Artistic License Paleontology / Western Animation

• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius was guilty of this in several episodes.
  • The pilot movie had Cindy giving a presentation on a theropod dinosaur, using a model skeleton as a visual aide... and she refers to it as a plesiosaurus, which, to make matters worse, wasn't even a dinosaur. Somewhat subverted when Jimmy calls her out on it, but he manages to uphold the trope by claiming that the dinosaur was in fact a Megalosaurus, which it still doesn't look much like (Though that may be due to the show's art style).
  • Then there's "200 million years ago" = "the late Cretaceous era" ... and all of the issues THAT brings up. In the same episode, there are Pteranodon that use their feet like talons, plus the giant Pteranodon eggs. A later aired TV special corrects this and puts the late Cretaceous 75 million years ago. However, they still featured a T. rex, which did not evolve until 7 million years later.
  • Another episode had a Jurassic Park-styled Velociraptor.
• Arthur:
  • The title card for the episode "Sue Ellen & The Brainasaurus" misspells "-saurus" as "-saurous".
  • The episode "In My Africa" mentions dinosaur bones found in Angola. . . accompanied by a photograph of a mosasaur skull.
  • The Cold Open of "Follow the Bouncing Ball" has the gang going on a tour in the Jurassic Period, made evident by the presence of Apatosaurus. However, Brain implies they went back 65 million years (try 152-150 million years).
• The Batman Beyond two-parter "Curse of the Kobra" involves the KOBRA organisation's attempts to gene-splice themselves into a dinosaur-human hybrid race that will rule the world. Their plans include detonating a nuclear warhead in a dormant volcano, with the resulting eruptions raising the global temperature. Why? Because everyone knows dinosaurs are cold-blooded, and can't survive let alone function in less than tropical climates. The spliced Big Bad even weakens and collapses as soon as his climate-controlled environment is breached, acting as though he's going to die immediately because his plan was foiled.
• The Animated Adaptation of the Belgian action-adventure comic series Bob Morane had an episode dealing with Time Travel. Naturally, all of the creatures the characters meet are Jurassic Park-inspired, down to the frilled Dilophosaurus, which is also misplaced in time to the Late Cretaceous (actually lived in the Early Jurassic, almost 150 million years earlier), but at least they got its size right. The episode also has stampeding "raptors", and mountain-sized dino skeletons that the heroes use as bridges to cross a quicksand swamp.
• Bobobobs has humans and dinosaurs coexisting during the same time period on Earth.
• The Nick Jr show Bubble Guppies did an episode on dinosaurs....thing is they included Pterosaurus and Marine Reptiles as dinosaurs. This is supposed to be educational. To be fair, they did go out of their way to use Apatosaurus instead of "Brontosaurus".
• One episode of Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers show that stegosaurs and sauropods actually came from outer space and are really small and intelligent but Earth's food made them grew big and stupid.
  • Even though he's an alien, Steggy's anatomy is completely wrong for a Stegosaurus: he has a dragging tail, a low-slung body, stubby limbs, grasping paws with four claws on each, an alligator belly, plates that look like half circles, an overly-long serpentine neck, and a lizard-like mouth. Stegosaurus had elevated tails, graceful frames like an elephant, long sturdy legs, hoofed feet that were completely incapable of grabbing, two claws on each forefeet ^note  The forefeet have five toes on each, but three of them are clawless., chainmail-like skin (according to a layer of small bones found underneath the neck), pentagonal plates, necks that were only slightly long, and horse-like heads with a beak.
    • Steggy can also run fast and casually ROLL OVER ON HIS SIDE. Even a layman knows these are impossible for a stegosaur.
    • On the other hand, he is depicted as being able to stand on his hind legs. The problem is that he can walk on them most of the time.
    • All the dinosaurs in the episode are anatomically inaccurate. In fact, they look no different than the swamp-dwelling, slender-limbed, tail-dragging dinosaurs from portrayals in the early 1900s (like this◊ for example).
  • The episode also went with the "dinosaur eggs are gigantic" myth (although the "egg" featured was really a spaceship).
• The eponymous Denver the Last Dinosaur doesn't seem to belong to any known species. Apparently he's supposed to be a Corythosaurus, explaining the mohawk-like head crest...but he doesn't look much like a hadrosaur either.
  • Made even worse by the reboot series Denver & Cliff, where not only does Denver look nothing like his 80s counterpart save for being green, he also has a very long prehensile tongue and can change his color to camouflage, being a mix between a chameleon and Yoshi.
