Domesticated Dinosaurs

Just imagine. A world where humans and dinosaurs can live as one and not have '60s-era sensibilities.

Henry Wu: We could easily breed slower, more domesticated dinosaurs.
John Hammond: "Domesticated dinosaurs?" Nobody wants domesticated dinosaurs, Henry. They want the real thing.

— Jurassic Park

Most fiction detailing interaction between humans and dinosaurs portrays the relationship as purely antagonistic; dinos want to eat us, and we want to not get eaten. But that's not the extent of our interaction with most animals we actually deal with, is it? This trope is another way of imagining what that interaction might look like. What if we found a use for dinosaurs? Wouldn't it be cool if dinosaurs were kept as pets, mounts, or beasts of burden?

In theory, this trope is an aversion of Prehistoric Monster, since it presents dinosaurs as simply another class of animals. However, this is often mitigated by one of two major factors: either the dinosaurs turn out to be impossible to domesticate and run wild, demonstrating that they are not simply another class of animals but are uniquely dangerous, or the people keeping the dinosaurs are themselves characterized as cruel, brutal, and primitive, kindred spirits to their reptilian servants. In a fantasy context, Lizard Folk are especially prone to this latter trend.

Despite the name of this trope, it can also apply to any prehistoric animal - mammoths make a pretty popular substitute for War Elephants.

Given recent advances in scientific knowledge, birds are considered Living Dinosaurs and we humans have domesticated them. We even eat them on a regular basis. The most common real-life domesticated dinosaur is thus the chicken.

Also see Fantastic Livestock and Horse of a Different Color, as well as All Animals Are Dogs for when the dinosaurs act just like real-life pets, and Fluffy Tamer for the sort of human character who keeps these things around. Typically occurs in a Hollywood Prehistory setting, a Lost World, in Medieval Prehistory, or as a result of Time Travel, but can also appear in a present-day setting with Living Dinosaurs. The dinosaurs may be treated as Fantastic Fauna Counterpart to various domestic animals. Related to Non-Malicious Monster and to an extent, Benevolent Monsters. May overlap with Extinct Animal Park.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Black Cat: The earlier chapters have Madam Freesia, an aristocrat who really likes to collect rare objects, including a pet T. rex named Flora, who escapes and causes much destruction.
• Doraemon sometimes has this, courtesy of Doraemon's "Momotaro-brand rice cakes" which turn any wild animal friendly to its feeder. One episode involve a mammoth, another involves a whole host of extinct animals, and Doraemon: Nobita's Dinosaur and its remake involves a dinosaur that befriend Nobita... and a T. rex.
• Doraemon: Nobita and the Knights on Dinosaurs is set in an underground world where dinosaurs still thrives, with the velociraptors having evolved into a humanoid state, having their own culture and civilization, and have domesticated other dinosaurs as their steeds.
• Garzey's Wing has villainous knights mounted on big dromaeosaur-looking animals.

Asian Animation

• Happy Heroes: The residents of the prehistoric-themed planet Guling are shown to own dinosaurs as pets and ride them to travel around.

Comic Books

• In Aquaman (1991), Derea of Mertu has a dinosaur companion named Peli, with whom she has a telepathic connection.
• In Disney Mouse and Duck Comics that take place in Flintstones-esque society AUs, characters often keep dinosaurs as pets and use them as industrial machines.
• Neozoic: This comic book is set in an Alternate Timeline where the asteroid extinction of the dinosaurs never happened. Humans and dinosaurs have coexisted into the modern era though this has affected human technological development in odd ways. Humans have domesticated herbivorous dinosaurs as beasts of burden, but for carnivorous dinosaurs especially if they're in large hunting packs, it's time to call for the elite Predator Defense League.
• Runaways: Gert has a pet Deinonychus named Old Lace. She was genetically engineered in the distant future and is given orders via a psychic link.
• Turok: In the Dynamite Comics version, various groups make use of dinosaurs such as pterosaur riding Mongols. Even Turok himself has a pet dinosaur.
• 2000 AD:
  • The comics run with this idea by having the Cursed Earth — the post-apocalyptic wasteland between the Mega Cities of North America — infested with reborn dinosaurs. A long-running strip follows a pioneer "wagon train" leaving Judge Dredd's Mega-City One to search out an unspoilt corner of the continent in which to build a better life; they encounter both raptor packs, some of which had been "tamed" by sub-human mutant tribes as riding beasts, and by others as beasts of burden.
  • Elsewhere in 2000 AD, tyrannosaurs repeatedly turn on humans who try to tame them. A story arc revolves around a bull tyrannosaur with a certain intelligence, who absolutely hates the humans who've treated him sadistically.
• Wonder Woman (1987): When Diana and Trevor help free Skartaris from Villainy, Inc. several of the locals who help them ride tame dinosaurs.
• Xenozoic Tales: Largely subverted, dinosaurs are simply too large, wild and powerful for the humans to domesticate. The exception to this is Hermes, a juvenile allosaur who Jack Tenrec keeps around as a guard animal for his home.

