Dinosaurs in the Pulps

Dinosaurs belong to the Pulps. If you’re like me you grew up with dinosaurs. Any show, any cartoon, any comic, any book with a dino was a sure thing. If you were lucky you got to go to places like Brooks or Drumheller, Alberta and experience the Badlands, and all things paleo. If you are my son’s age, it was all Jurassic Park. Dinosaurs, like hockey, run in families. Because of this I often take dinosaurs for granted.

The world reeled back in the mid-1800s when Science rocked the perceived order of things with Darwin and Richard Owen. Science Fiction follows Science and stories with dinosaurs became popular largely after Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864). Wardon Allan Curtis put a human brain in a dinosaur in “The Monster of Lake La Metrie” (Pearson’s, September 1899). A. Conan Doyle cemented books about dinosaurs (and cavemen) in the public’s mind with The Lost World (1912).

Many of us grew up with Edgar Rice Burroughs and his dinosaurs of Pal-U-Don, Pellucidar and Caspak. It is only now that I understand how accurate ERB was with his dinos. Other dinosaurs in the Pulps, the earlier ones, often demonstrate this. Take for example, “The Lizard” by C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne (The Strand, February 1888). Here’s how Hyne describes his dinosaur survival:

“Its body was about the bigness of two horses. Its head was curiously short, but the mouth opened back almost to the forearm; and sprouting from the nose were two enormous feelers, or antennae, each at least 6 ft. long, and tipped with fleshy tendrils like fingers, which opened and shut tremulously. Its four legs were jointless, and ended in mere club-feet, or callosities; its tail was long, supple, and fringed on the top with a saw-like row of scales. In colour, it was a bright grass-green, all except the feelers, which were of a livid blue. But mere words go poorly for a description, and the beast was outside the vocabulary of today. It conveyed, somehow or other, a horrible sense of deformity, which made one physically ill to look upon it. But worst of all was the musky smell. That increased till it became well-nigh unendurable, and though I half-strangled myself to suppress a sound, I had to yield at last and give my feelings vent. The beast heard me. I could not see that it had any ears, but anyway it distinctly heard me. Worse, it hobbled round clumsily with its jointless legs, and waved its feelers in my direction. I could not make out that it had any eyes—anyway, they did not show distinct from the rough skin of its head; its sensitiveness seemed to lie in those fathom-long feelers and in the fleshy fingers which twitched and grappled at the end of them. Then it opened its great jaws—which hinged, as I said, down by the forearm—and yawned cavernously, and came towards me. It seemed to have no trace of fear or hesitation. It hobbled clumsily on, exhibiting its monstrous deformity in every movement, and preceded always by those hateful feelers which seemed to be endued with an impish activity. For a while I stayed in my place, too paralysed by horror at this awful thing I had dragged up from the forgotten dead, to move or breathe. But then one of its livid blue feelers—a hard, armoured thing like a lobster’s—touched me, and the fleshy fingers at the end of it pawed my face and burned me like nettles. I leaped into movement again. The beast was hungry after its fast of ten million years; it was trying to make me its prey: those fearful jaws…” (“The Lizard” by C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne)

Armor, tentacles with hands, stumpy legs. This is a man who has never really seen a dinosaur skeleton. Any five year old today could see this is just bogus. Like I said, we take it for granted. But it isn’t even just old guys who wrote before the actual Pulps.

Here’s Lester Dent in his second Doc Savage novel, The Land of Terror (April 1933):

THE shocking size of the horror was apparent. It bulged out of the steam like a tall house. It hopped on massive rear legs, balancing itself by a great tail, kangaroolike. The two forelegs were tiny in proportion—like short strings dangling. Yet those forelegs that seemed so small were thicker through by far than Doc Savage’s body!
The revolting odor of a carnivorous thing accompanied the dread apparition. The stench was of decaying gore. The hide of the monster had a pebbled aspect, somewhat like a crocodile. Its claws were frightful weapons of offense, being of such proportions as to easily grasp and crush a large bull.

Dent has the T. Rex jumping around like a kangaroo. He also suggests that a dinosaur would be slow to react to humans since it is so big the response would need a minute to find the brain. These were current ideas in 1933 and they date the book horribly. For more on Doc and dinos, go here.

I have to wonder if King Kong‘s premiere on March 2, 1933 was the inspiration for the dinosaurs here. Could a Pulp that appeared a month later and be written and set up in that short a window? It seems more likely a coincidence. Maybe Dent had heard of the film’s coming release? I’m not sure but after Kong everybody knew what a dinosaur looked like and how it moved. (Or at least they thought they did.)

The Science Fiction Pulps, after Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories brought many dinosaurs into focus. Writing in the tradition of Verne and Burroughs, Pulpsters traveled through time, dimensions and remote ocean caves to find lost survivors of the reptilian age.

 

“The Valley of the Teeheemen” (Weird Tales, December 1924 January 1925) by Arthur Thatcher For more on this series, go here.

