Re: Dinosaur themes in science fiction

["Stephen V. Cole" <adbinc@arn.net>]

I remember  a couple of books about DINOSAUR PLANET where the 
dinosaurs had been taken to some other planet by mysterious aliens 
and were still a going concern. Ah, thanks to google, Anne McCaffrey, 
Dinosaur Planet and the sequel Dinosaur Planet Survivors.

Robert J Sawyer wrote a delightful series of books about some 
intelligent Nanotyranosaurs who lived on a moon of a gas giant, and 
eventually learned how to build space elevators and reach an asteroid 
left by aliens with clues how to find other inhabited planets. The 
moon they were on was unstable due to the graviity of the gas giant 
and had a lot of earthquakes. Somebody figured out that the motion of 
the planets meant they were on the moon of a planet and that God was 
just the gas giant they were on. Once they overcame that religious 
obstacle, they launched a technological revolution. The whole species 
were psychological basket cases because when each clutch of eight 
eggs were born, a priest would kill seven of the hatchlings 
(population control) meaning everybody's eariest memory was watching 
a huge monster (an adult of their own species) murdering their 
brothers and sisters. None of them could actually stand to touch each 
other because of this.

And of course, there were the Gorns of Star Trek, paralel evolution, 
descended from nanotyrannus or maybe Troodon.