Films — Animated

• Meet the Robinsons: The Robinson family ends up adopting the T. rex used against them. He acts like a dog.

Films — Live Action

• Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend: While under the care of the protagonist couple, the baby sauropod acts like a domesticated puppy.
• Dinosaur Island (2014): Kate has a pet dinosaur that acts a little bird-like.
• Jurassic Park:
  • Jurassic World:
    • The raptor handler Owen Grady is on very familiar terms with the park's four Velociraptors, and has raised them from birth to gain their trust, but he'll emphatically deny controlling them. When another park worker falls into their enclosure, Owen's able to get the raptors to stay back long enough for the other man to flee, then even he has to make a run for the exit before he's eaten. Owen may be the pack's alpha, but that just means he has to always been on guard for challenges to his authority. Sure enough, near the climax, the raptors briefly switch sides and help the part-raptor I. rex, but hesitate to attack Owen and his partner Barry. Owen ultimately convinces them to help, at which point three of them give their lives fighting to protect him.
    • The park includes a dinosaur petting zoo containing young herbivores, including Triceratops with saddles that kids can ride. Which is a good way to assure your visitors that the dinosaurs are safe, and if the baby dinosaurs grow up around their human counterparts, they'd be less inclined to be hostile towards them as adults.
  • Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom:
    • Owen is reunited with Blue, the last surviving member of the original raptor squad. While she is initially hostile after being betrayed and captured by the mercenaries, she later warms up again to her human "dad", and later fights the hybrid Indoraptor to protect Owen and his friends. However, she doesn't take well to captivity, and at the end departs once more to the Grand Canyon (refusing to come home with Owen) where she can live free once again.
    • Much of the plot to the film revolves around powerful people from all over the world trying to acquire the dinosaurs, including for military purposes.
• Prehysteria involves pet dinosaurs.
• Super Mario Bros. (1993): Yoshi is a pet of the royal family, and while Koopa mistreats him, he quickly bonds with Daisy and helps her escape captivity.
• The Valley of Gwangi: An old west rodeo makes a successful sideshow out of an Eohippus, and then they find an Allosaurus and try to put him in the circus. Naturally, he escapes and eats a lot of people.

