Are you sure this Oviraptor is accurate?
- Animal Crossing has a museum that can be filled up with various fossils, with accompanying factoids of varying accuracy:
- The museum exhibit plaque for the Stegosaurus states that the animal in question is from the Late Cretaceous, when Blathers (correctly) describes it as living in the Jurassic.
- And then there's the Seismosaurus, which is now considered to be a dubious genus. New Leaf, however, fixes this and renames it Diplodocus.
- Blathers also claims that dinosaurs are cold-blooded, Dimetrodon lived in the early days of the dinosaurs (especially jarring since the plaque correctly describes it as being from the early Permian), Stegosaurus couldn't feel pain in its tail for a long time due to its tiny brain, and Apatosaurus lived in lakes and swamps because of its size and weight (an idea that was disproven in the 1960s).
- In New Leaf, the exhibit plaque for the Pteranodon describes it as the ancestor of modern birds, when Pteranodon wasn't even a dinosaur to begin with. But that's the only major blunder in the museum fossil descriptions.
- The tree of life on the floor of the fossil exhibit in New Horizons seems to imply that not only are theropods and ornithischians more closely related to each other than theropods are to sauropods, but also that both of the former are more closely related to pterosaurs than they are to sauropods.
- ARK: Survival Evolved relinquishes a lot of accuracy in favor of Rule of Cool. The developers Hand Wave this as all the animals in-game being variants of the real life ones (which only brings up its own set of problems though). Examples include:
- The giant millipede Arthropleura is shown as a ferocious carnivore with acidic blood that it can spit like a Jurassic Park Dilophosaurus, despite the fact that it probably ate plant matter, with no evidence of the acidic blood (or being able to spit).
- The Compsognathus, Oviraptor, and Gallimimus have only some feathers on their head or neck, while Utahraptor has more on its arms and tail; all four of them are featherless otherwise. The Troodon has a venomous bite.
- The Dilophosaurus is a carbon-copy of Jurassic Park's. Interestingly enough, the Titanoboa also has a venomous bite and frills, despite being a constrictor snake.
- The Pteranodon have teeth, no fur, and a bat-like wing structure, and are capable of carrying a fully-grown human. Also, both sexes are depicted looking exactly the same, when the females are smaller and lack the large crestnote .
- The Procoptodon move by hopping like modern-day kangaroos and are capable of jumping backwards. Plus, the males also have pouches.
- The trope often overlaps with Rule of Fun as well. For example, players can use the aforementioned Pteranodons as flying war mounts to snatch enemies and drop them from a good height. Some of the more bizarre examples include Pachyrhinosaurus being able to release pacifying chemicals, allowing riders to move about safely in predator-infested territory, or the aforementioned Arthropleura's acidic blood damaging attackers and their armour, as well as act as artillery units.
- The game can also avert this on occasion. For example, Liopleurodon is 25 feet long instead of 25 meters like in most depictions, or the Raptors being man-sized Utahraptors for once, not dog-sized Velociraptors as always. It also seems they respond to popular demand for more accurate animals as the Megalosaurus is feathered and, with the exception of the Dimorphodon (the second pterosaur revealed after Pteranodon) who for some reason has feathers, all other pterosaurs are furry and have the correct wing structure.
- Zig-zagged with Spinosaurus. On one hand, it is portrayed with short hindlegs and a semi-aquatic lifestyle reflecting modern studies, plus its nostrils are positioned correctly (located near the eyes instead of at the tip of its snout). On the other, it is portrayed as a quadruped with its (four-fingered) hands facing the wrong way.
- Birthdays the Beginning often features taxa not resembling their real-life counterparts, mostly due to re-using of models. We've got Andrewsarchus and Hyaena both as a Palette Swap of the game's wolf, Velociraptor missing its killing claws due being a re-hashed model of Eoraptor, apes like Dryopithecus and Pan troglodyesnote using the same model as Eosimias (which is portrayed as a long-tailed monkey when the real animal was a lemur-like early primate), the wide-snouted amphibian Mastodonsaurus being a Palette Swap of the phytosaur Parasuchus, two generic frogs being labeled as Pliosaurus and Tarbosaurus, a variation of Pteranodon/Geosternbergia labeled as R. muensteri (a species of Rhamphorhynchus), and a creature resembling a bear with a raccoon's tail (which could have been identified as Chapalmalania) identified as the ground sloth Megatherium. It also messes up with its classification and evolutionary paths (the proto-mammal Dimetrodon being a reptile and evolving into dinosaurs, mosasaurs evolving from crocodiles, pterosaurs being dinosaurs and evolving into birds, etc.), and they also make use of fictional creatures. And then there's the usual anatomical inaccuracies (theropods with pronated hands, Smilodon has a much longer tail than in real life, Stegosaurus's tail is droopy, Alligator has interlocking teeth instead of an overbite, etc.) At least the cave bear is portrayed as a herbivore, Velociraptor is feathered (albeit with just a crest and a thin coat), and Brachiosaurus has its nostrils on the snout.
