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Conception
The original idea for Dinosaur, called Dinosaurs was conceived by Phil Tippett during the filming of Robocop. The film would have been directed by Tippett and Paul Verhoeven with Jon Davison serving as producer and Walon Green as screenwriter. Dennis Muren of Industrial Light and Magic was also attached to the film. In the late 1980s, the film was pitched to Disney as a Disney documentary. The film was originally supposed to be darker, less anthropomorphized, void of any dialogue, and used stop motion to portray the dinosaurs. The original story featured scenarios featuring several dinosaurs, most notably a Styracosaurus protagonist and a Tyrannosaurus rex antagonist. At the end of the film, a battle would have occurred between the ceratopsid herd and the Tyrannosaurus just before the KT Extinction occurred. The smallest of the dinosaurs would survive the asteroid, but would soon be killed by flying animals. Tippett stated in Cinefantastique that the film for dramatic storytelling needs would stray from paleontological accuracy.

During the project's development, however, tensions arose between Tippett and Disney in regards to the budget and some large scale changes that Disney wanted to be implemented into the film. One such change that Disney wanted to be done to the film was in regards to its tone, with Tippett recalling that Disney wanted the dinosaurs to be Disney-esque. The team of Dinosaurs continued pursuing the project into the early 1990s. But Tippett, Davison, and Verhoeven soon went their separate ways due to creative difficulties. In a 2011 interview conducted by MTV News, Phil Tippett showed no remorse for losing the film saying: "I wasn’t sad when we got kicked off of [that] because we could tell where it was going to go."

Early 1990s
Disney then hired former Industrial Light and Magic general manager Thomas G. Smith as director. Executives at Disney gave Smith the green light to research how the film might be done economically. But an investigation of European animation facilities found none of sufficient quality and capacity to the create the animation to this dinosaur project. David Allen then became director per Smith's request as Smith would be assigned to another project. Longtime friend of David Allen, Chris Endicott, recalls that Allen worked heavily on the film for six months. Around this time, artists Mark Hallett and Pete Von Sholly were hired to create concept art for the film. Hallett cited his involvement in Steven Speilberg's Jurassic Park in 1990 as opening his engagement to this film and Walking with Dinosaurs. During this period te Styracosaurus was referred to as "Woot" and was potentially going to be a Monoclonius as well. Suri, a character who ultimately appeared in the final film, was also introduced in the film albeit instead of a lemur, she would have been a prosimian bushbaby-esque animal. that because the film was impossible to make using solely stop-motion animation, it was tentatively settled upon to use a combination of stop-motion and rod puppetry to portray the dinosaurs with company Will Vinton Studios to host the work. For Suri, her portrayal was to be an actor in a suit.

The project then became briefly halted the project to due to the impending release of Jurassic Park in 1993. According to Endicott, Disney wanted to see how the CGI dinosaurs of Jurassic Park would "change the landscape."

Greenlight
In late 1994, the project was put in the featured animation division of Disney. Subsequently that year, producer Pam Marsden and directors Ralph Zondag and Eric Leighton were hired. Furthermore, tests began on creating digital dinosaurs. The project soon became greenlit when after the creation of a proof of concept test. Several paleoartists were hired to work on the film. These included among others: William Stout (who had been approached previously by Disney about working on the film), Doug Henderson, Gregory S. Paul, James Gurney, and Brian Franczak. Pete Von Shellby and Mark Hallett remained on the film, with Hallett in paticular creating detailed drawings of dinosaur musculature. The artwork created by these artists would be synthesized with the vision of the film's directors and finalized by Mark Krentz. Paleontologists Jack Horner and Dr. Robert Bakker as well as science writer Don Lessem were also consulted for Dinosaur.

