You raise an excellent point. I can see now that it is clearly a mistake on my part to refer to my setting as weird west. The phrase weird west strongly implies a historic wild west with the addition of elements like magic, Cthulhu, or steampunk technology. I intend for my setting to have as much resemblance to the historic wild west as the Firefly TV show did, although I won't be requiring my players to have characters who are adherants to a lost cause narrative. A better way of describing my setting might be Gaslamp Fantasy Frontier, drawing on a mix of ideas from both wild west and sword and planet stories, and the Ishmael Reed poem
I am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra. I do want to include themes from western genre films, such as the tension between justice/vengeance or freedom/responsibility. To get back to the dinosaurs, the idea of the lichosaur in the game is to play a role as a non-renewable resource being exploited by the settlers, where the indigenous people (Therionthropes - animal headed humanoids) see the lichosaurs as sacred ancestors. So a lichosaur is like a whale, on land, and I can throw in a villain obsessed with hunting down a great white T-Rex. It is a hook for conflict that my players can choose to engage with or ignore.