Somewhere a Palaeontologist Is Crying/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Dinosaurs and other prehistoric life forms appear where their existence and/or behavior is historically or biologically improbable.

  • Straight: Caveman Ogg lives in prehistoric times and has an obsession with killing a giant albino T-Rex.
  • Exaggerated: Robert Ainsworth, Esq. lives in Victorian England and hunts flying and fire-breathing dinosaurs for food, fun and profit.
  • Justified: The dinosaurs or Ogg have been temporally misplaced, or a tiny pocket of dinosaurs has survived much later than their fellows.
    • In the show, the K-T extinction was less harsh, and allowed some groups of dinosaurs to survive in isolated pockets, away from the competition of the mammals, who had grown to much greater sizes than they were used to, until mammals migrated to these isolated pockets.
  • Inverted: Dinosaurs do not appear in times and/or places where they should.
    • Dinosaurs remain in their own time period, but everything from the distant future is barging in.
  • Subverted: Dinosaurs appear in the wrong eras, but turn out to be simulacra carved in stone, made of wood, or are robots made by incredibly advanced caveman tribes or somesuch.
  • Double Subverted: It turns out those carvings/statues/robots were modeled off actual still-living dinosaurs
  • Parodied: Caveman Ogg rides a dinosaur to work ... at Microsoft.
  • Deconstructed: Dinosaurs reintroduced into later eras produce tragedy.. either because they cannot deal with the latter era or because they can deal all too well...
  • Reconstructed: ...but with effort, a domestication process takes place and dinosaurs become utility and perhaps companion animals.
  • Zig Zagged: Dinosaurs occasionally feature in the plot, and the characters alternate between treating them as ordinary or commenting that they really shouldn't be there.
  • Averted: Ogg lives with animals which would be contemporary to his time period and place.
  • Enforced: Rule of Cool and Everything's Better with Dinosaurs are the work's principal rules.
  • Lampshaded: "Wait, shouldn't dinosaurs be extinct by now?" "Tell that to the hungry T. rex!"
  • Invoked: A scientist cloned a bunch of prehistoric animals from different eras, including early homonids, and lumped them all in one single preserve.
  • Defied: "Die-No-Sore? Ogg not know that thingy. Taste good?"
  • Discussed: "Cavemen spent all their time hunting dinosaurs -- everyone knows that!" " ..."
  • Conversed: "Goddamnit, did anyone on the production team even LOOK at a book about paleontology before they filmed it?"

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