It seems a little harsh to criticise a children's animation for scientific inaccuracy so it's hard to justify sticking this anywhere but the top of the list. However, if Pixar had wanted pernickety writers like me to treat it as an entirely make-believe animation, they should probably have gone a little easier on their exposition. The mere fact that a conscious effort was made to explain how the film's alternate reality came into being (the dinosaur-killing asteroid missed Earth by a hair) makes it sort of okay for nit-pickers to do their thing. We'll be really kind and ignore what is perhaps the most jarring inaccuracy, which is the fact that mammals (and therefore humans) only ever evolved to a planet-dominating scale because of the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period. Thus, even if the dinosaurs hadn't died out, they would never have met humans because we simply would never have evolved. But yeah, we're turning a blind eye to that whole debacle. What the more eagle-eyed dinosaur nerds may have spotted though, is that Apatosaurs like Arlo (pictured) weren't actually killed by the meteor strike in the first place. What the researchers at Pixar seem to have overlooked is the fact that a smaller mass extinction took place a few million years prior, at the end of the Jurassic period. Amongst other giant veg-eating sauropods, one of the unfortunate species to be killed off was Arlo and his Apatosaurus friends. Its not truly understood what caused so many species to die at the turn of the Cretaceous period but its thought that climate change played a major role. Incidentally, it was this extinction event that also killed off the Stegosaurus. So, the fact of the matter is that whether or not Pixar managed to redirect an enormous lump of space rock to save the T-Rex and the Triceratops, Arlo was already long dead and would never have made it to witness the asteroids flyby. I guess they better give the backstory a rewrite.
Peter Austin initially joined WhatCulture as an occasional contributor to our Film, Gaming and Science sections, but made the mistake of telling us that he'd been making videos in his bedroom for over a decade. Since then he's been a vital member of our YouTube team and routinely sets the standard for smart-casual wear in the office.
