The Last Dinosaurs: Wearing my Inspirations and Just How Dark Children’s Media Can Go

 

So I’ve been locked the fuck in recently.

A couple of months ago, I came across an essay discussing the original Land Before Time film as a Prehistoric  Dark Fantasy, three words that fascinated me so much I wanted to write my own one. 

 

Sometimes, I come up with a character, or a setting, or a few hyphae in a mycelium of a plot. Other times, I have some vibes, or a goal, and have to come up with a story around it. And that’s what the words “prehistoric dark fantasy” did for me.

I started a mind map to get my thoughts in order. A lot of animated dinosaur films revolve around the premise of dinosaurs migrating to a safe place, often fleeing climate change or an extinction event. I thought it would be fun to take things a step further. In the 2020s, we have a better idea of just how sudden and brutal the extinction of the dinosaurs was, maybe something set in the aftermath would be interesting. 

With that time period in mind, I thought about who my possible characters could be. One idea I briefly floated involved a nestful of siblings, hatching into an inhospitable world and slowly being picked off, one by one. However, this seemed a little dark even for me. Children’s dinosaur media seems to be “allowed” to be darker than other stories, but there were limits. I’ll discuss the rules and limits for dark children’s stories later on, when I talk about my inspirations. 

My second idea revolved around a friendship between a herbivore (or multiple herbivores) and a carnivore, something akin to the Land Before Time sequels featuring Chomper. More on that later. I especially liked the idea of the main characters being a Sauropod and a Therapod. 

I knew right away I was not writing about North American dinosaurs. Not only were the Americas hardest hit by the asteroid – thereby making my story that bit more unbelievable – but I am so, so fucking sick of T-Rex and Triceratops. 

Looking for somewhere else to set the story, I went through the other landmasses in my mind, and India stuck out to me. India was an island at the time – therefore possibly full of strange, unique dinosaurs. It was also deep in the Southern Hemisphere, near Africa and Antarctica. It was also covered in flood basalt volcanoes: the Deccan Traps. Not only would this provide a dark, scary setting, but the volcanoes themselves have been subject to a lot of debate on their impact on the dinosaurs’ extinction. Some paleontologists think they had an effect on the death of the dinosaurs, others say they had a minimal effect or even kept Earth warm enough to mitigate some of the impact winter.

It turns out a lot of the Indian/South Asian dinosaurs were closely related to the dinosaurs of Madagascar. It also seems that the Malagasy dinosaurs are more researched, with a better selection of fossils. Maybe it would’ve been smarter to set the book in Madagascar, but I had already committed to India.

When I think of Indian dinosaurs, I think of the episode of Prehistoric Planet titled “Badlands”. At the start of the episode, a herd of Isisaurs cross a volcanic plain to lay their eggs in a caldera. Later, we follow the Isisaur hatchlings as they make the journey to a forest and safety, while hunted by a pack of Rajasaurs.

There were my Sauropod and Therapod who would become friends despite the circumstances. However, I switched out Isissaurus for Jainosaurus so it wouldn’t be a blatant ripoff of that Prehistoric Planet episode. Also the name Isisaurus seems pretty sus when written and might make parents mad at me, should this be published. 

So that’s where the premise came from: two eggs miraculously survive the end-Cretaceous (KPg) mass extinction and hatch into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Their instincts are responding to a world that no longer exists, and they’re disorientated and scared. They meet while looking for food and shelter, and the carnivore doesn’t even recognise the herbivore as food, only as a potential friend. Together, they set off for a place they can call home. All the while, they have to battle the elements, while pursued by other hungry carnivores.

My working title is “The Last Dinosaurs”.

So, we have Prehistoric, and we have more than enough Dark, but what about Fantasy?

While one of the justifications for Land Before Time being a fantasy was that the dinosaurs and other creatures all come from different time periods, I just couldn’t do that. I’m too autistic for that. The dinosaurs needed to be from the same time, and preferably the same place, barring necessary creative liberties. Because the time period I picked was the first months of the Paleocene, just after the extinction of the dinosaurs, the dinosaurs I did feature would have to be from the late Cretaceous. Funnily enough, I do find the late Cretaceous and its dinosaurs somewhat overrated, but a post-apocalyptic story was where my mind went to. Maybe, one day, I’ll write similar middle grade stories about other prehistoric time periods. 