Literature

• Edmond Hamilton's sci-fi novella The Abysmal Invaders, originally published in Weird Tales, portrays a race of Lizard Folk from Beneath the Earth invading the surface world with their dinosaur and pterodactyl mounts.
• Chrono Hustle: Jack gets himself a pet Triceratops while in the Cretaceous.
• Ciaphas Cain: Duty Calls features dinosaurs used as livestock. Unfortunately, the Tyranids are on the planet, meaning that the huge herbivorous beasts are also excellent sources of biomass for the 'nids to make new troops with.
• The Dinosaur Lords has dinosaurs in all parts of society, replacing modern creatures. They're bred for eggs, food and hides, they're kept as pets, they pull carts and plow fields, they carry burdens and, above others, they're war mounts. To quote a review:
  Dinosaur Lords has medieval knights riding dinosaurs into battle. Your decision to read the book will inevitably be based not on this or any other review but on precisely how excited you feel by the phrase "medieval knights ride dinosaurs into battle."
• Dinotopia: The first illustrated book provides the picture for the above thumbnail. While there are sentient dinosaurs in the setting who befriend the protagonists, there's also plenty with animalistic intelligence which the inhabitants use for labour.
• The Enormous Egg: A Triceratops is hatched from a giant hen's egg and becomes the pet of a boy named Nate Twitchell, who names it "Uncle Beazley." Nate walks him like a dog every day, and once Uncle Beazley gets big, Nate starts riding on his back.
• The Fantastic Dinosaur Adventure: The Dollybut siblings and their great-uncle Lancelot travel back in time to the age of dinosaurs. By the end of the story, they adopt two juvenile animals: a female Diplodocus and a male pterosaur.
• How To Keep Dinosaurs is a full book on dinosaur care with elaborate CG enhanced photo illustrations featuring dinosaurs in the modern world. The book covers dinosaurs as house pets, guard animals, livestock, and as zoo animals with a sense of Black Comedy throughout.
• The Ideal Sponger Life has various breeds dinosaurs as the main horse-analogues in the other world, used as mounts for riding and beasts of burden. They're generally referred to as drakes, wyverns, and so on.
• Jurassic Park is about a failed attempt at creating a dinosaur zoo. Certain spin-off video games let you succeed, though, by focusing on the upkeep of such a park if it really worked. On of inGen's long-term plans is to breed small dinosaurs for children to keep as pets. BioSyn, a competitor, worries that they would make it so that they could only survive off of food produced by inGen, giving them a nice monopoly on them.
• Liv in the Future sees the titular character adopt a quartet of tiny dinosaurs that wandered out of a portal as pets.
• The Lords of Creation: The Sky People has the Earth outpost tame dinosaurs via neural implant.
• More Information Than You Require: The "pseudosaur" is listed as one of the hideous steeds of the molemen. This is actually a subversion, because, although the mole-men think that pseudosaurs are dinosaurs, they're actually just oversized iguanas.
• The Space Odyssey Series: In 3001: The Final Odyssey, Frank Poole is more than a little shocked to learn that, in the 31st century, raptors^note given that his source material is stated to be the "Jurassic" movies, it was more likely a Deinonychus or similar are employed as gardeners, among other things. Apparently carnivorous dinosaurs, with a touch of genetic modification, make excellent laborers; they're even employed as babysitters, which leads to the Obligatory Joke:
  "Would you trust your kids to a dinosaur?"
  "What — and risk injuring it?"
• The Stone Dance of the Chameleon takes place in a world inhabited by a lot of prehistoric animals. The local population has domesticated ceratopsids called huimur, small versions of which serve as pack animals and giant versions of which are ridden to war like war elephants, and theropods called aquars, which are ridden like horses.
• The Way Things Work is a children's book about how various machines function. The framing device is from the perspective of a visitor to a society that domesticate and use woolly mammoths in everything. The machines explained in the book are operated by, used upon or represented by the mammoths.
• In Eight Worlds novel Steel Beach the protagonist spent time working on a sauropod ranch that uses domesticated T. Rex as herding animals.

Live Action TV

• Dinosaurs: Inverted; the ridiculously-suburbanized dinosaurs keep pet humans.
• Doctor Who:
  • "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" has the Doctor taming a Triceratops and then riding it around the ship.
  • Torchwood gives the main protagonists a pet Pteranodon.
  • The Silurians have a guard-dinosaur in "Doctor Who and the Silurians", which has led to them having a variety of domesticated dinos in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe. The spaceship in "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" is said to have been a Silurian Ark.
• Josh Kirby Time Warrior "Planet of the Dino-Knights" has knights riding dinosaurs instead of horses.
• Land of the Lost (1991): Annie has a baby Parasaurolophus named Tasha.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: In "The Land That Time Forgot", Kinga and Max start a dinosaur BBQ bar and grill "Moon 14 Mesozoic Ranch", all human remains powerwashed out. Then Max forgets to lock the Allosaurus cage and they run for it.
• Power Rangers Dino Charge: In "End of Extinction", the series finale, the Rangers go back in time and, in the course of defeating the Big Bad, unintentionally prevent the extinction of the dinosaurs; when they return to the present, they discover that dinosaurs survived into the present day, and the museum where they work is now a dinosaur zoo.
• Prehistoric Park is about a successful attempt at creating a dinosaur zoo. It's just a documentary series about the management and construction of a zoo, but the zoo happens to be for dinosaurs and other prehistoric critters.
• Primeval: Abbey keeps a Coelurosauravus, a type of small, gliding reptile from the Triassic, as a pet. His name is Rex.

