Web Animation / Antediluvian

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Antediluvian is short film by palaeoartist Mario Lanzas, released in 2024. It is a short vignette depicting prehistoric creatures as Victorian scientists and artists thought of them, the kind the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs are part of, and is based on the premise by theologian and palaeontologist William Buckland that fossilised animals were the remains of those who had been killed by God during The Great Flood. It was preceded by a short prologue featuring Mary Anning's discovery of a plesiosaur skeleton along the seaside cliffs of Lyme Regis.

This film provides examples of the following tropes:

• Art Imitates Art: The short homages palaeoart from the early to mid-1800s, namely that produced by Benajmin Waterhouse Hawkins.
• Artistic License – Paleontology: A intentional example — the short is based off of paleoart from the early to mid-1800s, so it includes all of the inaccuracies from that time period. These include:
  • Bat-winged pterosaurs.
  • Iguanodon and Megalosaurus have designs directly based on their iconic Crystal Palace Park sculptures, and thus look like giant lizards. Also, the two live side-by-side.
  • Ichthyosaurus and Elasmosaurus being able to move on land.
  • Plesiosaurs having impossibly flexible necks that they hold in an upright, swan-like posture when out of the water.
  • Elasmosaurus has a short neck and a very long tail, based on the "head on the wrong end" arrangement by E.D. Cope during the Bone Wars.
• Bizarre Alien Locomotion: The ammonites use two specialized tentacles to catch the wind like sails as they float on the surface of the ocean.
• The Day the Dinosaurs Died: A variant, shown as being caused by The Great Flood rather than a meteorite impact (in keeping with the theories of early 19th-century science).
• Ending After the End of the World: The very last scene of the film features an underwater shot of the dinosaurs submerged beneath the waters of The Great Flood, all drowned.
• "Everyone Dies" Ending: All the creatures die in a tidal wave.
• Gorn: The creatures descend into an orgy of violence in the last moments before the tidal wave sweeps them all away, with many shots of them dismembering and eating one another alive in gruesome detail.
• The Great Flood: The short ends with the animals wiped out by one, implied to be the Deluge from the Book of Genesis.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Toward the end of the short, a Dimorphodon is gored right in the belly by a pterodactyl's beak.
• More Predators Than Prey: Exaggerated. Of the dozens of prehistoric creatures that appear in the video, not even one is shown to be herbivorous (this includes the few that should be, such as Iguanodon and dicynodonts); they're all either active predators or scavengers. Possibly justified, given that dead trees are the only plants visible at any point. Perhaps the herbivores all starved or resorted to scavenging meat to survive, and the predators have no choice but to go after each other?
• Off with His Head!: Several plesiosaurs get their heads bitten off at the neck.
• Prehensile Tail: In one shot, an Iguanodon uses its long tail to strangle another dinosaur.
• Prehistoric Monster: Downplayed, as while the short is a homage to a time when this trope was the general view of prehistoric life, most of the animals are just minding their own business, and only start to get violent when the deluge begins (which even then could be partly justified on account of desperation and panic causing the animals to lash out at one another).
• Retraux: All the dinosaurs and contemporary reptiles are depicted as they would have been in the 19th century, with all the inaccuracies that that entails.
• Ribcage Ridge: One shot shows several small pterosaurs climbing on top of the corpse of a large Mosasaurus.
• Terror-dactyl: The pterosaurs, being based off 1800s art, are the classic bat-winged monsters.