So what fantasy elements do I include? The dinosaurs can talk. There’s also the improbable premise of the whole story. I don’t know how possible it was that some dinosaur eggs weren’t cooked or broken or eaten on the last day of the Cretaceous, but it was probably unlikely-to-impossible. 

There’s also the acid rain in the story. In “The Last Dinosaurs” it’s a little more acidic, physically burning the creatures it lands on. In real life, however, acid rain doesn’t really do that, and has a subtler effect. It kills plants and disrupts the PH of waterways, devastating, but less fantastical than what I wrote.

So, I have my premise, a location, and some characters. I’ll go deeper into the characters in a bit but first, I want to talk about my various inspirations and the various genre “rules” and conventions I’ve found.

My main inspirations are as follows: The Land Before Time, Fallout, The Dinosaur’s Diary by Julia Donaldson, Dodos are Forever by Dick King Smith, Primal, Walking with Dinosaurs, Prehistoric Planet, Disney’s Dinosaur, and The Last Days of the Dinosaurs by Riley Black

These are a few general rules I’ve found:

• Eggs can be destroyed or eaten, which can create tragedy without “real” baby dinosaurs being killed. In terms of kids media, killing off hatchlings or child dinosaurs is generally a little too much. Destroyed eggs are a plot point in Disney’s Dinosaur and The Dinosaur’s Diary, and there's the start of The Land Before Time when Littlefoot hatches into a nest of broken eggs. He has no siblings, and it’s directly stated he’s the only baby in his herd, so it’s strongly implied the other eggs were broken into and eaten. This “loophole” is missing from the sequels, which are made with a younger audience in mind. Even the second LBT, where the villains are egg-eaters, no eggs are broken or eaten.
• You can have stories where the main character is a parent or parents, and the story will involve them raising and protecting their eggs and children (The Dinosaurs Diary, Dodos are Forever). Or you can have stories where children are the main characters, and in that case, parents just get in the way. They need to be killed off for tragic moments, and so the kids can go on an adventure (Land Before Time). This second premise fits very easily into my story, given that nearly every adult dinosaur is incinerated in the prologue.
• Tangentially related, but dinosaur stories can be darker in tone and subject than even modern animal stories, which can already get very dark (think Watership Down). In the Land Before Time, we can see a silhouette of the Sharp Tooth ripping into Littlefoot’s mother before she stumbles into view with a huge gash on her back. 

We showed this to my three-year-old nephew.

• In addition, in Disney’s Dinosaur shows dinosaurs being killed and eaten on screen. Primal is even darker, but that’s for an adult audience.
• And, finally: the adorable baby dinosaurs are allowed a body count. Sometimes, they need to kill to survive. At the climax of The Land Before Time, the characters commit premeditated murder, hatching (haha) a plan to kill Sharp Tooth by luring him into deep water then dropping a rock on his head. They weren't taking any chances when it came to killing this fucker. These kids are a couple days out the egg and committing murder. They also kill and maim other Sharp Teeth in the sequels, usually by dropping rocks on them.

In addition to all this inspiration, Littlefoot and Chomper’s friendship in various LBT sequels made me want to write about a Sauropod and a Theropod. Jaina and Raja’s dynamic is a lot different, though. In LBT 2, Littlefoot, an older child, attempts to raise Chomper as his own son. In later films, and the TV show, Chomper is one of the gang, though his need to eat meat does come into conflict with his friendships with the herbivores. From what I’ve seen of the TV show, he often has to prove he’s “good”, not like other Sharp Teeth, and other characters don’t trust him. This would affect any child's mental health, and I want to explore that in more detail.

