Loving Animals with Dinosaur Sanctuary

• Author: Robert Iveniuk

• Editor: Cy Catwell

CONTENT WARNING: Since this article talks about animal care, themes of illness and death, smuggling and mistreatment, poaching and violence against animals – as well as animal violence against humans – will all be discussed and/or referenced. Reader discretion is advised.

It’s not often that a manga catches my attention from the cover alone.

I was cutting through Thunderstruck Books in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood, window-shopping while on a lunch break. Normally, I only go into comic stores when I plan on buying something, but I still felt a need to peruse, just because. However, when I saw the cover for Volume 1 of Itaru Kinoshita’s Dinosaur Sanctuary staring at me from a low shelf, it immediately pulled me in. There was something about the image of an manga-style girl zookeeper standing next to a hyperrealistic Tyrranosaurus where they’re both smiling at the reader that charmed me so much I bought it on a whim. Sometimes, you need to follow your gut: mine led me to Dinosaur Sanctuary.

Like a lot of my peers, I grew up loving these long-extinct thunder lizards. I’m pretty certain I dragged my parents through the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) once a month so I could gawk at the fossils. My father took me to see The Land Before Time as a child, and I was so engrossed in it that we ended up hanging around the theatre to sneak in a second viewing before dinner. One of my first anime series was Return of the Dinosaurs, an English version of Dinosaur Expedition: Born Free that my parents rented from a local video store. That’s on top of my exposure to shows and films like Denver the Last Dinosaur, the original Power Rangers, and yes, Jurassic Park over the years.

Honestly, as an adult, I’m still into dinosaurs. I have dino-synth musician Diplodocus on in the background while I write this and I remain  a longtime kaiju movie fan. That said, there isn’t a lot of Dino Content for adults looking for a cozy read or watch, outside of speculative nature documentaries. This is why Dinosaur Sanctuary surprised me. An informational seinen slice-of-life manga that has more to do with Moyashimon than Carnosaur? I think Kinoshita must’ve read my diary.

Dinosaur Sanctuary, nicknamed DinoSan in Japan, takes place in an alternate history where an island in the Pacific was discovered, teeming with (you guessed it!) dinosaurs that had been left unchanged by the past several million years of evolution. Through a series of genetic engineering breakthroughs, many more dinosaurs were revived and placed in enclosures, zoos, and wildlife preserves around the world.

Our main character is Suzume Suma, the daughter of the scientist responsible for the dinosaur boom, who took his own life following an incident at a zoo some years prior involving a genetically-engineered Allosaurus attacking a zookeeper and running amok. Driven by her love of dinosaurs, she signs on to be a dino handler at the Enoshima Dinosaur Sanctuary, a park at risk of closure, in the hopes of reigniting people’s interest in these majestic creatures.

Much has already been said about the first volume and how it recontextualizes dinosaurs to be more animalistic than monstrous, but I don’t think enough has been said since. I’m five volumes into the manga at the time of writing, patiently waiting for the sixth to drop in March 2025 and a lot has happened since. The image of dinosaurs as being like any other animals on earth has prevailed and–for lack of a better term–evolved. Part of how this change happened was by drawing parallels between events in the manga and instances in real life.

Let’s start with stories coming out of zoos and preserves. The aforementioned Allosaurus attack, for example, mirrors a real-life tragedy at the San Francisco Zoo that occurred in the oughts. In 2008, Tatiana, a Siberian Tiger taunted by attendees, broke free, killing one and wounding two other park visitors being shot by authorities. Despite sensationalized accounts of the incident, it’s important to note that Tatiana wasn’t the Jason Voorhees of big cats: she didn’t break free and then stalk people across the zoo grounds, picking off lovey-dovey teenagers and foolhardy workers investigating mysterious sounds coming from the boiler room. In reality, Tatiana  was a scared animal in an environment unfamiliar to her, attacking three other living things that were–in her brain–encroaching on her already-small territory.

The same could be said of the Allosaurus Ichigo. In any other manga, Ichigo would have gone on a rampage and there would be multiple, detailed panels and pages dedicated to her ripping people to pieces before being gunned down in a righteous hail of bullets. Instead, Ichigo only kills her handler and gets put down by armed personnel after getting stuck in a gate. Her reasons for the rampage were not driven by alien malice, either. Construction crews outside made too much noise and spooked her and her handler made the mistake of trying to settle the nerves of what was essentially a bipedal saltwater crocodile. Like Tatiana before her, Ichigo’s death is horrible but it isn’t horrifying. It’s tragic more than anything else.

There are more, of course. There’s the poaching incident in the Australo National Dino Park in Volume 5 that mirrors the real-life killing of a rare White Rhino for its horn at France’s Thoiry Zoo. The hopes placed on getting Centrosaurus power couple Shoukichi and Umeko to mate and produce more of their species is similar to China’s ongoing Panda Breeding initiative. The current plotline’s conversation about saving Umeko’s leg or replacing it with a prosthetic is similar to the story of Crescent, the Great Indian Hornbill who was saved from skin cancer and given a new 3D printed beak to replace the one that had to be removed. The very real problems zoo keepers and conservationists face are reimagined in DinoSan’s pages, even if they’re dealing with long lost creatures.

This is driven home with the way the dinosaurs themselves are shown. A point in Dinosaur Sanctuary’s favour is that Kinoshita brought on an actual paleontologist, Dr. Shin-ichi Fujiwara, to fill in the more technical and biological side of things, in order to bring the series dinosaurs to life. Fujiwara is someone who thinks a lot about dinosaurs and has a lot to say about them, thinks about what their temperaments would be like, drawing from the behaviours of modern-day birds and reptiles as inspiration.

Furthermore, the dinosaurs are all seen as having different moods and quirks. Spinosaurus Eiger is prone to missing catching fish left in his tank due to his own overeagerness. Citipati Kuku is skittish and needs to be lured out when the keepers need to take her to a vet or clean her enclosure. Pachycephalosaurus Hachibei still mourns Daisy, the female dinosaur he was once partnered with. Anyone who’s ever owned more than one cat, dog, or bird in their life would tell you that what their pets liked or disliked varied greatly.

There’s never a moment in any of the currently released volumes where the dinosaurs are presented as terrifying apex predators. Even the T-Rex and Velociraptor introduced in the story are seen as relatable and sympathetic, a feat considering how often these two kinds of dinosaurs have been depicted as ruthless killing machines.

Take, for instance, Hanako the Tyrannosaurus. She’s an elderly beast, enjoying her twilight years in the Enoshima Dinosaur Sanctuary, resting like a bird on a stoop for long hours and messily and happily eating the birthday meats laid out for her. Comparatively, an arc where Suma and her teammate Arata Kaidou have to locate a Velociraptor that escaped from being trafficked is given the gravity of chasing down a runaway Cassowary. The situation is dangerous, but in the sense that being in unfamiliar territory would be bad for it and regular civilians. Hardly the nail-biting thriller we’d expect. 

I think this is important because there’s an entire subgenre of films dedicated to humanity beating the biggest, meanest animals left in the world. There are scores of movies about killer sharks, alligators,anacondas, lions, spiders, and even…vengeful orcas? No matter the creature, land or sea, the pretense is always the same: either these animals have mutated or are biologically out of control, or alternatively, they’re just ordinary animals that have gone full Terminator on any human they come across. Even the news does this: we have several news stories about ordinary people being attacked by bears, defending themselves or their pets from wild animals. A lot of air time gets dedicated to sensationalizing such incidents, resulting in mortifying culling efforts from scared citizens.

Yet any conservationist worth their salt will tell you that yearly shark attacks are rare, that bear attacks only happen if people don’t take proper precautions, and that spider bites and jellyfish stings can be treated easily as long as you are close to a doctor or hospital. We, as a species, want to prove that we deserve to be at the top of the food chain, that the best of us can easily take down Jaws in his own oceanic habitat. Speaking honestly, I feel we’ve put that need to assure ourselves we’re more than just other kinds of animals onto the dinosaur. We want to imagine ourselves either defeating them or taming them in some way. We cannot imagine living alongside them because we barely do that with other animals around us–at least not ones we don’t find cute.

What I love about Dinosaur Sanctuary is that it asks us a simple question: what if we could live alongside any animal species? What if we looked at a Plesiosaur the same way we look at whales? Could we look at sharks in the same way Rob Stewart did?  Can we treat a T-Rex the same way the Irwin Family treats crocodiles? Hell, can we treat crocodiles in the same way that they do?

Of course, this isn’t an advertisement for anyone reading this to go out and adopt a lynx or whatever. But I do want people to consider: what if we treated animals as animals, and not as competition or as things to measure ourselves against? What if we met them on their terms rather than ours?

In our reality, the dinosaurs are gone. They went extinct millions of years ago. But we still live next to their descendants, including the descendants of Sabretooth Tigers, Woolly Mammoths, and Megatherium. It’s not too late to rethink how we see our planet and everything else we share it with. 

Dinosaur Sanctuary gives readers a look into a different world, one with all the good, the bad, and the messy parts in-between about living alongside dinosaurs, even if those animals mainly live in parks and enclosures. It also shows us how to treat these animals with respect and dignity, from the smallest herbivore to the largest carnivore. It shows us Suma and her new coworkers, the love they have for these creatures and the care that they show them, and asks us a simple question: how hard is it to be kind to the animals we currently share the world with?