In addition to my regular job of being a Human being. I also write fiction. For 6 years, I also gave the occasional sermon or homily.
An Author, in addition to polishing his/or her “idea”, tries to straddle and balance being completely and scientifically accurate, and moving or presenting the story. Most tend to lean towards “story” rather than “substance”. There was that one time when I was writing Urban Gothic, that without checking a map first, I plopped a huge stone mansion in the middle of a wood…looking at the map later, there was a wood where I said it was, even a drive-in in the right spot. Bonus!
One of the more recent examples of this is “Project Hail Mary,” where the writer pegged the meter on realism. Usually, that is not the case (at least to that extent).
We, in both Science and Theology, have learned not to get too upset or angry about the process.
I went to see the original Jurassic Park movie with fellow geology grad students, so naturally we were criticizing a lot of technical details (such as the fact that Dominican Republic amber is far younger than dinosaurs). But it was fun animation. The Royal Tyrrel Museum has not only impressive Mesozoic reptiles but quite nice bivalves, both the ones living alongside the dinosaurs and much older ones, plus many other types of fossils. Drumeller is in the middle of rivh dinosaur-containing deposits, but otherwise in the middle of nowhere (Did you see that? The road! It turned! That hasn’t happened for 100 km!).
Invertebrate paleontologists generally have plenty of species needing named without having to oversplit, though some do anyway. We’ve got a few hundred species to name from one formation in the Carolinas, for instance, but that reflects the almost total lack of previous work on the smaller mollusks.