- The far past of Chrono Trigger features an ongoing war between mammals and dinosaurs, the latter being led by the Reptites. The dinosaurs and Reptites eventually became extinct during the ice age caused by the fall of Lavos to Earth.
- At one point during the director's commentary for The Deadly Tower of Monsters, said director says he got complaints about the inaccuracies of a meat-eating sauropod, which he refers to a s a stegosaurus. And then there were the fire-breathing pterodactyls.
- The Dino Crisis series likes to play Artistic License – Biology with the dinosaurs it features.
- Dino Run, considering the premise of the game, for starters, involves the "instantaneous extinction" trope. And the raptors supposedly find shelter and escape said apocalypse and go on to live for an indefinite amount of time.
- In the Google Chrome Dinosaur Game, the two obstacles are cacti and some unspecified species of pterosaur. Cacti didn't evolve until around 30 million years after the dinosaurs went extinct. T. rex and some pterosaur species did live at the same time, though.
- Happily averted (anatomically at least) in the Japanese Xbox game Dinosaur Hunting
, which even includes feathered maniraptorans and a T. rex with a feather crest. Unfortunately the theropods still have pronated hands, a lot of the quadrupedal dinosaurs have padded feet, Compsognathus has bird-like feathers instead of more primitive downy ones, Dilophosaurus has a frillnote and spits venom, the plesiosaurs have flexible necks and can haul themselves onto land, Pelecanimimus has an oversized head and raptor-like feet, Ankylosaurus and Gastonia can roll up into balls, the cave lion has a really big mane, and some of the animals are enlarged for dramatic effect (not counting the albinos and mutants). There's also an Accidentally-Correct Writing example with Spinosaurus, which has proportionally short hind legs. - This is played straight with the mammoths of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, though it is largely for the Rule of Cool. Averted by the Sabre Cats, which are surprisingly accurate to sabertooth cats in the genus Smilodon.
- Cave bears in Skyrim are just a tougher version of normal bears, found in regions rich in caves (actual cave bears hibernated in caves, but lived the rest of the year in the forest and were not tied to a cave in particular). Both look identical, though interestingly, they have neither the straight cranium of brown bears nor the very domed cranium of cave bears, but something in between. "Snow bears" also look the same (so not like polar bears either), but are even tougher, with white pelts instead of brown and live in snowed-in areas.
- Far Cry Primal:
- Though the game is supposedly set in Europe 12,000 years ago, a lot of the often stock Prehistoric fauna would rather feel at home in North America (sabertooth cat Smilodon, direwolf, Californian tapir, jaguar, bald eagle) or Asia (crocodile, yak, snow leopard, langur monkey, brown rat, wild chicken). There's also the presence of cave lions and cave bears, which in real life have gone extinct thousands of years prior to the game.
- Bigger Is Better too. In-game sabertooths and wooly mammoths are twice the size they were in real life.
- On the other hand, the game portrays cave lions, the largest cats ever, as smaller than modern-day lions, because the developers must have decided that the more fearful-looking sabertooths, which were smaller and are out of place anyway, should be the game's top cats.
- In-game jaguars are also smaller than modern South American jaguars, even though European jaguars were larger. They also went extinct in the continent around 1 million years before the game is set and were replaced by leopards, which are absent from the game despite previously appearing in Far Cry 3.
- A promo claims that in 10,000 BC, humanity was on the brink of extinction. This wasn't even close, unless you judge human numbers then by the current ones sustained by civilization. Human population boomed after the end of the last ice age, for obvious reasons.
- The "behind the scenes" featurette makes the common mistaken claim that prehistoric people dropped dead at 30.
- The game also makes the usual mistakes of portraying sabertooths as fast and cave bears as carnivores. And not just that, they are the most powerful predators in the game and the only animals woolly rhinos are afraid of!