• Dino-Riders operates on the Rule of Cool, and so features several strange elements. All flying reptiles are able to carry humans on their backs with no problem (this is notably impossible, especially for Pteranodon), and both Pteranodon and Quetzalcoatlus are the same size. The heroes and villains fight over a Brontosaurus (which is also dubbed as the biggest dinosaur) and not an Apatosaurus. In the toys, virtually all of the ceratopsians are identical in size (and Kentrosaurus was as large as Stegosaurus). Despite this explicitly taking place on Earth, all the dinosaurs and other Mesozoic animals are shown living in the same time period (i.e. Cretaceous, Jurassic and Triassic creatures all existing simultaneously). There's also Dimetrodon, which lived before the Mesozoic era. And then the Ice Age mammals and cavemen start showing up, though this is due to Time Travel. However, said mammals include an entelodont (labeled as a "killer warthog"), which died out in the early Miocene.
• Dinosaucers used Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus confusion as a Running Gag. When told that "Brontosaurus" was an incorrect designation and that Apatosaurus was the correct one, Bronto Thunder would immediately reply "That's a girl's name!" (he had a girlfriend back on his home planet named Apattysaurus). Dimetro is kind of an oddball here. Sphenacodontids like Dimetrodon are most definitely not dinosaurs. They are pelycosaurs, the ancestors of the therapsids, who were in turn the ancestors of mammals (in short, Dimetro is a closer relative of the Secret Scouts than he is to any of the Dinosaucers). However, given Dimetro's appearance, it's very possible that the producers had Dimetrodon confused with Spinosaurus. Old illustrations of Spinosaurus show an animal that could easily be confused for a bipedal Dimetrodon (the only good specimen of Spinosaurus was destroyed during World War II — really). Indeed, Dimetro's head resembles the head Spinosaurus was drawn with in the 1980s, long before Spinosaurus' relative Baryonyx was discovered and turned out to have a head that does not look like that of any other large theropod at all. Take a look at this old illustration from the time (there's even a direct comparison to Dimetrodon) for an example. Oddly, the show's broad definition of "dinosaur" would actually prove a boon decades later, as one of their number was an Archaeopteryx, which is now classified as a dinosaur.
• This occurs in Dingo Pictures' Dinosaur Adventure because of laziness and a desire to reuse animation from one of the studio's previous movies. The main character and his parents are clearly members of different species, herbivores can become carnivores, and animals from the Age of Mammals coexist with dinosaurs.
• Dinosaur Train on PBS Kids tends to avert this by having Dr. Scott the paleontologist (portrayed by actual paleontologist Scott Sampson) come in and explain what scientists believe (and an un-named, party-pooper character step in and complain about one of the most fantastical moments in the episode like "Point of fact. Dinosaurs did NOT give music concerts."). That's not to say, however, that it's completely immune to some very odd mistakes (scaly, bipedal and ectothermic pterosaurs, hadrosaurs that only walk on two legs, maniraptorans that either aren't feathered enough or completely featherless and so on).
• Dino Squad:
  • For his first experiment, Victor Veloci uses his deevolution chemical, which reverts ordinary animals into dinosaurs, to "revert" a shark into a "Mutated Megalodon"—except that it's actually a mosasaur, an ocean-going lizard that sharks did not evolve from, and neither of these animals are dinosaurs anyway.
  • The show also stated that Spinosaurus' super power was Super-Speed. Given 2014 discoveries of Spinosaurus, its legs had high bone density, which was useful for buoyancy, but not much for speed.
  • The Styracosaurus in the show is depicted as having having two brow horns that are larger and longer than the nasal horn, when in reality, it should be reversed. The official website accurately states that the brow horns should be smaller—though the site made its own mistakes, such as stating that Tyrannosaurus dragged its tail along the ground like a kangaroo (which the show itself got right).
  • In one episode, Veloci attempts to infect the clouds with primordial ooze so it woud rain down on everything and revert them into dinosaurs—even plants, which are in a different kingdom entirely.
• Lampshaded in an episode of Ed, Edd n Eddy which involved one of the Eds' scams as taking the kids back in time to the Triassic period, and they use Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus as the fake dinosaurs to terrorize the kids. Double D found this amusing, since these dinosaurs were actually from the Cretaceous.
• The Fairly Oddparents often depicts Tyrannosaurus rex with a kangaroo-stance. Strangely, they got it right in the opening of Abra-Catastrophe with Wanda's T. rex form. There's scaly, bat-winged pterosaurs and sauropods with crocodilian belly-scales, and one episode "Movie Magic" had a Triceratops with a spiked tail. A more recent episode had dinosaurs living with cavemen in 50,000 BC. Given the nature of the show, however, these inaccuracies hardly seem out of place.
• The Flintstones: Dinosaurs are shown coexisting with humans: mammals that existed up through the Cretaceous were small and rodent-like.
• Fred the Caveman had dinosaurs wandering around a prehistoric world... in which cave-people existed.
• Gertie the Dinosaur one of the earliest cartoons ever made features Gertie alongside a mammoth. She also eats far more material than her body could hold such as a tree twice her size and drinking A LAKE which scenes are there mostly for Rule of Funny.
• The caveman episode of Goof Troop. Perhaps the biggest offender is that what looks like an outdated representation of a carnivorous theropod was referred to as a Brontosaurus. Interestingly, while the creature in question was shown eating meat, Goofy points out that Brontosaurus were herbivores. Then again, it was Pete who called the creature a Brontosaurus.
• According to one episode of I Am Weasel, the earth was flat during the Mesozoic and that dinosaurs died because they laughed at I. R. Baboon's red butt and fell off the flat earth. And then there's the caveman-themed episode, with dinosaurs included. Given the show's setting, none of these are unusual.
• Having been made in 1979, the pilot episode of the French Edutainment cartoon Il Était Une Fois... l'Homme (Once Upon a Time... Man) gets a free pass in most respects, but it's still odd how the animation shows birds descending from non-dinosaurian thecodonts and yet the narrator insists later on that they've (along with crocodiles) also evolved from dinosaurs.
• I'm A Dinosaur. Holy sweet mother of John H. Ostrom, I'm A Dinosaur. For a cartoon that tries to be educational, it fails pretty spectacularly at being such. For instance:
  • Brachiosaurids with long, diplodocid-like tails (yeah, have fun with that◊).
  • Boatloads of Anachronism Stew & Misplaced Wildlife (for instance, the Late Jurassic Compsognathus in the Early Cretaceous and the African Jobaria in South America).
  • Sinosauropteryx with the largest theropod tail (the creature itself was turkey-sized, making this impossible, although this is true if it's proportionate length).
  • Giganotosaurus ^note  The show calls it "Gigantosaurus", but that's an invalid sauropod. as the largest theropod (Spinosaurus was known to be larger for some time then).
  • Dilophosaurus as the largest Jurassic theropod (ironically, the show features Allosaurus and did an episode on the considerably larger Torvosaurus).
    • They probably meant the largest Early Jurassic theropod, and Dilophosaurus did rival Cryolophosaurus and the ichnotaxon Eubrontes for that title.
  • Abelisaurid hands proportioned liked those of typical theropods. They were ridiculously tiny, without elbows or knuckles.
  • Saltopus as a dinosaur (generally considered a more primitive dinosauromorph since the Turn of the Millennium).
  • An "Ultrasauros" character (it had been sunk into Supersaurus for some time then).
  • Egg-laying plesiosaurs (live-birthing plesiosaurs were still a pretty recent discovery then, but they still should've known better).
  • Three-fingered tyrannosaurids (any competent paleontologist could tell you this is wrong).
  • Deinonychosaurian Megaraptor (disproved in 2003, well before the series' 2009 pilot).
  • Inaccurately feathered maniraptorans (do we really need to review this?)
  • The implication that theropods were the only bipedal dinosaurs (primitive members of all dinosaur groups could walk bipedally, and the most advanced ornithopods retained this feature to an extent).
  • Zuniceratops with a nose horn and being the earliest ceratopsian (its lack of one is the only difference a layman could find between it and a chasmosaurine ceratopsid, and if you're discussing a taxon as obscure as Zuniceratops, there's no excuse for you to not know Psittacosaurus at the very least). One wonders why they didn't just use Triceratops (which is surprisingly absent in this series) if they wanted to use a three-horned ceratopsian.
  • Blatant mispronunciations of multiple names, such as Sinornithoides^note  Actually sine-OR-nih-THOY-deez, suh-NOR-nith-oyds in the show, Sinosauropteryx^note  Actually SINE-oh-saw-ROP-tur-icks, SINE-oh-SOP-tur-icks in the show and Carcharodontosaurus^note  Actually kar-KAR-oh-don-toh-SAW-rus, KAR-cher-oh-don-toh-SAW-rus in the show.