Podcast

• Twilight Histories: "Beyond the Indus" takes place in a world where dinosaurs somehow survived in India, and were domesticated by the Indians as sources of food and beast of burden.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Druids and rangers have access to various prehistoric animals as their companions. Additionally, the 3.5 supplements Frostburn and Sandstorm suggest that paladins in arctic or desert settings might use Megaloceros and Diprotodon, respectively, as mounts, and the book Arms and Equipment Guide offers the "axebeak" (a distinctly phorusrhacid bird) as a steed.
  • Eberron: The halflings of the Talenta Plains are a Central Asian nomadic tribe of dinosaur riders. Their most common mounts are Leaellynasaura (which they refer to as "fastieths"), though other species like "glidewings" (pteranodons) are also known.
  • Forgotten Realms: The jungles of Chult in the far south of Faerun are full of dinosaurs, so not surprisingly, the locals often domesticate them. There's even regular dinosaur races held in the region's largest city, Port Nyanzaru.
  • Isle of the Ape: One of the groups of cavemen had phorusrhacids that they used as "hounds" to hunt down prey.
• Ironclaw and Jadeclaw have dinosaurs substitute for cows and horses. The text refers to them as "lizards", but the illustrations clearly show dinosaurs.
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • The elves of Dominaria have a tradition of domesticating allosaurs, as shown in cards such as Allosaurus Rider and Allosaurus Shepherd.
  • In the Ixalan set, the Aztec-inspired Sun Empire have domesticated feathered, solar dinosaurs which they uses as beasts of burden and battle. This is parodied with Raptor Companion, according to which trained raptors can follow any order... as long as that order is some variant of "hunt", "kill", or "go for the guts".
• Myriad Song: Many planets have dinosaurs, and the descriptions for some species mention that they're often domesticated.
• Pathfinder:
  • Druids have access to dinosaurs and pterosaurs as companions.
  • The Kellids are a steppe nomad culture who ride domesticated mammoths.
  • The city-state of Absalom uses axebeaks, essentially phorusrhacids by another name, as mounts and beasts of burden alongside camels — the city's centaur population finds the use of horses in this manner offensive.
• Predation is built around this trope. The game is set in the late Cretaceous, and every player has a companion dinosaur. Various types of dinosaur have been integrated into society; Bambiraptor is a common pet and also used for pest control. And these dinosaurs are often enhanced with genetic and cybernetic implants.
• Space 1889: Several species of dinosaurs on Venus are used as work and riding animals by both the native venusians and human colonists.
• Warhammer:
  • The Lizardmen ride various distinctly dinosaurian steeds into war. The Stegadon can be mounted with different siege engines on its back, while Carnosaurs are the reason there are no dragons in Lustria.
  • One such creature, the therapod-like Cold One, is also available to the Dark Elves. It's a bit of a stretch to call Cold Ones domesticated, though, as the elf rider needs to cover themselves in an unguent that masks their scent so the beasts won't attack them. The unguent also eventually deadens the rider's senses. one Dark Elf was able to get rid of a rival by replacing the unguent with a placebo, the rider getting promptly ripped apart when he tried to get on his mount.
  • On the mammoth side of things, some Chaos tribes are able to use mammoths as war beasts. This being Chaos tribes, these creatures are less "domesticated" and more "beaten, abused and possessed by daemons".
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The Eldar and Dark Eldar used to have access to Cold-One-like steeds in the 1st edition. Exodite Eldar still have them in background material.
  • Certain Imperial Guard regiments also use Cold One-like steeds instead of horses for their cavalry units. Experimental rules for them were released, but never made it into a codex.
  • Dinosaur-like creatures called Grox are kept as livestock on many Imperial worlds. A more dangerous creature called Carnosaurus is also mentioned to exist on a number of planets.
  • The Tau Empire's Great Knarloc is an avian T. Rexpy with a big gun mounted on its back. The Kroot also ride smaller Knarlocs into battle.