- The "giant golden crocodile" is identified (at least around the internet) as Crocodylus bugtiensis, a species that lived in Pakistan around 25 million years ago. Crocodiles died out in Europe at the beginning of the Pliocene, over 5 million years ago.
- While dholes did live in Europe at the time, the "European dholes" in the game look like African painted dogs, not dholes. This is particularly jarring because the previous game, Far Cry 4 was set in India and had perfect looking dholes. To make it worse, they make hyena sounds. Actual hyenas, which were common in prehistoric Europe and were present in Far Cry 2 and Far Cry 3, do not appear in this game.
- The Udam are an odd case; just playing the game might give you the impression that they're a relic group of Neanderthals who've stuck around some 30,000 to 20,000 years after the rest of them went extinct, but Word of God is that they're supposed to be a highly divergent homo sapiens population instead (even if archeology hasn't found evidence for an Udam-like population existing around 10,000 BCE).
- There are also woolly rhinos with Y-shaped horns, Megacerops-style. These are rare and implied to be some kind of genetic mutation, but they still make little sense if you know that rhino horn is made of hardened hair and not actual horn or bone. Although some fans assume these actually are Megacerops, albeit a relic population of them given they're living 33 million years after their supposed extinction. But there's still the issue they're living on the wrong continent (Megacerops was endemic to North America).
- The main setting of the game is an European mixed forest (it's set just after the last ice age, after all), but woolly mammoths and rhinos were cold grassland animals and were following the retreat of the tundra towards Siberia in this time. European forests had their own elephants and rhinoceroses during the Pleistocene, which were most likely hairless, although they had gone extinct before the game's timeframe.
- Commendably, this game is one of the few fictional works to correctly portray the attack methods of saber-toothed cats (the sabertooths wrestle their prey to the ground first before using their sabers to stab the vital part).
- One of the recurring enemies in Final Fantasy VIII is a red T-Rexaur (Tyrannosaurus rex). Odds are that many first-time players got offed by one during their first hour of playing by accidentally wandering into the forest area in the Balamb Garden training center.
- On the other hand, all monsters in the game are actually from the moon, so a red dinosaur is really the least its problems.
- Played with in Fossil Fighters, a mons game which has you digging up fossils and reanimating the dinosaurs within. The "vivosaurs" are explicitly different from dinosaurs and have different traits and names than real dinosaurs do (it's explained that's a process of the revivification device) but there is a section that lets you see what creatures they were based upon. There's even a smilodon, properly called a smilodon by the game.
- Goodbye Volcano High: Aside from the game taking place in a modern-day world of anthropomorphic dinosaurs, the game takes place eight months before the asteroid impact that ended the era of dinosaurs, and some species featured were extinct long before then.
- Guild Wars has dinosaurs on the Tarnished Coast in Eye of the North. The Tyrannus and Raptors are relatively accurate, the Ceratodon somewhat less so (it's an armored ceratopsian with one horn on its forehead and two more on its shoulders). Hard to tell what the Ferothrax and Angorodon are supposed to be, though...
- Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs: The Dilophosaurus appears with a frill and the ability to spit venom, just as it did in Jurassic Park.
- Averted in Jetpack Brontosaurus. As the game acknowledges, the title character is an Apatosaurus. Brontosaurus is just his name. It also takes pains to use the Order name Pterosaurs in the introduction, some of which were contemporary with the Apatosaurus, rather than a specific genus that might not have been. All other weirdness can be written off to it taking place in a surreal dream world. Then again, it's made by the same people as Raptor Safari, below, which similarly delights in being much, much more scientifically accurate than such a blatantly ridiculous game needs to be.
- Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis: Actually invoked as a game mechanic. If you stick dinosaurs from different time periods and/or different locales in the same enclosure, then some of the more nerdy visitors will notice and subsequently their enjoyment of the exhibit will go down. Other inaccuracies from the films (featherless therapods, oversized Velociraptors, poison-spitting Dilophosaurus) carry over as well, and are not commented upon.
- Let's Build a Zoo: Dinosaur Island:
- Desmatosuchus' description calls it a dinosaur, even though it was an aetosaur, a group of archosaurs that are more closely related to crocodilians and went extinct at the end of the Triassic.
- The "pterodactyl" is noticeably less realistic than the other pterosaurs; it's bipedal, and despite the name, looks more like Pteranodon.
- Justified in Live A Live. Pogo's chapter, set in prehistory, has a Tyrannosaurus Rex as its final boss. This is the only dinosaur in the entire chapter, and it is worshipped as a god by the Kuu tribe, who offer it human sacrifices. It's also the current manifestation of the Lord of Dark, Odio, so it might not be a real dinosaur anyway.