  • Feathered, bipedal pterosaurs that perch in trees and have 2 small fingers.
  • Bavarisaurus as a small feathered theropod dinosaur (it was a lizard).
  • Sauropods, hadrosaurs, ceratopsians, and thyreophoreans with the wrong hands.
  • The series is also guilty of Informed Species. For starters, Velociraptor is portrayed with an Allosaurus-like skull, Troodon has a long neck like Coelophysis, and Allosaurus and Giganotosaurus look more like Tyrannosaurus with three-fingered hands.
  • Smilodon with a long, Panthera-like tail.
  • Stegosaurus with a toothed beak and 8 plates arranged in pairs.
  • Herrerasaurus described as being the size of an elephant. The only herrerasaur that big was the putative "Aliwalia", which appears to be a sauropod relative anyway.
  • Massospondylus couldn't walk on four legs.
• In the Johnny Test episode "Johnny BC", the sister's teacher makes them look for a fossil from precambrian times, so the sisters go back to caveman times for a 3-toed sloth fossil to plant where they were looking. Too bad precambrian times ended 540 million years before cavemen appeared.
• According to the Jonny Quest TOS episode "Turu The Terrible", pteranodons are much larger than human beings, can fly while carry a human being in their talons, and can survive multiple direct hits by bazooka rounds.
• In Jorel's Brother, dinosaurs are an alien species that lives in another planet; they are able to speak and live mostly like humans, except they have an extremely short attention span. In another episode, it's revealed that the series' entire world is located in the lice of alien dinosaurs. This trope is also parodied in "Shostners Games"; at one point, a song's lyrics mention that humans coexisting with dinosaurs is historically inaccurate... because dinosaurs were never real.
• An episode of The Little Mermaid (1992) either didn't care or just figured "We already have a mermaid using a magic trident, screw it" (so brace yourself) when everyone takes a trip to the Arctic (the mermaid equivalent of Aspen apparently) where Ariel sees the "poor frozen dinosaurs" and decides to thaw them out with good ol' King Triton's trident. It starts off all well and good with the land-based herbivores peacefully cavorting with Ariel UNDERWATER before the mean ol' T. rex starts chasing them... UNDERWATER. Without needing to come up for air. In the ARCTIC WATER. Everything is set right again with the dinosaurs' previously frozen home melting and restored back to its former glory like just another day in the life for Atlanteans on vacation though the audience will either be confused from this trope enough to fail any tests in school, angry at the severe logical fails (because cartoons about mermaid princesses and magic tridents are "so" logical) or just laughing at the sheer audacity of a mermaid being hunted by a T. rex.
• Looney Tunes has this issue whenever depicting the Before Christ period. "The Hole Idea" opens this way and "Pre-Hysterical Hare" takes it up to eleven!
• Madeline:
  • The dinosaur song in "Madeline and the Dinosaur Bone" has the lyric, "Dinosaurs, dinosaurs, big and tall! They make the Eiffel seem a trifle small!" However, the Eiffel Tower is 324m at the tip while Barosaurus, one of the biggest dinosaurs ever discovered, grew up to 48m in length.
  • Also in the song, a sauropod is shown chomping on a T-Rex, while another is correctly shown eating the leaves of a tall tree.
• The Magic School Bus episode "The Busasaurus" at least tried to avert this trope based on the paleontological knowledge when it was made. The Frizz took the class back in time 67 million years (Late Cretaceous Period) specifically to correct Carlos (and the audience) on several pop-cultural misconceptions, the biggest of which was that all dinosaurs were predators. Of about a dozen different species they encounter in the episode, exactly three were carnivorous. The Licensed Game loosely based on the episode, The Magic School Bus Explores in the Age of the Dinosaurs, was similarly studious. However, Science Marched On:
  • Troodon and Ornithomimus were more likely omnivores rather than straight carnivores as depicted. The latter is particularly egregious, as suggestions that ornithomimids habitually ate plants are Older Than Television.
  • And, again, featherless coelurosaurs (it's debatable whether tyrannosaurids were feathered, but there's no question that troodontids and ornithomimids had them).
