moon is used as a plot point, as the Silurians went into hibernation to escape it, thinking it was about to collide and destroy them, only to be left sleeping when it didn't happen. Rather ironically, within a decade the idea that the Age of Dinosaurs had been ended by an impactor from space was gaining ground, enough for a later Who serial, Earthshock, to use it as part of its plot.
One episode of 24-Hour Restaurant Battle had a caveman-themed restaurant called The Cave-In. Every single food item was dinosaur-themed, even things like ribs and burgers that could have been named after any animal at all (like, say, mammoths).
In the BBC show My Pet Dinosaur, they speculated on humans' relationships with dinosaurs had the meteor not hit. Ignoring the likelihood of humans even existing in that scenario, they had sauropods that barked, walked on two legs, and were the size of small cats. They also had a Protoceratops as the equivalent of pigs and chickens, even though Protoceratopswent extinctbeforethe meteor, and chickens--or at least chicken-like birds--already existed in the late Cretaceous. They also had human-shaped dinosaurs, even though the structure of a dinosaur couldn't have supported that. Also, they had scaly maniraptors. I thought this was speculation, not Looney Tunes.
To be fair, they did address the issue of humans coexisting with dinosaurs. According to the cited experts, there is no evidence that any dinosaur ever occupied the arboreal niche of our primate ancestors, leaving it open for them to exploit. Whether this is actually true is up for debate.
Primeval doesn't have accurate creature models, but the creators have acknowledged that they do their research - they just decide to deliberately exaggerate things for dramatic effect.
Lampshaded in an eighth season episode of The Office (US). While talking about the many unpleasant aspects of living in Florida, Robert California remarks, "Alligators are dinosaurs, Dwight. You know that, right?" Dwight, visibly torn between correcting his boss and letting the inaccuracy slide, quietly answers, "Mmm... it's complicated."
Two episodes of Disney Channel's Jessie seem to perpetrate the lizardlike Velociraptor subtrope.
Dino Dan is guilty of this, despite being an educational series:
Bipedal, scaly pterosaurs that carry things with their feet and are only shown eating fish (ALL OF THEM. Yes, even the Quetzalcoatlus).
Not only are the deinonychosaurs not feathered enough, they don't even have the right kind of feathers (real deinonychosaurs had actual feathers, not protofeathers).
Mispronunciations of several dinosaur names (Euoplocephalus is pronounced with a hard "C" instead of a soft "C", and Compsognathus is pronounced with an "Ä" sound instead of an "Ā" sound).
Pronated hands on the theropods.
Elephantine forelimbs on the ornithischians and most of the sauropods.
A Deinonychus skeleton seen in one episode is identified as Dromaeosaurus.
Dan translates Corythosaurus as "helmet head" in one episode (it actually means "helmet reptile"; "helmet head" would be "Corythocephale").
When discussing Brachiosaurus in one episode, Dan incorrectly identifies an illustration of Apatosaurus as that genus (to add insult to injury, the book he was reading did actually have a Brachiosaurus illustration).
The generic Triassic dinosaurs seen in one episode just look like small lizards.
Dromaeosaurs that hunt in packs. Exactly how much they cooperated while hunting is debatable, but it almost certainly wasn't to the same degree as living canids.
The eudromaeosaurs are portrayed as being a bit too fast. While far from slow-moving, they weren't exactly among the speediest theropods due to their proportionally shorter metatarsus. One of the minigames subverts this with Velociraptor by stating its running speed at 40 km/h, but the speed of Dromaeosaurus is still exaggerated at 64 km/h.
Other assorted anatomical errors (the tail of Brachiosaurus is too long, the skull of Spinosaurus is too tubular, etc).
The worst offender has to be the episode where Dan states that Stegosauri plates changed color according to their mood.
Terra Nova can't seem to decide where and when it's supposed to take place. Everyone says that the wormhole takes people back 85 million years ago to the Cretaceous, yet it features Jurassic dinos like Allosaurus and Brachiosaurus. It also has Carnotaurus, which is closer to the correct time but still off by 10 million years; on the other hand, Carnotaurus lived in South America, while Allosaurus and Brachiosaurus lived in North America. And then they bring in a super-sized version of Spinosaurus, which lived in Africa.
Timecop: Ian Pascoe claims to have witnessed a Megalodon rip the throat out of a Tyrannosaurus rex. These animals lived over 47 million years apart, assuming he didn't somehow (?) bring them together.
In the Elementary episode "Dead Clade Walking", the stolen dinosaur skeleton that Sherlock and Joan have to track down is referred to as a "Nanotyrannus". This is a dinosaur species that most scientists think didn't even exist— it might have just been a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex. The fossil also looks nothing like a tyrannosaur.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has entelodont-like creatures referred as "wolves" by characters, which implies to be a warg subspecies, and by association, canine creatures. Problem is, they look exactly like entelodonts, and are quite accurately portrayed as such.
that look like the adults and typical pop culture raptors.