- In Mass Effect 2 (set in late 22nd century CE), The Illusive Man describes a certain 37 million year old artifact as from the time when mammals were taking their first steps on Earth. Sorry TIM, but mammals first evolved somewhere between 167 million BCE and 225 million BCE (not too long after dinosaurs).
- Monster Hunter Generations: With the reveal of one of the Maccao and Great Maccao species, the game manages to play with this trope. In prior games, all of the Theropod Bird Wyverns were simply super-powered raptors, similar to the Jurassic Park raptors in appearance. With the introduction of the Maccao and Great Maccao, the aversion happens. While still absolutely massive compared to real-life raptors, they're sporting a notable bright green feathered coat (except on their face/neck, lower arms/legs, underbelly and tail). The only inaccuracy is that their hands still are paw-like (as with the raptors in Jurassic Park), while real raptors weren't even able to twist their hands like that.
- The "naked Velociraptors" subtrope is happily averted in FlashBang's Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, of all places. Bonus points for the Perpetual Molt effects.
- Original War is set in Beringia 2 million years ago, but the fauna includes...
- "Apemen", identified by Dr. Gladstone as Homo pekinensis (an old name of Asian H. erectus). Hominids had not left Africa at the time yet, and the accompanying artwork ranges from Homo erectus to H. habilis, Australopithecus and sometimes chimpanzee and orangutan-like.
- The terror bird Phorusrhacos, clearly based on Charles R. Knight's classic restoration from 1901, which had disappeared ten million years before and only lived in South America. A possible descendant of Phorusrhacos, Titanis, lived in North America at the time, but only in Texas and Florida.
- Small mammals called "baggies". According to the manual, they are echidnas, which never lived outside Australia.
- A primitive horse called Eohippus (only available in the editor). On the one hand, Eohippus lived in the Eocene, around 50 million years ago, but on the other, the animal looks far more like a modern horse than Eohippus, just very small. In any case, the horses that lived in the area 2 million years ago were already part of the modern day genus, Equus.
- The mastodons and sabertooth cats are alright at least (although they are named sabertooth tigers).
- Mostly averted with Paraworld, which has a few minor issues that are mostly explained away with Rule of Cool or lampshaded by the protagonists (All dinosaurs living at the same time, ice age mammals being counted as dinosaurs, and extremely oversized Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus [Although even then, they are referred to as Tyrannosaur Titan and Triceratops Titan and more realistically sized versions can be seen roaming the maps; the third Titan is a Seismosaur that is only about half again as big as a real one]).
- Theropods don't have feathers in Parkasaurus even with the "realistic" textures option, which the developers acknowledged in an update announcement.
- Jurassic Marsh in Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time is a huge offender on this. The dinosaurs shown are Velociraptor (no feathers, much bigger than a zombie), Tyrannosaurus (has arms too big, acts like a dog), Stegosaurus (has six spikes on its tail, isn't meant to exist in the same time period as Tyrannosaurus or Velociraptor), Ankylosaurus (has spiky armor and a tail club shaped like a spiked ball), and Pteranodon (Toothy Bird, carrying zombies off with its feet).
- Portal Runner: The dinosaurs in the dinosaur world. Justified, though, in that they're supposed to all be toys, and toys are rarely accurate in the first place.
- Saurian deliberately attempts to avert this, with extensive research, input by numerous paleontologists, and an actual dinosaur on their production team for reference (an emu) to make certain their recreation of the Hell Creek Formation during the Latest Cretaceous is as accurate as possible, containing only species that were for certain present in that region during that time. This hasn't stopped the devs from adding speculative (though not necessarily inaccurate) traits to their dinosaurs, like the Anzu being given the ability to mimic calls.
- Scribblenauts:
- Plateosaurus is not a hadrosaur, but typing its name summons one.
- The words Dunkleosteus, Bull Shark, Cow Shark, and Sixgill Shark summon a Carcharocles megalodon.
- In the first game, the word Microraptor summons a pterosaur. In Super Scribblenauts it correctly summons a feathered dinosaur, but it's a little big for a Microraptor unless you apply adjectives.
- The word Ceratosaurus summons a T. rex, and so do the names of several other non-avian theropods that were not tyrannosauroids.
- The word "Ichtyostega" (note the absence of the second "h") summons a plesiosaur.