  • The episode also had a bit of Anachronism Stew with Parasaurolophus, Maiasaura, and Pteranodon existing 67 million years ago, when these are three reptiles that disappeared about 5 million years before then, and Pteranodon was portrayed as living inland. Edmontosaurus (or Anatosaurus/“Anatotitan”, depending on who you ask) would have been a better substitute for Maiasaura and Parasaurolophus^note unless undocumented reports of Parasaurolophus remains in Hell Creek turn out to be true, although lambeosaurines otherwise seem to have disappeared from North America before the end of the Cretaceous. Even then, Hypacrosaurus would be a less anachronistic choice if the writers needed a crested hadrosaur, since it’s known to have lived only 68 million years ago., and Quetzalcoatlus would be a more accurate fill-in for Pteranodon. At least this episode decided to stick with late Cretaceous dinosaurs. Similarly, the Cretaceous Alberta scene in the game is mostly based on the Two Medicine Formation but features Triceratops and Ornithomimus from the slightly younger Hell Creek Formation.
  • The Alamosaurus has flat mammal-like molars instead of the more accurate peg-shaped teeth, and they look more like generic diplodocids.
  • The call of Parasaurolophus was portrayed sounding like a high-pitched dolphin cry. Recent research via digital technology suggests this wasn't the case.
  • Basal synapsids were identified as reptiles in the Licensed Game.
  • The mini-game "Dino Madness" has birds as non-dinosaurs but still described as dinosaur descendants. Strangely enough, Wanda addresses the idea that birds are dinosaurs in the classroom area of the game. Plus Archaeopteryx is identified as a dinosaur.
  • In what may also count as another Science Marches On example, the game uses the name "Rioarribasaurus", a suggested alternate name for Coelophysis that has been officially suppressed.
  • In the game, the bus turns into a “rhamphorhynchoid” (long-tailed) pterosaur to travel to the Cretaceous, but these pterosaurs mostly died out in the Jurassic (anurognathids, the only Cretaceous “rhamphorhynchoids”, actually had short tails and look nothing like the game’s pterosaur).
  • The game does make a few errors, however, such as claiming plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs being the only types of marine reptiles (which gets particularly jarring when the game uses an animated Stock Footage from The Dinosaurs featuring a mosasaur and has it referred to as a Kronosaurus) and featuring what appears to be a legless snake in the Jurassic period (although it could be a caecilian).
• Mighty Max, with its paranormal story lines, had to oblige us with a dinosaur themed episode. An Evilutionary Biologist used a de-evolution machine to turn lizards into dinosaurs. Despite lizards and dinosaurs having some similar features, these two groups are not all that closely related, never mind being descended from each other. Interestingly enough, the de-evolving beam was used on sapient chicken ("Fowl, actually.") Virgil. Even though Virgil should have become a theropod dinosaur, he becomes a pterosaur instead. Pterosaurs are not true dinosaurs, nor are they the ancestors of birds. That said, the after-show educational segment did correctly teach that birds are descended from dinosaurs (although it also implied that pterosaurs are dinosaurs).
• Miraculous Ladybug runs into a brief instance of this in one episode where a Tyrannosaurus is shown licking Bunnyx's face in a photograph, and has pronated hands. Not only did theropod dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus actually hold their arms to the sides similar to birds, but are nowadays believed to have flat tongues similar to those of crocodiles which would actually be incapable of extending outside the mouth.
• The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "The Fault in Our Cutie Marks" features a filly with a skull cutie mark, whose parents are initially disturbed until she discovers a dinosaur in her backyard, whereupon they cry in unison, "She's an archaeologist!" Uh, no she's not; she's a palaeontologist since archaeologists like Daring Do study human artifacts. Made especially jarring considering the filly's name is Petunia Paleo.
• The New Adventures of Superman episode "Prehistoric Pterodactyls". Did you know that pterodactyls (actually depicted as impossibly large Pteranodons) can catch fighter jets in their mouths, survive direct hits from missiles and naval gunfire, go one-on-one with Superman and survive in space? According to this episode they can!
• Ninjago: Despite being identified as a dromaeosaurid theropod (i.e. raptor), the Grundle barely resembles any theropod let alone a dromaeosaurid. For starters, it has a head like a fish.
• The Peppa Pig episode "Potato City" has this in-universe. When the kids visit the dinosaur exhibit in Potato City, Edmund Elephant points out that the dinosaurs they have living together didn't actually live in the same era. The kids also get the attendant of the dinosaur exhibit to admit that the only reason they have a dinosaur exhibit at Potato City is because dinosaurs are popular with kids.
