Dino Gangs

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

A 2011 TV Documentary and tie-in book from the Discovery Channel, presented by renowned paleontologist and tyrannosaur-enthusiast Phil Currie. The main theme is finding evidence to support Currie's theory of pack-hunting tyrannosaurs.

Compare to Valley of the T Rex, an older Discovery docu that proposes the exact opposite idea, that tyrannosaurs were scavengers.

Tropes used in Dino Gangs include:
  • Feathered Fiend: Various feathered dinosaurs that appear in Stock Footage shots. Some people argue that perhaps even tyrannosaurs were coated, but this show went the conservative way, giving them scales.
  • Real Is Brown: Or, rather, real is gray, as apart from the Stock Footage dinos, the animals have mainly dull colors, mostly gray, black and muted green.
  • Somewhere a Palaeontologist Is Crying: A couple of points:
    • Anatomically iffy dinosaurs. The adult Tarbosaurus looks like a cross between the Walking with Dinosaurs and Animal Armageddon T. rex (both of which were already pretty badly designed), while the "Parasaurolophus" could pass for a CGI hand-puppet.
    • Incorrect use of Stock Footage means Saltasaurus becomes Nemegtosaurus (close enough), Aucasaurus a tyrannosaur (a totally different kind of dinosaur), Nothronychus a Therizinosaurus (again, not much of a difference, but just how large does this make the raptor that shares a scene with it?), and the most baffling of all, Triceratops animation is used for Protoceratops. The animals are way different: Proto was a much more primitive and smaller ceratopsian who lacked the horns Triceratops is so famous for; and not only that, the editors probably had access to copious amounts of Protoceratops stock footage anyway, yet still refrained from using it.
    • The central idea of pack hunting dinosaurs is also a heavily discussed topic, and does indeed make many experts cry, because it's more sensationalist than scientific.
  • Stock Footage: From When Dinosaurs Roamed America, Clash of the Dinosaurs, Dinosaur Planet, and various modern-day nature documentaries. However a lot of new animation also gets repeated.
  • Tyrannosaurus Rex: Subversion -- The main focus is on its relative Tarbosaurus.
  • Zerg Rush: From tyrannosaurs, no less!