65 movie dinosaurs species

May 7, 2023

If you’ve seen the trailer for the 65 movie, or caught the film on the big screen, then you might be wondering what all of the dinosaur species are. Following on from our list of dinosaurs in Jurassic World Dominion we’ll take you through all of the big beasts that have featured in the movie now that the release date is in the bag.

The one-liner details for the film reads, “65 million years ago earth had a visitor”, which gave us a lot to work on in addition to the trailers before the film came out. Firstly, we’ve got the timeline for our dinosaur species and secondly we know that it’s earth, despite the fact that the planet is unknown to the pilot that crash lands.

He’s played by Adam Driver (Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker), and his ship is badly damaged in the crash, so he must trek across the planet with the only other survivor, a child named Koa. Along the way they come across some fearsome creatures that are out for their blood, but from our perspective they’re just dinosaurs hunting their prey.

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Shouldn’t all of the dinosaur species be extinct 65 million years ago?

The simple answer is yes all dinosaurs should be extinct by the time the pilot crash lands on earth. This is because the latest dating for the mass extinction event that took place at the end of the Cretaceous period occurred 66 million years ago.

It’s known as the K-Pg extinction, which stands for the Cretaceous-Paleogene event, where a supersized asteroid crash landed on earth and wiped out all of the big dinosaurs. However, the ship that crash lands on earth does so after it hits an asteroid on approach to the planet, so the 65 movie story is clearly a loose adaptation of historical events.

In fact, that’s exactly what it is if we’re being honest, but the point is that it might be trying to rewrite the history of the extinction event. The other thing to consider is that the timing for the K-Pg event has only recently been updated to add on an extra million years, so it’s possible that the film has decided to act on the previous timeline.

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This could be for a variety of reasons ranging from 65 million years sounding better than 66 million years to just wanting to move away from being exact about the dates. The latter gives the film more freedom of creativity and considering the fact that it’s made by the people behind A Quiet Place it kind of makes sense.

65 movie dinosaur species

From our review of the trailer and the 65 movie, it looks like there aren’t that many species of dinosaur. You can check them out in the list below, which we’ve added to with the release date in the bag, giving you a comprehensive rundown of all the species that feature in the film.

Tyrannosaurid dynosaur

The Tyrannosaurids were one of the last groups of large carnivorous dinosaurs in existence before the arrival of the extinction asteroid. One of the species in the film looks a little too small to be a T-Rex, but it’s possible that it’s a juvenile, or something like a Dryptosaurus, which is a more distant relative Tyrannosauroidea.

There were a number of other Tyrannosaurids, but records for them date most of their final steps on earth as being much earlier than 65 million years ago. You can also rule out other similar dinosaurs like Allosaurus and Ceratocaurus, because these were from the Jurassic Period, which took place way earlier.

A small T-Rex is our best interpretation for the carnivorous Therapod we see hunting them on the plain. However, it does pose some questions for the raptor-like dinosaur we see, because the home for the T-Rex was North America and the Velociraptor is from modern day Asia.

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If you’re looking at Tyrannosaurids from Asia with a possible timeline for the movie then it could be a Tarbosaurus from Mongolia with a specimen dating back to 70 million years. It’s smaller than a T-Rex, but not by that much, so maybe a contender. Another option is the Zhuchengtyrannus from China in the late Cretaceous.

It definitely looks like there are a couple of large carnivorous therapods in the 65 movie, because the dinosaur roaring behind the waterfall appears to be larger than the one chasing them. Either this is an older and juvenile duo, a T-Rex and a Dryptosaurus or there’s a long distance covered in the film to feature two species from Asia.

The reality is that the continents were much closer together 65 million years ago, but not so close as to allow that much freedom of movement. There is the potential for a land bridge connecting the very top of what it now Europe to modern-day Greenland, Iceland and Canada, but that should alter things in terms what is where in relation to the movie.

However, the real evidence is the Raptor-like species, which we’ll cover in more detail below. This looks too big to be an Asian raptor, which gives more credibility to the location being in North America, which is a good indicator that the large Tyrannosaurid featured is a T-Rex.

Raptor-like dinosaur

The dinosaur species we see in the movie looks a lot like a Velociraptor from Jurassic World Dominion, which would work well with the Asian Tyrannosaurids mentioned above, as they were native to Mongolia. However, more recent evidence suggests that Dromaeosauridae (the official name for what we know as raptors) were also in existence in North America during the late Cretaceous period.

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The reason for the obscurity is that raptors are relatively small, but they’re still therapods, so their bones are hollow. As such, they’re less likely to preserve well over 65 million years. The fact that there were some Dromaeosauridae in North America at the time is a strong enough indicator that there were more, larger species than the tiny ones discovered.

The Utahraptor may well have disappeared well before this, but the Dakotaraptor is another option. With this in mind, we’re looking at North America as the most likely setting for the film, but as mentioned, the world looked very different during the Cretaceous period.

The other thing to consider is that the Velociraptor is shorter than a human, despite what you see in Jurassic Park and its World successors. The Dakotaraptor is about as tall as a fully grown human, so this ties in well with what we can see in the 65 movie.

Crocodile/Alligator dinosaur species

We then have an illusive alligator or crocodile-like dinosaur species. It doesn’t take that much time for it to skim through the water behind Adam Driver, so it’s probably not a big beast. This is most likely a smaller member of the Crocodilia order, which originated in the Cretaceous period.

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Pterasaur

While these aren’t featured in the main trailer, they do appear in the international trailer and there are two distinct species in the movie. Off the cuff, you might say that these are maybe Pteranodon being attacked by something like a Quetzelcoatlus, but extinction timelines and feeding habits go against this a little.

The Pteranodon fazed out around 84 million years ago. And while the Quetzelcoatlus was there until the K-Pg event, the common understanding of its feeding is that they probably remained on land to catch prey.

However, this is possibly due to the kind of creative license that changed Velociraptors from small, feathered hunters into large reptilian man killers in Jurassic Park. The fact that the film is called 65 rather than 66 is a good indicator that this is a possibility. It could just be a case of never letting the truth get in the way of a good story.

There are other Pterasaurs that lasted longer than the Pteranodon, so it could be a Nyctosaurus. However, it looks like we’re going to get at least an element of playing with time and reality in the film, but this wasn’t too extreme in the end.

Dromaeosaurus

This is the little dinosaur you can see in the international trailer. It’s another carnivore that originated in North America, but as with others on the list it is supposed to have been wiped out millions of years before the K-Pg event, but still in the late Cretaceous period.

Unknown 65 movie dinosaur species

We’ve managed to narrow things down for the majority of the dinosaur species that appear in the film, but there’s one that we couldn’t place. It’s the pack near the sea attacking Koa and the pilot as they try to escape. In the trailer they looked like Deimetrodon, but without the sail spines on their backs, but when you see them in the film you can tell that they’re more sleek.

We’re still struggling to find anything definitely relevant from the timeline. It’s possible that this is another part of the creative license we talked about earlier, so maybe it’s just been made up on the assumption that not everything has been preserved in the fossil records, so why not this.

We’ll update you with more details on the dinosaur species in the 65 movie if we get any tip offs on the latter. To keep tabs on the latest upcoming films you can also check out our movie news section. Visit the official movie website at https://www.65.movie/.