• Phineas and Ferb tend to run headlong into this trope whenever their daily shenanigans bring them in contact with dinosaurs.
  • The episode where the boys (and Candace) travel back in time, they encounter sauropods wading in swamps (an idea that has been disproven since the fifties) and has a Tyrannosaurus rex with three fingers. They say they went back over three hundred million years. Three hundred million years, huh?
  Phineas: Hey T. rex, aren't you a little young to be hanging around in the Carboniferous?
  Tyrannosaurus rex: Why, yes, yes I am.
  • This trope is played straight again in the episode "Lizard Whisperer", where the boys' American chameleon (which is a whole other trope in and of itself) is enlarged to gigantic sizes, and the boys call it a dinosaur. This one, however, is lampshaded.
  • A third instance of this trope occurs when Perry the Platypus fights Doofenshmirtz in Hawaii over the "Devolvinator". When the Devolvinator's beam hits Perry and Doofenshmirtz, Perry devolves into, among other things, an Ichthyornis and a Triceratops. What? Platypodes aren't even remotely close to either of these extinct organisms. Don't the creators even listen to their own song, he's a semi-aquatic mammal of action. Though given how Doofenshmirtz's evolutionary stages weren't exactly accurate either and got a giant ear in one of them ("Okay, this I don't even get."), it might have been Played for Laughs. Also probably justified as "Brain Drain" suggests that Doofenshmirtz himself doesn't know even what evolution actually is, only that it is "something to do with monkeys".
  • Averted in "Boyfriend from 27,000 BC", which showed frozen prehistoric animals representing the time periods and epochs they're from (Stegosaurus for Jurassic, Pteranodon for Cretaceous, a mammoth for Pleistocene, and a neanderthal for Paleolithic).
• Primal (2019) takes place in a Hollywood Prehistory setting with Neanderthal-like cavemen, inaccurately portrayed dinosaurs (including horned Tyrannosaurus rex, monstrous pterosaurs and large, scaly raptors), ice age mammals, savage ape-men and downright impossible fantasy creatures like monster bats and a Giant Spider. It's a fantasy story taking place in a primordial world, and any similarity to real prehistory is pure coincidence.
• In the Rugrats episode "Reptar 2010", the main characters watch a Reptar movie that claims dinosaurs ruled the earth fifty thousand years ago. Possibly justified since Reptar is a Godzilla expy, a franchise that isn't exactly known for scientific accuracy in the first place. A better example is an episode where the protagonists visit a museum and learn that T. rex is from the Jurassic. They're at least 80 million years off.
  • In one chapter book from 2002, "In Search For Reptar", Lou claims dinosaurs didn't have feathers. Although this could be chalked up by him not being up-to-date with modern theories.
• The Simpsons: The Hollywood Prehistory setting Homer encounters in "Time and Punishment", the second segment from The Simpsons S6 E6 "Treehouse of Horror V", features (in addition to the expected dinosaurs and pterosaurs) pelycosaurs, a ground sloth and what is presumably intended to be a primitive sarcopterygian (lobe-finned fish). Obviously none of these animals lived at the same time, but the Treehouse of Horror episodes aren’t meant to be taken seriously anyway.
• The Stanley Direct to Video movie Stanley's Dinosaur Round-Up: After jumping into the Great Big Book of Everything, Stanley encounters a herd of Brachiosaurus, which soon run off, scared by a three-fingered kangaroo-stance Tyrannosaurus rex that appears to be bigger than the brachiosaurids. Brachiosaurids did not travel in large herds (they would have stripped large areas of their foliage too quickly), they went extinct about 70 million years before tyrannosaurids evolved,^note  Primitive tyrannosauroids did live along Brachiosaurus, but they were essentially harmless to anything larger than a lamb. they couldn't run nearly as fast as they did in the show, tyrannosaurs held their bodies horizontal to the ground, had two fingers per hand and were considerably smaller than Brachiosaurus.
• Super Dinosaur, an Animated Adaptation of the Comic Book of the same name, renamed the character Terrordactyl (Pterodactyl) into Terroropterx (Archaeopteryx). By the way, the name is the only thing it changed with the character, he wasn't changed from a pterodactyl to an archaeopteryx to fit the new name.