Unlike the previous directors before them, the new directors started from scratch with the film. In the final film, only a few names originating from the previous developments, such as the character Suri, and the concept of primitive mammals interacting with dinosaurs remained. The new directors felt, in Zontag's own words, that the new story "needed something to work into the Disney way of thinking without damaging the studio's ideas of the film being made." According to David Krentz, the story would change every few months. An example of this was a brief period in the pre-production of the film when the story ignored scientific accuracy and attention to placing species in an accurate time period. Concept artist Ricardo Delgado, who created concept art during this period, recalls that during this period there was a minor character named "Vorax", which Delgado described as being a combination of a pterosaur and a bird. Over the course of the film's development, the bushbaby Suri would become a lemur and have a family. The Tyrannosaurus became replaced by Carnotaurus, albeit being made larger for the film. The protagonist, originally a ceratopsid like Styracosaurus, became an Iguanodon. Producer Pam Marsden explained in an interview with the Dinosaur Interplanetary Gazette that this was because Iguanodon was easier to animate and were "much like horses" compared to other animals which Marsden said had "too many frills to illustrate." Several animals that did not live in the time period of the film were added regardless out of how appealing they were to the filmmakers.

Unlike what Phil Tippett had envisioned, the dinosaurs were given the ability to talk, a choice that was insisted upon by then-current Disney CEO Michael Eisner. Producer Pam Marsden noted that there was disdain among members of the animation crew regarding this decision. The dislike was so notable that Marsden even told Newsweek that if the dinosaurs sang in the movie "some people would have walked out." The directors had trouble finding ways to implement dialogue into the story. They experimented with having a narrator and hearing the characters' inner thoughts as a means of expressing dialogue, but despite the latter receiving a test audience the filmmakers thought that this did not engage the audience like dialogue did. The directors expressed gratitude that the film had dialogue to the Dinosaur Interplanetary Gazette. Zondag said that having dialogue in the film gave the viewer "real empathy with the character." In the same interview Eric Leighton gave his own reason as to why dialogue in the film was important: "The “no dialogue” idea was conceptually compelling, but I felt myself detached from it. I wanted to be inside the character's head. I didn’t want just motion, but character, too. The opening of the film is about as long as you can go with a totally naturalistic approach and still reach a wide audience."

As a result of the dinosaurs being able to talk, the dinosaurs were given anthropomorphic facial features, such as giving the beaked Iguanodon lips teeth at the upper front of its mouth. Tests had been done with Iguanodon with a beak, but Leighton felt that the test "came across as comic." Leighton further explained, "It would have been okay for a sidekick character like Eema, but not for a hero character." Producer Pam Marsden gave a reason for the Iguanodon lips saying "We needed faces that animators could relate to and faces that could act." Another reason for the lips was that it gave the Iguanodons the ability to easily express their emotions in a way the audience can easily understand quickly. Leighton justified the reason for the film's Iguanodon bearing lips in his interview with the Dinosaur Interplanetary Gazette: "[I]n talking to one expert, there was evidence on some beaks of having small perforations on top edge of the beak. This might have been a blood supply for lips. Of course it is a difficult paleontological question. Soft tissue disappears over time. If people found the fossil remains of an elephant, would they figure out that an elephant had a trunk?"

Production
Dinosaur used real locations as backgrounds. Among the many filming locations were Australia, Florida, Venezuela, and the Los Angeles Arboretum, Jordan, Samoa, Hawaii, and the Mojave Desert.

Music
The film's score was composed by James Newton Howard. The Los Angeles Times reported that the studio liked Howard's score, liking it so much that they signed him on to compose the scores of Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet.

Pop singer/songwriter Kate Bush reportedly wrote and recorded a song for the film to be used in the scene in which Aladar and his family mourn the destruction of their island, but due to complications, the track was ultimately not included on the soundtrack. According to HomeGround, a Kate Bush fanzine, it was scrapped when Disney asked Bush to rewrite the song and Bush refused; however, according to Disney, the song was cut from the film when preview audiences did not respond well to the track.

In Asia, pop singer Jacky Cheung's song Something Only Love Can Do, with versions sung in English, Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese, was adopted as the theme song for the film.

Coe
Most specimens of Coelophysis bauri have been recovered at the Whitaker quarry ("Coelophysis quarry") at Ghost Ranch, in the Chinle Formation of Arizona and New Mexico. The Whitaker quarry has been dated to Late Norian-Rhaetian age.