One thing I’ve really enjoyed about the LBT sequels is when the films give the dinosaurs culture. If you write about talking dinosaurs for long enough, it becomes inevitable. The dinosaurs have myths, stories, events and holidays. In LBT 10, a Longneck called Pat tells a story passed down to him about the moon becoming jealous of the sun and trying to knock it out of the sky. This is their explanation for solar eclipses. Longnecks have a tradition of migrating to this crater before every eclipse and using their long necks to “hold up the sun”. They also have holidays such as the Time of Great Giving (LBT 3), and Nibbling Day (LBT 11). There’s also Petrie’s rite of passage, specific to pterosaurs, in LBT 12. It’s not much, but it’s something I wanted to bear in mind as I write.

The Land Before Time films (the first seven, at least) were a huge part of my childhood and I’ve been having a lot of fun watching them with my little nephew. We’ve now seen the first twelve… out of fourteen. I might write down my thoughts on each LBT movie someday.

The second major inspiration is the Fallout franchise. I’ve played a lot of New Vegas since watching hbomberguy’s video on it, and seen a few episodes of the TV show (I’ve been meaning to watch more but I started planning and writing “The Last Dinosaurs” instead).

The one thing I’ve used from Fallout is the one plot point not found in New Vegas: the playable character leaving a vault and having to learn about the outside world along with the player. Though instead of vaults, the main characters are leaving their eggs and having to learn about the inhospitable world or die. Apart from that, I suppose my other Fallout inspiration is the tone: dark, but also touching and humorous to balance things out. 

I’m also using The Dinosaur’s Diary logic of the characters all magically knowing the names paleontologists will give them millions of years later. Look, The Land Before Time kinda cornered the market on names dinosaurs would call each other. Longnecks, Threehorns, Sharp Teeth, you already know what groups of dinosaurs they’re talking about, even without visuals. These are the things that, were dinosaurs capable of language, they would notice about each other and remark on. What is there left for me to add? What original spin can I put on them?

Apart from that and the eggs, The Dinosaur’s Diary works as a general gauge as to what a children’s book about talking dinosaurs can look like. TDD is for a younger audience than I’m going for (5-8 rather than 8-12), and has a slightly shorter word count, but it’s still good to read in the genre you’re hoping to write. 

Another children’s book I’ve had on my mind is Dodos Are Forever by Dick King Smith, even though it’s also for a 5-8 year-old audience. It doesn’t have a prehistoric setting, but it’s about extinction, and in many ways even darker than my other inspirations (for children). The story is set on the island of Mauritius, full of carefree dodos. A ship anchors off the island, and humans explore the beach and kill several dodos for food. Then a storm sinks the ship, the only survivors being Frank the parrot, and a lot of rats. The rats then systematically kill and eat every egg on the island, before moving on to hatchlings, then older chicks, then finally adult dodos. 

It’s only because of Frank that the two main dodo couples are aware of what’s happening, and therefore can protect their eggs. This earns them the ire of the rats when Frank kills their leader. Eventually, the dodos and Frank have to flee the island in a row boat washed ashore in the storm. 

There are a few incredibly dark scenes (for a book aimed at small children), such as when Bertie, the protagonist, is looking for his uncle, and finds said uncle’s severed foot next to a pile of feathers and a smouldering campfire. This causes him to realise the humans are eating them. Later on, Frank is flying over the jungle and sees rats swarming over the corpse of an adult dodo, and tells himself the dodo died of old age and the rats are scavenging. He doesn’t truly believe this.

Speaking of dark…

Primal is one of the most fucked up things I’ve ever watched. I’m only seven episodes in, mostly because I’m busy writing, but also because I’ve still not recovered from episode seven. The zombie dinosaur shook me to my very core. 

I’d started watching it for research into Prehistoric Dark Fantasy, even if it was for an adult audience. It seemed better to have watched it and learnt nothing, than to have not watched it and missed out. And the friendship between Spear and Fang is, at its heart, exactly what I’m going for when I write Jaina and Raja. They’ve lost their families, and through that tragedy have formed an unlikely friendship. Plus, as tough as they are in order to survive, they’re both kind and gentle, deep down. Especially Spear.