Video Games

• ARK: Survival Evolved: Players can tame dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts. Those that are big enough can be fitted with saddles so that the player can ride them.
  • Subverted with the Giganotosaurus. You can tame them, but if they take too much damage at once they become enraged and will begin attacking anyone and anything around, including their tamer.
  • Some creatures, like Titanosaurus and Liopleurodon, only remain tamed for a short while. Titanosaurus goes off its food once tamed and will starve in a few days (this can be changed in server settings, but it still starves faster than it eats unless force-fed), and the magical Liopleurodon decides it's had enough and teleports away.
  • It's also averted with some creatures, mainly bosses and alphas. These cannot be tamed at all without cheating.
  • Several creatures require you to steal an egg from a wild creature and hatch and raise it. Naturally the parents don't appreciate this and it's often a tricky proposition. Also, some of these won't breed in captivity. Getting a tame Reaper King involves getting a Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong from a Reaper Queen, surviving the birth, and raising the baby.
• Chrono Trigger: Ayla's caveman tribe keep (four-legged) pterosaurs as flying mounts while the Reptites keep tyrannosaurs.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind:
    • Guar are vaguely theropod-like dinosaurids, about the size of a cow, which the native Dunmer farm for their hides and use as beasts of burden. Despite their awkward and clumsy appearance, they are Not So Harmless and are quite capable of defending themselves. Concept art for the game shows them being ridden by armed and armored Dunmer as Beasts Of Battle, but this was not present in the game itself. (There are still mentions of Guar being ridden in the lore, however.)
    • In the Tribunal expansion, Goblins are shown to train Durzogs, a sort of reptilian dog, for combat and protection.
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Giants herd woolly mammoths. The relationship is said to be symbiotic, with the mammoths allowing the Giants to milk them and create cheese in exchange for the Giants' protection.
• Horizon Zero Dawn: Downplayed. The dinosaurs are mechanical, and, while Aloy can override them in order to make them fight by her side, there are only a few robots she can actually use as mounts (namely, the horse-like Striders, the bull-like Broadheads, and the bighorn-like Chargers, so no, you can't grab the reins of a Thunderjaw and munch on enemies). The sequel Horizon Forbidden West, on the other hand, lets you ride the raptor-like Clawstriders, and furthermore, the Tenakth also seem to have figured out how to override machines and have used this ability to create, among other things, mecharaptor cavalry.
• Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis allows you to build and run your own dinosaur park similar to that of the book and movie, but hopefully without the whole breaking-out-and-eating-people thing (unless you wish that to happen). This also applies with Jurassic World: Evolution and its sequel, which are defacto the Spiritual Successor's of Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis.
• King of Dragon Pass: Various dinosaurs exists alongside the setting's Bronze Age culture. They aren't normally domesticated, but there is a random event where you can find some Triceratops and tame them as beasts of burden for your clan.
• Lost Eden: Subverted. In this setting humans and dinosaurs work
• Monster Hunter: Aptonoth (large herbivorous Monsters with traits from different kinds of dinosaurs, generally resembling duck-billed dinosaurs) are sometimes used as working animals by NPCs. In Monster Hunter: Stories, riders (including the protagonist) can tame any monster, and you can see the scaly raptor-like Velocidromes being used as working animals as well.
• Monster Rancher has the Zuum species, known as Dino in the first game. They're known for being friendly and easy to raise, with well-balanced stats.
• Original War: The game is set two million years ago, and all three factions can boost their meager numbers by training local "apemen". The Arabs can also tame sabertooth tigers and mastodons.
• Paraworld: all three playable factions as well as the unplayable Big Bad faction make extensive use of domesticated dinosaurs especially in combat, such as the Norsemen using Triceratops. Justified for the in-story setting, dinosaurs it turns out aren't native to Earth. It's just that many of them accidentally migrated there from another dimension in the distant past.
• Pokémon: There are several dinosaur-like Pokémon, all of which can be tamed and made to fight other people's pets the same as any other creature.
• In Stardew Valley, there is a small chance of finding a dinosaur egg when doing certain activities such as digging or fishing. This egg can be incubated and hatched into a living dinosaur for your farm's coop, which will then produce more dinosaur eggs. You can even turn the eggs into dinosaur mayonnaise.
• Star Trek Online: The Voth, a race of Rubber-Forehead Aliens descended from Earth dinosaurs (from VOY: "Distant Origin"), use dinosaurs with laser beams as pack animals and, for lack of a better term, living armored vehicles.
• The Strange and Somewhat Sinister Tale of the House at Desert Bridge has Stripes, a Sauropod who acts as Old Man Bill's guard dog. He's actually pretty nice, but he still can't let you enter the kitchen until you gain his trust.
• Super Mario Bros.: Yoshi, Mario's faithful steed, is referred to as both a dinosaur and a dragon. "Domesticated" might not be exactly the right word, as Yoshies intelligent, have their own culture, and aren't treated as animals at all; but they do give people rides.
• The Tribez from Game Insight has you as a time traveller who went to prehistoric times and help a particular tribe of cavemen develop their own civilization as you learn the mysteries of that world. These cavemen can domesticate newly hatched dinosaurs for policing the village for bandits, occasional riding animals and also as hired muscle for industrial and entertainment facilities based on your own contemporary designs. The sequel Tribez and Castles has the time traveller take the tribe and their dinosaurs into the Medieval period.
• World of Warcraft:
  • Trolls often ride giant raptor-like creatures, while the tauren typically ride the brontotherium-like kodo. The trolls of Zandalar also use the Apatosaurus-like brutosaurs as transportation (and one of said brutosaurs ended up the most expensive purchasable thing in the game until it wasn't available anymore).
  • There are several dinosaur-like beasts that can be tamed by hunters, including raptors, compsognathus-like saurids, diemetradons, pterrodaxes, mammoths, wooly rhinos, stegodons (picture a stegosaurus with the head of a rhinoceros), ceratopean based direhorns, and devilsaurs.
• Zoo Tycoon:
  • In the first game, the expansion pack Dinosaur Digs let you create a Jurassic Park of your own, though the expansion pack also included several Ice Age animals.
  • Zoo Tycoon 2 has the similar expansion Extinct Animals, but with a wider variety of other extinct critters besides dinosaurs.
  • Notably, however, the dinosaurs and prehistoric animals will escape their enclosures given the opportunity and attack or eat any helpless human they come across.

