Collectable Card game about time travelling dinosaurs

Question

I'm trying to track down a series of cards a friend of mine had back in the early 90's and I'm not sure if they were actually a game or just a collectable series.

The cards told the story that, for reasons unknown (or I just didn't see the card that told this part) dinosaurs started randomly teleporting through time into the modern world. Each card had an illustration of the event being described, and hi-jinks ensured (i.e. pterodactyls tangling with fighter jets). I think the cards actually had slight horror theme as the encounters with people didn't seem to end well and at least one unfortunate person wound up fused together when the dinosaur "phased" in where he happened to be standing.

I actually have no other information about besides the year he was showing them and some of the cards that I remember. Any help much appreciated.

Although not strictly a book, the cards where quite narrative in form and, as mentioned, I don't believe they were collectable rather than playable.

Answer 1

Might this be Dinosaurs Attack! from 1988? There are some images and additional description on this page.

Dinosaurs Attack! tells a self-contained story, just like the previous Mars cards do. Scientists board a space station and open a portal through time, and suddenly, dinosaurs start appearing on Earth. For 40 cards, they kill helpless people in the worst ways imaginable. Humans rarely get the upper hand against the gigantic and scientifically inaccurate monsters. Somewhere in the middle of the story, the lead scientist is visited by a reptilian alien in his sleep who tells the him that dinosaurs have no souls. By the end of the story, a literal dinosaur Satan unexpectedly appears on the other side of the portal, snatches the scientist, and the portal is closed. It is off the wall, butts to nuts bonkers, and it’s amazing. It’s sci-fi at its most inexplicable; sometimes things happen that just can’t be explained yet.

You can see most of them on this page. I can't find any with pterodactyls dueling with jet fighters, but flying dinosaurs feature on a number of the cards, like #16 and #18.

Answer 2

Dinosaurs Attack!

It's a card trading game. I confess I have never seen the game but the Wikipedia article closely matched your description. For example:

The artwork is intended to be shocking and graphically bloody, with one card showing schoolchildren being eaten by an Allosaurus, a Stegosaurus devouring a police officer while its spiked tail gouges out the eye of another and a Pteranodon tearing apart the President of the United States.

Card 41 shows the unfortunate chap merged with a dinosaur: