Dinosaur

were a large type of reptile that lived in the Land of Redaku millions of years ago. They went extinct when a meteorite struck the region. In the millennia that followed, the wetlands that the dinosaurs once lived in turned into a vast mountain range, at the peaks of which the dinosaurs' fossilised remains can commonly be found. Humans who discover these fossils more generically refer to them as.

A few years prior to the events of Sasuke Retsuden, Zansūru, a paleontologist, discovered a way to revive the dead. With the approval of Redaku's Prime Minister, Zansūru began excavating dinosaur fossils from the area surrounding the Astronomy Research Institute with plans of reviving them to use as an army; he recruited Jiji to help him. They revived one dinosaur in order to test the technique, which they named Menō. Once enough fossils were collected, dozens of additional dinosaurs were revived, to be used to invade the Land of Fire. However, before they could be used for this purpose, the Prime Minister was overthrown by Prince Nanara, Zansūru died while fighting Sasuke Uchiha, and Jiji was convinced by Sakura Uchiha to return all of the revived dinosaurs to the afterlife.

Trivia

 * Masashi Kishimoto originally planned to have Naruto Uzumaki learn to summon dragons. The design he came up with used the basic aesthetics of Chinese dragons, but made fat to evoke European dragons.
 * Sasuke Uchiha had a toy that looked like a dinosaur when he was a child.