- The word Pliosaur summons a long-necked plesiosaur, but Pliosaurus summons a correct pliosaur.
- The word Ichthyosaur summons a bottlenose dolphin.
- The 2017 Time Travelling Toaster Event in The Simpsons: Tapped Out features a very sparsely-feathered raptor (from the episode "Days of Future Future"), a baby T. rex that looks like a Super-Deformed version of an adult, Dilophosaurus with Jurassic Park-styled neck frills, and a bat-winged Pteranodon that perches bipedally in its bird-like nest. Not to mention Lisa of all people mistakes Brachiosaurus for Brontosaurus and Pteranodon for a dinosaur, but she does receive points for breaking the myth that T. rex's vision is based on movement. The 2018 Moe's Ark Event features the "Flying Brachiosaurus", which looks nothing like a Brachiosaurus and more like Gertie the Dinosaur.
- In Star Fox Adventures, there's an item called a Dinosaur Horn. It's associated exclusively with the Snowhorn, a tribe of wooly mammoths.
- Super Mario Bros.:
- Super Mario World Dinosaur Land is inhabited by Yoshis (who are variously referred to as dinosaurs and dragons, depending who you talk to). So within the whole Mario canon, we have dinosaurs who live among humans, fly or spit fire, swallow other creatures amphibian-style and turn them into eggs, which they then use as missile weapons! And later on they got a limited form of speech. Dinosaur Land also has Reznors, which are chibi Triceratops that breath fire. Rex isn't based on a Tyrannosaurus rex like the name would suggest, but rather a purple Celtic dragon; and it doesn't breath fire.
- In Super Mario Odyssey, one of the many forms Mario can assume throughout the game is a Tyrannosaurus rex... a scaly Tyrannosaurus rex. As stated on the main page, T. rex was either at least partially feathered or had smooth skin. The usual handwave of "it's a cartoon, it doesn't need to be realistic" doesn't apply here, given the T. rex's realistic design. Plus there's the usual shrink-wrapping, pronated hands, and smoothed-over skull.
- The Tekken character Alex is a predatory dinosaur living alongside humans in the 20th Century. However, he was genetically engineered from fossils by scientists, partially averting this trope as Alex is more Genetic Abomination than Dinosaur.
- World of Warcraft:
- In the Barrens and Durotar, there are the most stereotypical predatory dinosaurs in the world, though given slight makeovers. Raptors (the dinos, not the bird) are even the racial mount of trolls. To be fair, if there are dragons, yetis, green-skinned shamanistic weird people, and giant blue satyrs with tentacles growing out of their faces, there may as well be dinosaurs.
- Un'Goro Crater is a zone devoted to a mashing-together of various popular dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. Their versions of pterosaurs, raptors, stegosaurs, dimetrodons, and T-Rex-like creatures all hang out within a few city blocks of each other. Along with gorillas. It, along with Sholazar Basin, is really an homage to Land of the Lost (1974) (all that's missing are the Sleestaks), and probably any other movie/show that has a hidden valley of dinosaurs. With a dash of Nintendo thrown in.
- Animal and vegetable fossils are a subset of the Archaeology skill, and include a rare pet and mount that are both magically reanimated fossilized raptors, implying that Azeroth's raptors have been around for a very long time. (Probably long enough to evolve off their feathers, pick up the carnotaur-esque horns, and gain the sentience the game keeps pointing out.) There's even a nod to feathery raptors with the Feathered Raptor Arm item, though it's promptly lampshaded in the item's own description as just-as-likely belonging to one of Azeroth's hojillion other magical abominations. Also mentioned are the possibility of still-living giant trilobites, and while the entry on the nautilus shell says all the shelled squids in the world are extinct, there's two very large examples hanging out in Vashj'ir.
- There's the Pandaren Isle of Giants, in which all sorts of monstrously large dinosaur-esque creatures are put in groups wandering about on the island. The island itself is a blatant Shout-Out to the Jurassic Park movies, and there is even a campsite outright named so.
- Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire points out in the manual that humans and dinosaurs lived millions of years apart... While you encounter both in the game. There are also human tribes from different parts of the world from different times. A major element of the plot is to find out why and how these were all brought together into one valley.
- Played for Laughs in Zoo Tycoon 2, in which Stokesosaurus wears glasses when painting. Not that the game didn't have plenty other examples, however (the likely herbivorous oviraptorosaur Protarchaeopteryx was portrayed as a generic carnivorous coelurosaur, to name one of the better examples).