Webcomics

• The Fellowship of Heroes: A supervillain overran the southwest states with dinosaurs, many states were evacuated, Texas decided to domesticate them. It's first mentioned when Crusader wrangles up a baby brontosaur that escaped from a traveling rodeo.
• Gifts of Wandering Ice: Technology allowed for easy and widespread genetic manipulation. Ash's pet "Bitey" might look like a small raptor, but she's essentially a large bird whose latent "dinosaur" qualities (clawed forelimbs in lieu of wings, sharp teeth) have been "switched back on" and combined with parrot-like intelligence, ability to mimic sounds, and bright feathery plumage.
• The Order of the Stick: The Empire of Blood uses a lot of dinosaurs in their military and in their gladiator arenas.
• Schlock Mercenary: Turns out there was a sapient dromeosaur species that domesticated other dinosaurs, including T. rex.

Web Video

• Pokemon Amber: This game has you traversing through an island filled with Fossil Pokemon, finding them, catching them and taming them. The three Starter Pokemon you can choose and obtain are based on Ankylosaurus, Dromeosaur and Dilophosaurus

Western Animation

• Arthur:
  • Conversed in when Arthur, Buster, and the Brain are writing a fanfic sequel to Robin Hood. Buster wants to write a scene where pirates ride an Apatosaurus into town and crush buildings. Brain points out that "dinosaurs and pirates never coexisted."
  • Not quite a dinosaur example, but Buster once mentioned that he would want a pterodactyl as a pet, stating that it would be "like having a parrot that could give him rides to the movies".
• Dino-Boy: The title character had a baby Brontosaurus named "Bronty" as a pet. The villains in various episodes sometimes had dinosaurs as beasts of burden, mounts, attack animals and so on.
• Dino Ranch: Being a show about a ranch that has dinosaurs as farm animals, this is naturally in full force. The Cassidy family all ride dinosaur companions; large herbivorous dinosaurs like Parasaurolophus and Stegosaurus fill the role of cows; there's a Triceratops that acts like a bull and a Pteranodon instead of a rooster; and Compsognathus run around the ranch just like chickens.
• Dino-Riders is about guys who ride dinosaurs. Albeit these dinosaurs are also wearing combat rigs full of missile launchers and laser cannons.
• DuckTales (1987): Bubba the Caveduck has a pet Triceratops named Tootsie.
• DuckTales (2017) has a version of Bubba and Tootsie that meet for the first time. Bubba attempts to tame her, but calming down an angry Triceratops isn't all that easy.
• The Flintstones: The prehistoric humans kept dinosaurs as pets and used them as industrial machines (e.g. a brontosaurus was used as a steam shovel). Bizarrely, many of these were sapient and would even remark on their lot in life with "It's a living." Dino and the unnamed Sabertooth Tiger were Fred and Wilma's pets, acting like a dog and cat respectively. Dino in particular was particularly fond of Fred and would tackle him to the ground when Fred came home.
• Futurama:
  • "I Dated A Robot": Fry fulfills one of his dreams: riding a T. rex in the Jurassic Kiddie Park.
  • "Fun on a Bun" sees cavemen riding mammoths and using other Ice Age critters as war beasts.
• Gertie the Dinosaur, the very first cartoon of all time, stars a sauropod who does tricks on command and metatextually interacts with live actors.
• Mighty Mightor: Sheera has a pet mammoth calf named Bollo. Little Rok also has a pet dodo bird, although that's a borderline example, since the dodo went extinct relatively recently. Plus, the villains of the show regularly used dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals as mounts and attack animals.
