Trivia / Dinosaur

• Celebrity Voice Actor:
  • The Japanese dub features film and TV actor Yoshihiko Hakamada as Aladar and actress Makiko Esumi as Neera.
  • The Brazilian dub has soap opera stars Fábio Assunção and Malu Mader as Aladar and Neera, veteran actress and comedian Nair Bello as Baylene and talk show host Hebe Camargo as Eema.
• Creator Backlash: Robert Beech, who worked in visual effects, said he and his team knew the story was ripping off Don Bluth's The Land Before Time.
• Creator Killer: Not to Disney itself, but despite being a box office success, The Secret Lab (the special effects company that Disney made to produce this film and formed from the remains of Dream Quest Images after their buyout by Disney) was shut down, with the only other project they made being Wild Life (specifically, they were animating it). This was cancelled. More on The Secret Lab's history can be found on a Jim Hill article.
• Cross-Regional Voice Acting: The Latin American Spanish release was dubbed in Mexico and Venezuela. Unlike similar examples, however, the reason for using Venezuelan voice actors were more petty: It turns out Disney refused to reach a deal with the Mexican voice actors in order to receive a better pay, so Disney dubbed the rest of the film with Venezuelan voice actors. It also remains the only mainstream Disney film dubbed, through partially, in that country.
• Directed by Cast Member: In the Latin American Spanish dub, Raúl Aldana is Zini's voice actor, as well as one of the ADR directors and translators.
• Fatal Method Acting: A crew member was killed and another seriously wounded when a camera boom struck a cross-country power line.
• Kids' Meal Toy:
  • McDonald's sold hand puppets of Aladar, Neera, Kron, and Carnotaur as well as talking toys of Baylene, Eema, Bruton, and the Lemurs in their Happy Meals.
  • In the 2000 holiday season, McDonald's released toys of Aladar, Baylene, and Eema as part of their "Disney Stars" Happy Meal, which also included toys based on Toy Story 2, A Bug's Life, Winnie the Pooh: Seasons of Giving, The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea, and Mickey's Once Upon a Christmas.
• The Other Darrin: In the PlayStation video game and Dinosaur Activity Center, Tress MacNeille replaces Joan Plowright as Baylene while Billy West replaces Della Reese as Eema.
• Playing Against Type: Whoever knew Samuel E. Wright, the voice of the soft-shell Jerk with a Heart of Gold Sebastian from The Little Mermaid (1989) could play a callous, demanding Jerkass, with almost nothing redeeming about him?
• Science Marches On:
  • The Velociraptor, Oviraptor, and Struthiomimus depicted were very accurate for the time, but nowadays it's known all of them would've been covered in feathers (notably, feathers were considered for some of the dinosaurs in the concept art stages, but even then only thin fuzz, whereas they should have thick coats and wings).
  • Velociraptor is portrayed with two small crests in front of its eyes, but it's now known that these were frontal bones that shifted out of place during fossilization and it would not have actually had these in real life.
  • The unidentified gliding lizard in the prologue is clearly meant to be Longisquama. At the time, its strange, frond-like projections were theorized to have been paired and used for gliding, but later research generally considers them to have been a single row and possibly having a display purpose instead.
  • Oviraptor was assumed to be a nest raider when it was first discovered, and named appropriately. Then it turned out, thanks to new technology, that the eggs they are usually found with contain baby Oviraptor. This discovery was made several years before the movie. However, this discovery does not completely rule out the inclusion of eggs in an Oviraptor's diet. The Oviraptor in the film should also probably be considered Rinchenia, which was considered synonymous with Oviraptor for a long time and contributed to its tall-crested appearance (the actual crest of Oviraptor remains unknown).
  • The Pteranodon, despite being accurate for its time, is shown dip-feeding (snatching food from the water with its beak) and rearing its young like birds. It's been proven that Pteranodon would be more likely to catch food by swimming (its prey was noted to be rather small, so dip-feeding would have been impractical). The Pteranodon species featured in the film is also usually called Geosternbergia nowadays.
  • One of the background dinosaur species among the herd is Stygimoloch. These are largely considered to be the adolescent form of the larger Pachycephalosaurus nowadays (or more semantically, they appear to represent the adolescent form of a yet undiscovered Pachycephalosaurus species). Although there are other juvenile dinosaurs in the herd so you could interpret them as also being juveniles.
  • A minor visual error; the spines on the Carnotaurus' backs are arranged in rows like the scutes of crocodilians, but a more extensive study of the skin published in 2021 suggests they were distributed randomly rather than in any set patterns.
  • The existence of primate ancestors in the Cretaceous Period, as depicted by the lemurs in the film, is very hotly debated. While mammalian ancestors dated back to the period, Purgatorius, widely identified as the earliest primate ancestor, only had a fossil record going back to the early Paleocene Epoch, though scientists at the time suspected it could be much older. In 2021, the announced discovery of another species of Purgatorius suggested a species diversity that would have placed other members of the species as existing in the Cretaceous period... walking alongside dinosaurs. They still don't resemble lemurs or monkeys as the film shows, all of which began to emerge in the Paleocene.
• What Could Have Been: Enough examples it needed its own page.

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