Terra Nova/Trivia

• Hey, It's That Guy!:
  • Colonel Quaritch!
  • Max used to be a Red Ranger!
    • Also a Roman slave!
  • Ashika Chandiramani became a doctor in 2149!!
  • Michelle Benjamin has befriended Josh.
  • Declan Coyne sure went out of his way to get away from Holly J.
  • The Sixers are led by Simone Hunden.
• Shout-Out:
  • Sky and Josh's exchange about the Slashertails: They mostly come out at night... mostly.
  • "Instinct" was basically a huge The Birds homage.
  • Jim, I'm a doctor, not a chemist.
  • In "Now You See Me", Elizabeth makes passing mention of one Nurse Ogawa.
• Somewhere a Palaeontologist Is Crying: The presence of Brannon "Threshold" Braga wasn't really that reassuring to those of us who were originally assured the show would avoid this trope. We... guess you could handwave all of this because we're in an Alternate Universe, but for specifics:
  • The show takes place 85 million years into the past, which puts it in the Late Cretaceous Period (the Santonian Age, to be specific). Carnotaurus (lived 70 million years ago) isn't too far out of place, but the brachiosaurs and Allosaurus (mentioned but not seen) are way out of place.
  • In addition to issues of time, you've also got issues of space - although Brachiosaurus and Allosaurus fossils have been found in similar places from western to central North America, Carnotaurus was located in Chile.
  • There was a Brachiosaur 85 million years ago, it's called Sauroposeidon.
  • And then, there are the Slashers. They are a fictional species of maniraptor that looks for all the world like a straight and unsarcastic version of this. With pygostyles that act as tail blades.
  • The second episode has pterosaurs which are clearly belong in rhamphorhynchoidea, small with long tails but that went extinct at the end of the Jurassic, and not the surviving suborder pterodactyloidea, larger with short tails. They are also bipedal, for those not in the know, see Ptero-Soarer.
  • All of which arguably fulfills the Misplaced Wildlife trope.
    • One could argue that "undiscovered" fictional dinosaurs are a nod to realism. The fossil record is patchy and it's entirely likely that a time traveler would encounter species that didn't get into the record.
    • Moreover, predator species tend to have a high rate of turnover, evolving into something else or going extinct within a few million years at most. With a short lifespan for each taxon, together with predator populations being smaller than prey in any stable ecosystem, odds are good that we've missed a good deal more carnivores (which is what the show focuses on) than herbivores.
    • Still, you would have thought that Spinosaurus aegyptiacus would be a bit of a giveaway about the beast's home territory.
  • See one paleontologist's comments on the show here and here.
  • The symbol used extensively in media material and in-Universe by the expedition features the supercontinent Pangea in a configuration from the Triassic Period, 150 millions earlier to the setting. By this point Gondwana was almost entirely broken up and much of Laurasia was covered in intercontinental shallow seaways.
    • Maybe they picked it because it looked cool. Plus, they don't seem to have much ability to take a peek at what the entire planet looks like.
    • The final episode does appear to acknowledge that the world is not just one big landmass at this point. When the Phoenix officers are discussing the planned detonation of the charges that will strip away the vegetation and animal life, they use a map image showing multiple detonations across a large land-mass and comment that the dozen or so detonations will clear half the continent.
  • There's always the giant centipede. There were giant myriapods at one point in Earth's history, but they weren't centipedes and, more importantly, they lived over 200 million years before the timing of the show, in the late Carboniferous.
  • Oooh look - grass 20 millions years early!
    • More like Reality Is Unrealistic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass
  • Grass is one thing - how about cretaceous apple trees! Okay, maybe imported. And a fungus eating on the apples. Okay, maybe imported as well. But then there are clearly indigenous beetles feeding specifically on that fungus.
    • Presumably there's some native plant that the fungus normally grows on, and the beetles would chow down on it whether it's growing on apples or its normal food source.