Cera is a Triceratops, which lived 68-66 million years ago. Littlefoot is an Apatosaurus, a genus that lived 151-150 million years ago. The Timeline Is Screwy AFĬonsider the five main characters of the Land Before Time franchise. Predators learn to go after things small enough that they are sure to win the fight, but big enough that they are worth the effort. Making a living in the world of the dinosaurs was all about getting enough food, but also appropriate food. It would cost more to bite them and swallow them than it would get energy out,” Habib says, hyperbolically. “Why a large rex would be trying to eat a hatchling is beyond reason. Littlefoot and his merry band of hatchlings would have made an excellent snack for all sorts of hungry predators, but the large sharptooth that killed his mother would have turned up his nose. Sharptooth Would Have No Interest in Littlefoot and Friends To Sharptooth, the hatchlings would hardly be worth the effort. ( Birds, on the other hand, are dinosaurs.) Without parents around, a grounded pterosaur is a dead pterosaur.Īlthough the film never explicitly calls Petrie a dinosaur, it’s worth mentioning, for the record, that pterosaurs aren’t dinosaurs but related reptilian cousins. The fossil evidence suggests that they could fly immediately upon hatching, or soon after. Actually, like sauropods, pterosaurs likely fended for themselves from birth. Petrie Never Couldn’t FlyĪ secondary plotline of the first film is that Petrie, a spastic pterosaur, is too nervous to learn to fly. It turns out that making lots of babies and having them grow to large proportions very quickly works OK as a life strategy, too. That idea held that herbivorous dinosaurs must have either had physical defenses, like horns or spines, or lived in the water, where sharptooth predators couldn’t reach them. Hadrosaurs earned this ill-gotten reputation as part of a larger myth, which was dispelled long before the Land Before Time movies. “In fact, they were probably some of the worst swimmers among dinosaurs, but they just had this wide beak that kind of looks like a duck beak, if you squint.” “They were not very duck-like animals at all,” Habib says.

In the movies, the hadrosaurs are known as “swimmers,” “bigmouths,” or “duckbills.” But in reality, hadrosaurs were land animals with next to nothing in common with a duck. Ducky Couldn’t Swimĭucky, Littlefoot’s plucky young friend, is a hadrosaur who is, indeed, very duck-like - competent on land but at home in the water. “If you did put a rex and a large apatosaur in the same room, it’s very unlikely that the rex would want to make a go for that animal,” says Habib.ĭucky: Not actually duck-like. The battle between the sharptooth and Littlefoot’s mother is unrealistic not only because their species lived at very different times (more on that later) but also because that sharptooth - if he were smart - would have none of it. Littlefoot’s genus is officially classified as Apatosaurus, although he has been named differently on different occasions.

One hit from the tail and you’re decapitated, or close enough - your neck is shattered.” You don’t mess with the 30-ton animal,” he says.

“In reality, in their environment they’re the heavy. In pop culture, adult sauropods are incorrectly stereotyped as targets, or sacrificial lambs, says Habib. “In reality what would happen is that he would wake up and there would be hundreds just like him, and they’d be scattering into the brush, and they wouldn’t even know who their parents are, and they wouldn’t know them if they saw them.” A Sharptooth Would Never Pick a Fight With Littlefoot’s Mom “These animals probably laid them and left them,” says Mike Habib, Ph.D., a researcher with the University of Southern California. The problem is, sauropods weren’t great parents. The whole premise of the franchise is that Littlefoot loses his mother to a battle with a sharptooth and his grandparents in an earthquake, leaving him to fend for himself in an unfriendly world. ‘The Land Before Time’ divides animals into types, and our protagonist Littlefoot is a longneck, or in the scientific parlance, a sauropod. Littlefoot Would Never Have Known His Mother The tender relationship between Littlefoot and his mom would never have happened IRL.

Ducky land before time yep yep yep