• Porky Pig: In "Prehistoric Porky", cave-Porky has a pet Brontosaurus named Rover.
• The Simpsons: One future episode features a zoo of resurrected dinosaurs and pterosaurs where the dinosaurs can also perform tricks a la SeaWorld.
• Sonic Underground: Chomps is Knuckles' carnivorous pet dinosaur who serves him by devouring intruders who came onto Floating Island.
• Tiny Toon Adventures: In "Rock n' Roar", Buster tries to get his soccer ball back when it falls down a hole, but instead he picks up an egg that hatches into a dinosaur. He tries keeping him as a pet, naming him "Rover" and raising him to be a vegetarian, but Rover's massive size makes a mess of Acme Acres and Monty tries to trap him. At the end, Buster has to return Rover to the cave where he found his egg.

Other

• There's a popular photoshopped image floating around the internet of Napoleon Bonaparte riding on an allosaur. Images of Jesus riding a dinosaur or of Bible-era farmers riding Triceratops are also often used to advertise, or satirize, creationism.

Real Life

• For information on how this would actually pan out in real life, here's Paleontologist Darren Naish with some helpfully scientific speculations.
• There is one familiar example of a domesticated "dinosaur" so common and successful that they outnumber humans more than three to one, and has been raised by humans for millennia, first for brutal bloodsports, then later for its delicious meat. It's called a "chicken". Yes, being birds, chickens are considered living dinosaurs! (Making dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets very ironic, in hindsight.) This means that chicken tastes like dinosaur.
• Human beings have domesticated and kept other kinds of avian dinosaurs for thousands of years and have produced hundreds of breeds for various purposes including for food, for ornamental purposes, as messenger carriers and as pets. Some examples include ducks, turkeys, canaries, budgerigars, and pigeons.
• Other birds, while not domesticated (as in, their genetic structure is still largely the same as their wild counterparts) can be successfully tamed and kept as well. Examples of these include falcons, hawks, owls, ostriches, finches, pheasants, and parrots.
• There are lots of toys that have this premise to them, often remote-control critters. They're very rarely accurate, though.
• Young Earth Creationists believe that humans and non-avian dinosaurs coexisted in biblical times and that some dinosaurs were domesticated back then. They sometimes create hoax artifacts like the Ica Stones to promote this worldview.^note Initially the Ica Stones were a money-making venture by a Peruvian artist, who carved the stones passed them off as ancient artifacts. Only a few of his stones depicted dinosaurs, with others depicting modern animals or just geometric designs. But when both Young Earth creationists and Ancient Astronaut believers showed great interest in the dinosaur stones, he kept making more. Even after the artist confessed to this, some YECs continued to pass them off as evidence of human and dinosaur coexistence. And copycats fed into the craze by carving their own "Ica Stones". This has resulted in images of Jesus riding a dinosaur being widely used to mock YECs.
• The project to retro-engineer a chicken to look more like its prehistoric ancestors will result in this as while it may look different it will still be a chicken, albeit a new breed of chicken called a "chickenosaurus" and probably won't act any differently than a regular chicken.

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