The origins of Donisaur
The character Doni was first created by accident in 2009, when Thomas made a typing error when writing about Dinosaurs. (He mistype it as Donisaur, and there lies the origins of the Novel’s title.)
The concept art of Donisaur started back in Zuperbuu’s DeviantArt days, in 2004, with the early drawings of a young cloned Allosaurus. Over the years the creation was left in his archives, gathering dust, until he returned to it in 2009 and gave it a name and new identity.
Story Brief
It is the distant future; cloning is at its greatest point in history; with animals near extinction brought back to full strength. The known world is at peace and now strives to learn more about its prehistoric past by cloning extinct animals from ancient times.
Doni and Bluth, a pair of cloned Tyrannosaurus Rexes, enter a facility that houses the best prehistoric animal clones; paid for by public visitors, it is the most visited zoo of its kind in the world.
It is here that Doni meets his future friends; Tom the clumsy and stubborn Triceratops, Veronica the crafty Velociraptor and Archie the shy but intelligent Archaeopteryx, plus many more!
Doni embarks on a journey of knowledge; learning what the modern-world expect him to be like, and that it is up to him to show this new world what a real Tyrannosaurus Rex is all about, whilst learning more with Archie about other Dinosaurs! All the while his brother Bluth seeks to pester him and bully his friends at every chance.
Can Doni change this modern-world’s view of what the Tyrannosaurus Rex has always been envisioned to be? Or will Bluth continue to keep that image alive?
This series has been retired and will not receive further instalments.
Available Books
- The characters names are chosen to help children learn Dinosaur species names easier. Stacy the lazy Styracosaurus, for example, uses the first two letters of the species she belongs to. Steve the slow-witted Stegosaurus, again, uses three letters. Barry the chatty Baryonyx on the other hand is a shorter version of the actual dinosaurs name.
- Doni and Bluth are both named after the writer and animator Don Bluth, creator of the first Dinosaur film Thomas watched (The Land Before Time, 1988), though Donisaur itself was created after Thomas made a simple typo whilst writing about Dinosaurs (mistakenly written as Donisaur).
- Originally Donisaur was planned to be 2 styles of book; a children’s picture book and teen novel. The picture book was a story much like the teen novel, split into 16 picture books. The story, however, was too dark in tone and the entire concept of split storytelling was scrapped. Donisaur was anchored as a children’s picture-book, though in the future the teen novel may return, however it will be vastly different to the stories told in the children’s books.
- Donisaur was going to be based on Archie looking through a time-machine at Dinosaurs in different time-periods, but this limited his interactions with the characters too much, so the idea of a Dinosaur-zoo like Thomas’ favourite movie, Jurassic Park, was adopted instead.
- All the Dinosaurs in the story have individual quirks that are based on either their species name, or an actual theorised trait of the species they belong to. An example is that Carol the Carcharodontosaurus has the word “Car” in both her name and species, sometimes twice, and Thomas decided to joke with that fact and made her obsessed with chasing or chewing on anything resembling Cars. Steve the Stegosaurus is very slow and struggles to think, a quirk spun from the species actual trait of having a pea-sized brain.