Walking with Dinosaurs (the original series) will haunt everything I write involving dinosaurs. When writing description or action, I often find myself slipping into Kenneth Branagh’s cadence. Plus, episode two, "Time of the Titans", and special The Ballad of Big Al cemented Allosaurus and Diplodocus as my favourite and second-favourite dinosaurs, and OCs I developed from that inspiration (Dipper and Al) were my first dabble in a Sauropod-Therapod friendship. 

There’s also Prehistoric Planet, but I’ve already talked about all my inspiration from there.

There are a lot of parallels between Disney’s Dinosaur and Land Before Time. In many ways, it’s pretty derivative, but when I rewatched it recently, I still had a good time. Aladar’s commitment to being kind and compassionate, and not letting go of hope, despite how harsh and downright cruel the world around him is, was really compelling.

The parallels with LBT, personally, help me get a gauge of the genre conventions when it comes to dinosaur fiction. Both start with an egg – the only survivor of its nest – struggling to even hatch. The protagonists (Littlefoot and Aladar) are born through sheer miracle. A natural disaster (earthquake and meteorite) forces the protagonist to lead a group through a desolate wasteland to find promised safe land. Along the way, they befriend a group made of different species of dinosaur while being pursued by carnivores.

I’ll admit, versions of a lot of these plot points have made it into my story, but hopefully with enough of my own flavour that it doesn’t feel derivative. 

I could not be bothered checking out The Good Dinosaur. Or the 2013 Walking with Dinosaurs movie. I won’t watch them. You can’t make me.

Now that I think of it, Ice Age (at least, elements of the first three films) probably influenced parts of this too. Manny has lost his family, and Diego chooses his friendship with the herbivores over his carnivore pack. In Ice Age 2, Manny fears he’s the last of his kind, and has to contend with that unparallelled loneliness.

So far, everything I’ve talked about has been fiction (even the documentaries), but I have been reading nonfiction about dinosaurs, prehistory and the KPg mass extinction for years now, as research for a different project (maybe I’ll do a similar essay on "Panchronos" sometime). 

The best book on the KPg mass extinction that I’ve read is The Last Days of the Dinosaurs by Riley Black. Not only is it incredibly up-to-date, but it also describes the events through the eyes of the animals that witnessed it. It helps me get in the head of my characters a lot easier than other books that discuss different theories and how those theories came to be.

I’ve been rereading Last Days… in preparation for this, and it’s been affecting the direction of the story, sometimes line by line. I’ve rewritten parts of Uncle Vega’s backstory after reading about waterfowl trying to escape into water and drowning because the heat pulse has dried out the oil in their feathers. 

As well as all this, Black’s writing has been a huge inspiration for "Panchronos", especially how she discusses prehistory through the lense of queerness. This is something I do repeatedly in "Panchronos" too. Plus, I’ve also written a few poems on the KPg mass extinction because of her.

So, that’s my inspiration. And what characters have I created with this inspiration? So far, there’s about five (not including their dead families), because the world is so desolate.

Firstly, there’s Jaina the Jainosaurus (they’re not great names, and may change at some point). Given that she’s a herbivore, and a girl, I wanted to make her more assertive than Raja, rather than a shy, subservient character. 

In terms of storyline and character arc, I worry hers feels a little thin compared to the others. She’s taken being the last Jainosaurus hard. Drawn in by Uncle Vega’s stories, she can almost picture herds of massive Sauropods, animals so huge they could shake the ground and gorging on treetops. Barely able to feed herself, she can feel the weight of this legacy bearing down on her, and she resolves to survive by any means necessary.

Fellow protagonist, Raja, is less disturbed about being the last Rajasaurus, and more concerned about how he would’ve been raised, had the world not ended. He longs to have known his family, but knows he would’ve been at odds with them because of his nature. A family disappointment, even. He’s soft. He’s sensitive. He doesn’t want to eat other dinosaurs. 

His dilemma is one that I’ve often wondered when watching media with talking animals: how do you eat something you know is just as smart as you are, and can communicate with you? How much would you have to harden yourself for your own survival when every time you eat your food begs for its life? In a lot of stories, particularly dinosaur ones, the creators get around this by having the carnivores be unable to speak, or use their own carnivore language. However, in other media (Ice Age, for example), they all understand each other, and that dynamic seemed worth exploring. 

