Land Before Time location

[Daddytops2009]

The Rainbowfaces mentioned mountains made of fire.

Could it be that LBT took place in Azerbijan?

[Petrie85]

Not sure but it could be that it might have. I will look and do research on that location.

[Dilopho]

It is the western part of North America. Time-wise I would say end Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) although some species like Stegosaurs were extinct at this time.

[Petrie85]

So did it take place in the location It may have.

[jansenov]

It couldn't have been Azerbaijan. While it is known as "the land of fire" today, it spent most of the past 150 million years under sea, according to these maps. And I also share Dilopho's opinion. LBT must take place in the Late Cretaceous, judging by the vegetation which is dominated by flowering plants (angiosperms) and the climate which has four seasons, which makes Earth of LBT look more like Earth today than Earth in the Jurassic (excluding the dinosaurs of course). Also many of the species which appear in the movies are from North America (some are from far places like Australia).

If the dinosaurs of the Late Createceous appeared on Earth today, they would find it to be very familiar, unlike the dinosaurs from the Early Cretaceous, not to mention the Jurassic and the Triassic. They would be well adapted to this environment. Had the K-T extinction event not occured, the transition to a mammal-dominated world would have taken much longer (maybe a 100 million years wouldn't be enough), or maybe wouldn't occur at all. I know this was off-topic, but I had to say it.

[Allicloud]

It couldn't have been Azerbaijan. While it is known as "the land of fire" today, it spent most of the past 150 million years under sea, according to these maps. And I also share Dilopho's opinion. LBT must take place in the Late Cretaceous, judging by the vegetation which is dominated by flowering plants (angiosperms) and the climate which has four seasons, which makes Earth of LBT look more like Earth today than Earth in the Jurassic (excluding the dinosaurs of course). Also many of the species which appear in the movies are from North America (some are from far places like Australia).

If the dinosaurs of the Late Createceous appeared on Earth today, they would find it to be very familiar, unlike the dinosaurs from the Early Cretaceous, not to mention the Jurassic and the Triassic. They would be well adapted to this environment. Had the K-T extinction event not occured, the transition to a mammal-dominated world would have taken much longer (maybe a 100 million years wouldn't be enough), or maybe wouldn't occur at all. I know this was off-topic, but I had to say it.

Concerning your statement about the geographical origins of the dinosaurs, you have to remember, this is set back in the days of Pangaea, when almost all the landmass of the world is one giant continent. So, theoretically, a dinosaur could travel all the way from wherever Australia was at the time, to wherever America was at the time on foot.

And concerning the first post, about the Mountais of fire, I think that's simply a reference to volcanoes, which were apparently extremely common in the days of dinosaurs...Maybe the Great Valley grew up to become Yellowstone Park!

[Dilopho]

In late Cretaceous there was no Pangaea, even Laurasia and Gondwana didn't exist anymore. And in reality even though there would have been migration between the connected landmasses a short while later there would had been visual differences in appearence.

Landscape wise, like I said, it is North America in the late Cretaceous. Lifeform wise it is a mixture between all mesozoic stages and landmasses(mostly NA). And if we took the Dimetrodon from LBT 1 we also have an animal from the Permian period. If we consider the current scientific level of knowledge there are also non existing creatures like featherless maniraptora or the Yellowbellies.

[Coyote_A]

Could it be that LBT took place in Azerbijan?

So the gang are in fact prehistpric commies, eh?

[jansenov]

^    Russkie i ih humor...

[Petrie85]

LOL That is pretty funny but kinda risky.

[Almaron]

North America seems the most likely location, because of all of the dinosaur species shown in the films, most come from North America - Triceratops is the key, here, only being found in North America. In additon to this, there was a large mountain range running in the west around the Cretaceous Period, so it's not hard to imagine the GOF walking across the western states (the middle states being underwater at this point) to a mountain valley (I belive another user identified a "Valley" in Utah which matched pictures of the Great Valley). I remember discussing this on another page somewhere here about what nationality this would make each character if they were human - I think Littlefoot & Petrie were both European settlers, Cera & Spike were Native American or Inuit, and Ducky and Ruby were Asian. Don't recall if Chomper ever got identified...

Anyway, I attempted to draw a map of how the Great Valley and the surrounding lands might look a while back. It's sketchy, but it's not too hard to understand what I mean by it. Scale is wrong, obviously.

Possible Great Valley Map

[Coyote_A]

^    Russkie i ih humor...

For once i'm actually being serious.
Green food for everyone! Equal rights to all kinds of dinosaures!.. Come to think of it the inhabitants of Great Valley look like workers on some collective farm.

[Dilopho]

..., Cera & Spike were Native American ...

Hm, Cera a Native American whose family consists of racists? That is not common for such people. I think that was the way of thinking of white settlers/people from Europe.

[Tails_155]

I'm pretty sure it's just as fictional a place as the situation itself is... the particular combination of dinosaurs renders this all impossible (well not 100% so, but reasonably so) because there are multiple "generations" of dinosaur groups, and the ones shown across the films is inclusive of cretaceous, jurassic, and triassic dinosaurs, and inclusive of ones that were extinct at the same time the others were alive. It's pretty safe to say there was no map in the author's mind of a real-world location if they didn't even make sure that the whole posse was alive at the same time. My two cents.

[Dilopho]

The reason for the dinosaurs of different periods in the first movie could be that Bluth and his team didn't know a lot about dinosaurs.  So they took the species which were the most known in the 80s: Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Apatosaurus (in those days Brontosaurus), T-Rex, a pterosaurian.
Only ducky as an hadrosaur gets out of line, maybe it was the only one that did fit in the role of the funny animal.