• The Teen Titans Go! episode "Open Door Policy" is very much guilty of this. Not only are the Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor copied off from Jurassic Park, Triceratops looks like one of those "Chinasaurs" complete with sharp teeth, Brontosaurus also has sharp teeth and is clearly based on a painting by Charles R. Knight (dragging tail, hump-back, stubby limbs, box-shaped head, etc.), and the "Pterodactyl" is a toothy Pteranodon without pycnofibres. Sergey's Krasovskiy's paintings of Abrosaurus, Torvosaurus, and Deltadromeus were used (if not stolen) to represent Brontosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, and Velociraptor respectively.
• The "Scary Monsters" episode of Timothy Goes to School perpetrates old, debunked claims like carnosaurian-looking Velociraptor and pterosaurs that hang upside-down like bats (although some things, like sauropod nostrils being on top of the skull, are actually Science Marches On). Megazostrodon is called a dinosaur (it was a primitive mammaliaform), and the model shown looks nothing like the real animal.
• Transformers: Beast Wars:
  • Generally, the show's okay in terms of accuracy. Megatron, Terrorsaur, and Dinobot turn into a Tyrannosaurus rex, a pterosaur, and some kind of dromaeosaur (likely Velociraptor or Utahraptor) respectively, but they get their alt modes by scanning fossils rather than living creatures. Then again, all three were found around an area filled with lava and volcanic rock, which would normally destroy fossils.
  • Magmatron from the Japanese Beast Wars series is a multi-component transformer who consists of a Giganotosaurus, a Quetzalcoatlus, and an Elasmosaurus. The Beast Wars Sourcebook, which adapts the characters for American continuity, apparently didn't get the memo, as they say the three have "only loose connections to actual reptilian lifeforms." To be fair to the sourcebook, the models really do only resemble the aforementioned animals loosely: the Giga model is a generic-as-it-gets theropod, the Plesio has an incredibly bendy neck (though this can be forgiven, as it's needed for the transformation) and a lizardlike head with incorrect eye-placement, whereas the Quetz looks like a scaly vulture with a huge, serrated beak.
  • Speaking of Magmatron, the series contains an assortment of dinosaurs as alternate modes for the various villain characters. Most of them were excellent in terms of accuracy, at least for their time... save for Hardhead◊, who was a remold of Beast Wars Dinobot and was a Pachycephalosaurus with a jaw full of razor sharp teeth and the toe talons of a Velociraptor. Pachys were herbivores, or omnivores at best.
    • The original raptor mold wasn't without its problems either. Besides looking like a JP raptor, it had six digits on its back feet, creating Dinobot's trademark double-thumbs. It should only have had four. When an upgraded version of the figure was released for the Classics/Universe toyline, it looked a lot closer to the character's cartoon depiction. But it still suffered from inaccuracies: it had a bent tail, pronated hands and scaly skin (in 2008!), in a line that was meant to recreate old characters in updated alternate modes. But at least the new toy did away with the original's spinning shield gimmick, a feature that required the figure to have an elongated button sticking out of its cloaca that you had to push in repeatedly. Yuck.
  • Transformers G1 had the Dinobots as how the dinosaurs were popularly thought of at the time: Grimlock was tripod-stanced, Sludge had a swan neck and dragged his tail, Snarl was extremely hunchbacked. Fortunately the Dinobots were much more realistically done in Transformers: Animated, Grimlock especially.
  • G1 also had the two-parter titled Dinobot Island, where they met horrible depictions of living prehistoric animals. Tail-dragging, Godzilla-sized Theropods, a pterosaur (looking a lot like the relatively small Dimorphodon) lifting Spike up to her nest (filled with eggs bigger then the mother), a bendy-necked plesiosaur (also being able to pick up Spike). And it was written by Donald F. Glut, renowned paleo-expert! Though considering he hated working on the cartoon, it is not unreasonable to assume that he did make himself cry while writing it.
• Xiaolin Showdown:
  • "Oil in the Family" features a three-fingered, tripodal Tyrannosaurus rex. The same episode reinforces the idea that oil is made from decomposed dinoasaur remains.
  • Interdimensional spy Tomoko (Kimiko's sister) from the Xiaolin Chronicles episode "Tigress Woo" has a size-shifting pterosaur (its species is not identified, but it has a Pteranodon crest) named Dina which she uses as a mean of transport. As always, it's scaly, bipedal, with bat wings and its name obviously shouts "dinosaur". Justified, for being a magical creature from another dimension.

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