I saw 65 last night and enjoyed the dinosaurs in it thoroughly. As to be expected there were Jurassic Park moments in it, but not too many. Hard to believe but Jurassic Park is thirty years old this year! 65 is the perfect film to celebrate that.
But there was dino Science Fiction long before Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park in 1990 and its sequel, Jurassic Park: The Lost World in 1995. There were even Victorian and Edwardian dinosaurs before Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) ACD was really at the end of that movement. His masterpiece brought two separate themes crashing together. That of dinosaur fiction and caveman fiction. They begin as separate things but after Doyle they were inaccurately fused in the common culture. No matter how many scientists say it: “Prehistoric man and dinosaurs were separated by 65 million years!” we still end up watching Rachel Welsh fight off Ray Harryhausen animated monsters. (And some of us are very glad about that.)
Before 1912
Dinosaur tales, found in the popular magazines of the 1890 to 1910s, magazines like The Strand, Pearson’s, The Windsor Magazine and The Pall Mall Gazette, are usually tales of today. Some kind of ancient survival comes to threaten the good people of Britain or America. Some times the victims go looking for the last of the dinosaurs and find them! Doyle will use this idea too, with Professor Challenge and his crew going to South America to find the lost world. More often in these stories, the dinosaurs are right here at home.
“The Last of the Vampires” (Contemporary Review, March 1893) by Phil Robinson has a cave filled with pterodactyls that drain their victims of blood, leading to the misbelief that vampires exist.
“The Lizard” (The Strand, June 1898) by C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne has a man find a dino in a cave. Hyne’s dinosaur has tentacles with hands! Hyne also had dinosaurs in his classic Atlantis novel, The Lost Continent (1899).
“The Monster of Lake La Metrie” (Pearson’s Magazine, September 1899) by Wardon Allan Curtis is a very odd story with two finding a dinosaur in America, killing, then transferring one of the men’s brain into the creature. B-Movie stuff fifty years early.
“The Slaying of the Plesiosaurus” (National Magazine, March 1903) by Edwin J. Webster
“A Prehistoric Sketch” (The Pall Mall Magazine, March 1906) by H. W. Bryce-Stacpoole
“The Pterodactyl” (The Grand Magazine, April 1907) by Thomas Charles Sloane
“The Monster of “Partridge Creek” (The Strand, July 1908) by Georges Dupuy
“The Diplodocus” (The New Broadway Magazine, August 1908) by Porter Emerson Brown
“The Last Haunt of the Dinosaur” (The English Illustrated Magazine, September 1908) by Henry Francis
The Lost World (1912)
The Lost World was an eight-part serial in The Strand Magazine, from April to November, 1912. It has not been out-of-print since that day. It has been filmed two times, 1925, 1960, and done as a television show and in comic books. It paved the way for King Kong, One Million Years B.C., When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, the parody Caveman and the Jurassic Park franchise. The novel spawned an entire branch of Science Fantasy (we can’t really call it Science Fiction, now can we?) that paired prehistoric man with dinos. This would be Alley Oop, The Flintstones, and any number of lost world stories to follow.
After 1912
Right after Arthur Conan Doyle comes another very important writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Doyle opens the doors. Burroughs throws it wide and cries, “The party is here!” Pellucidar, The Land That Time Forgot, Tarzan in the land of Pal-U-Don. ERB was the king of the prehistoric, whether on the Earth, in the Earth or back in time.
After Edgar Rice Burroughs, creators pretty much have carte blanc to do whatever they want. Writers like John Charles Beecham with Out of the Miocene (The Popular Magazine, August 23-September 7, 1914) could have guys and gals in fur being chased by carnivorous dinosaurs. No questions asked. That was normal, right?
Late Edwardians
That being said, there were still a few Victorian types around. These final three tales belong to the age before Tarzan. They are the last of the Edwardians hiding among the soft weeklies and soon the Pulps.
“The Great Beast of Kafue” (Under the Hermés, and Other Stories, 1917) by Richard Dehan (Clotilde Graves)
“The Lizard God” (All’s Well, December 1920) by Charles J. Finger
“Mr. Deely’s Diplodocus” (The Windsor Magazine, September 1926) by Arthur Mills
Conclusion
Hugo Gernsback had reprinted Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1926 and 1927, allowing him to feature dinosaurs on the covers of Amazing Stories. This was borrowing from the past. The appearance of “The Valley of the Teeheemen” by Arthur Thatcher (Weird Tales, December 1924 January 1925) and its sequel, “The Beast of the Yungas” (Weird Tales, September 1927) by Willis Knapp Jones and “The Paradise of the Ice Wilderness” (Amazing Stories, October 1927) by Jul. Regis show that the new writers had taken over the dinosaur business. No truly Victorian and Edwardian Dinosaurs could be done after this time. Dinosaurs now belonged to the Pulps. (And the comic books!)
