Dinosaurs the Terrible Lizards

Dinosaurs the Terrible Lizards is an American stop motion animated film. Directed and produced by Wah Cheng, the narration script was written by Aylsworth Kleihaur and then Ruth S. Zick. The technical consultant, Dr. J. R. Macdonald, Animated by Douglas Beswick, Edited by Stuart O’Brien The 8 minute long film was released twice, once in 1970 following the Kleihaur script and again in 1986 edited with the Zick script. The film was distributed by AIMS, Instructional Media Services, in both the 1970 and the revised 1986 version.

The film was featured in "Hewy's Animated Movie Reviews" The Top 10 Animated Dinosaur Documentaries in 2011.

Inaccuracies

The film's estimation is off by a couple million years both in its extinction date and its oldest dinosaur fossil date. Dinosaurs the Terrible Lizards says that the oldest dinosaur fossils were about 225 million years old, as of 2024 a 233 million year old dinosaur fossil was found in Brazil. The film says that dinosaurs went extinct 70 million years ago but there have been fossils found from 65 million years ago.

The most glaring inaccuracy is the dinosaurs' lack of feathers.

While it is true that dinosaurs may have depended on their surroundings to maintain a constant homeostasis, this is not thought to be true of all dinosaurs such as the film suggests.

The maximum length of a Tyrannosaurus fossil found indicates that they could grow up to 40 feet, not as the film states, 50 feet.

The film states three possible dinosaur extinction events where the dinosaurs either went extinct due to climate change, that their food sources became inadequate, or the possibility of mammals eating the dinosaurs’ eggs. While those options may be true in part for some species of dinosaur, the present theory of the dinosaurs’ extinction event is that an asteroid impact with Earth provided a much more abrupt departure.

Citations

“Dinosaurs the Terrible Lizards.” IMDb, https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1505115/. Accessed 6 Oct. 2024.

“‘Oldest EVER’ dinosaur fossil found in Brazil.” BBC, 8 Aug. 2024, https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/articles/c3vxkq05vzgo

“Last dinosaur before mass extinction discovered.” Science Daily, 13 Jul. 2011, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110712211016.htm

Ashworth, James. “Dinosaurs may have evolved from a warm-blooded ancestor” Natural History Museum, 25 May 2022, https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2022/may/dinosaurs-may-have-evolved-from-warm-blooded-ancestor.html

“7 Questions about Tyrannosaurus rex.” American Museum of Natural History, https://www.amnh.org/dinosaurs/tyrannosaurus-rex. Accessed 6 Oct. 2024

Rae, Sam and Hendry Lisa. “What killed the dinosaurs?” Museum of Natural History, https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/dinosaur-extinction.html. Accessed 6 Oct. 2024