YMMV / The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution

• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Treepounce. It looks less like a dinosaur and more like some sort of vaguely-humanoid demon from Japanese folklore.
  • The cutlasstooth also qualifies, with enormous blade-like teeth that grow in rows out of its mouth.
• Ugly Cute: The kloon looks bizarrely adorable despite all the overwhelming inaccuracies regarding its design. Must be those Puppy-Dog Eyes. There's also the Taddey, an ornithopod descendant that has evolved to fill the same role as the Giant Panda.
• Sequelitis: It's generally seen as an inferior output compared to After Man: A Zoology of the Future, partially because many of the fictional future dinosaurs and pterosaurs are very unsubtle Expies of extant animals without much creativity (though there are exceptions), and if you're versed in paleontology, the massive amount of Science Marches On can be hard to digest, especially the continued insistence that birds and dinosaurs are different creatures. While After Man also has its dated aspects, its being set in the future makes them stand out less.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Mosasaurs are surprisingly absent from the book despite not only being the main predators of the Mesozoic seas at the very end of the Cretaceous (while the large predatory pliosaurs by that point were extinct), but also shown to have survived in the present according to the book. In fact, with its shape and anatomy, the whulk would make more sense as a filter-feeding mosasaur than as a pliosaur.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Despite being about an alternative world where dinosaurs never became extinct, the book is more or less a time capsule of how dinosaurs were seen in the late 1980s. For example, dromaeosaurs/"raptors" have only two species shown, whereas they would almost certainly have had a much bigger role in the post-Jurassic Park 1990s. Special mention, however, goes to the Gourmand, which is a tyrannosaur that is a specialized scavenger. This firmly dates the book's publication to the late 1980s or early 1990s, when the "Was T. rex a predator or a scavenger?" debate was a big deal in pop culture, and was inevitably brought up in discussions of the animal.

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