Raja doesn’t want to eat Jaina. She is his friend. He has to reckon with the seemingly conflicting desire to survive, even if it means eating meat, and his friendship with Jaina and wish to protect her, possibly from himself.

Uncle Vega is a Vegavis, a waterbird from Antarctica that may have survived the KPg mass extinction. I couldn’t find any birds from India from the time period, so had to bring in someone from overseas. He’s flown up from southern lands in search of food and warmth. Go with it.

I quickly realised that Raja and Jaina needed a mentor, someone to fill them in on what the fuck happened. Less an Obi-wan, more a Frank the parrot. He helps give them a sense of history, and perspective. 

He’s also dying. He’s reaching the end of his natural lifespan, and his hips are plagued by Osteosclerosis, something common in waterbirds that provides ballast. But now he’s old, his adaptation is turning against him and affecting his mobility. He also lost his family during the extinction event, and is the last of his flock. The more he travels, the more he’s realised the non-avian dinosaurs are dead, along with many avians. He’s very aware of his own mortality. Vega sees protecting Jaina and Raja as his duty. The old world is gone and all that matters now is the few remaining dinosaurs stick together. 

As for the antagonists, I obviously couldn’t use a theropod dinosaur so had to get creative. I also liked the idea of the last dinosaurs being hunted by animals that did survive, particularly mammals. The last dregs of the old world hunted by the new. 

One animal from the Lameta Formation (an Indian fossil site where I’ve been looking for character inspiration) that stood out to me was Avashishta, a mammaliaforme from the Haramiyidan group, possibly the last Haramiyidan. I remember reading (in The Rise and Reign of the Mammals by Steve Brusatte) about Jurassic Haramiyidans that were able to glide like flying squirrels, so seeing the group on a list of Indian animals from the time period piqued my interest. 

Because there’s only been a single Avashishta tooth discovered (so far), I’ve had to take some creative liberties. Inspired by these Jurassic gliders, such as Arboroharamiya, I’ve made Ava a fellow glider. There’s (currently) no evidence disproving this. 

Ava, though bubbly and friendly, hates dinosaurs with a passion. Dinosaurs have eaten and squished her friends and family without second thought. She sees the apocalypse as a new beginning, where everything has turned on its head. Upon discovering the existence of two hatchlings, she vows to hunt down and eat them.

Ava has some parallels with Lucrezia Gorger from Dodos are Forever. Lucrezia, though a more unpleasant character than Ava, tries to eat Bertie and Beatrice’s egg, is foiled by Frank, and vows revenge on both the parrot and the dodo chick. She and her sons lurk in the shadows, waiting for a moment when the egg is unguarded and, when that’s not happening, plans to kill the chick as it’s hatching. She’s killed by Frank before she gets the chance, but her sons later try and take their revenge on the main characters.

Obviously, a tiny creature like Ava is too small to take on even baby dinosaurs. She needs muscle. 

A potential candidate from the Lameta Formation was a so-far unnamed Dyrosaurid, a crocodilian that survived the KPg mass extinction. I based “Snappy” on a Hyposaurus, as I couldn’t find much on the Indian Dyrosaurid. The Lameta Formation is actually quite frustrating to read about.

Snappy is hungry, like everything else at the time. It’s hard to be a carnivore when there’s not much left to hunt. He’s lost, far away from his ocean hunting grounds out of sheer desperation, and things aren’t going well. He teams up with Ava to hunt Jaina and Raja, because Ava knows the area and he doesn’t have any other ideas. 

He plans to betray her after they eat the dinosaurs, but maybe another unlikely friendship is about to form.

Anyway, I figured it would be fun to write out my thoughts here, because if there’s one thing I love more than writing this story, it’s talking about writing this story. Plus, I thought this might be a useful look into the writing process, since this whole idea was cooked up in the last month and fresh in my mind. Plus, I think it's important to talk about inspirations as a writer, as sometimes it can feel like you have to be "completely original" with your art, something that's simply not possible. I find it better to wear your inspirations, and let readers decide for themselves how you did.

Also, I really needed to update this blog.