“The Last of the Teeheemen” (Weird Tales, March April, 1925) by Arthur Thatcher

“Through the Vortex” (Weird Tales, July 1926) by Donald Edward Keyhoe

“The Land That Time Forgot” (Amazing Stories, February March April 1927) by Edgar Rice Burroughs was reprinted. For more on this series, go here.

“The Beast of the Yungas” (Weird Tales, September 1927) by Willis Knapp Jones

“The Death of the Moon” (Amazing Stories, February 1929) by Alexander Philips

“The Abysmal Invaders” (Weird Tales, June 1929) by Edmond Hamilton For more on Hamilton’s invasion stories, go here.

“The Bridge of Light” (Amazing Stories Quarterly, October 1929) by A. Hyatt Verrill

Tarzan at the Earth’s Core (Blue Book, September 1929-March 1930) by Edgar Rice Burroughs For more on ERB in the Pulps, go here.

“The Moon Master” (Astounding Stories of Super Science, June 1930) by Charles W. Diffin

“Into the Mesozoic” (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall-Winter 1932) by Duane A. Carroll

“Prisoners of the Electron” (Astounding Stories of Super Science, October 1930) by Robert H. Leitfred

“A Million Years After” (Weird Tales, November 1930) by Katherine Metcalf Roof

“The Primeval Pit” (Weird Tales, December 1930) by B. Wallis

“The Planetoid of Doom” (Wonder Stories, December 1932) by Morrison Colladay

“When Reptiles Ruled” (Wonder Stories, January 1934) by Duane N. Carroll

“Land of Twilight” (Amazing Stories, November December 1934 January 1935) by Robert Page Preston

“One Prehistoric Night” (Wonder Stories, November 1934) by Philip Barshofsky

“The Reign of the Reptiles” (Wonder Stories, August 1935)  by A. Connell. Reprinted in Fantastic Story Quarterly, Winter 1951)

“The Invincible Midget” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1937) by Paul Ernst. Reprinted in Fantastic Story Quarterly, Fall 1950

(Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1939) This cover isn’t from a story but a contest for readers to write the most interesting explanation of the scene.

“Beauty and the Beast” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1940) by Henry Kuttner

“The Blue Tropics” (Fantastic Adventures, April 1940)  by James Norman

Jongor of the Lost Land (Fantastic Adventures, October 1940) by Robert Moore Williams

“The Tomb of Time” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, November 1940)  by Robert Arthur

“Exiles of the Dawn World” (Action Stories, December 1940) by Nelson S. Bond

“Lords of the Underworld” (Amazing Stories, April 1941) by L. Taylor Hansen

“Men of the Stone Age” (Amazing Stories, March 1942)  by Edgar Rice Burroughs

“Tiger Girl” (Amazing Stories, April 1942)  by Edgar Rice Burroughs

“Blitzkrieg in the Past” (Amazing Stories, July 1942) by John York Cabot (David Wright O’Brien)

“The Lost Warship” (Amazing Stories, January 1943) by Robert Moore Williams

“Stalkers of the Dawn World” (Jungle Stories, Winter 1943) by John Peter Drummond

The Devil’s Monsters (The Shadow, February 1, 1943) by Maxwell Grant (Walter B. Gibson)

The Return of Jongor (Fantastic Adventures, April 1944) by Robert Moore Williams

“The Greatest Adventure” (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, June 1944) by John Taine

“King of the Dinosaurs” (Fantastic Adventures, October 1945) by J. W. Pelkie (Ray A. Palmer) For more on this series, go here.

“Before the Dawn” (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, February 1946) by John Taine

“Dinosaur Destroyer” (Amazing Stories, January 1949) by Arthur Petticolas

“Time’s Arrow” (Science Fantasy, Summer 1950) by Arthur C. Clarke

“Lost- One Mylodon” by Elmer Brown Mason  Originally published in All-Story Weekly, April 1, 1916. It was reprinted in Fantastic Novels, July 1950.

“The Day of the Hunters” (Future Combined with Science Fiction, November 1950) by Isaac Asimov. For more on the Early Asimov, go here.

With the next story, dinosaur Science Fiction becomes respectable. Ray Bradbury sold this story to Collier’s, a slick, not a Pulp. And suddenly, dinosaurs were cool, not nerdy.

“A Sound of Thunder” (Collier’s, June 28, 1951) by Ray Bradbury

“A Gun For Dinosaur” (Galaxy, March 1956) by L. Sprague de Camp

Conclusion

Thanks to Arthur Conan Doyle, lost lands and dinosaurs go together like peanut butter and chocolate. The Pulps blossomed shortly after Doyle’s classic novel. For a history of Lost Worlds in the Pulps, go here.

The Pulps inspired the comics, so it is no surprise there are plenty of dinosaurs in the Squinkies (as Manly Wade Wellman used to call them). If you would like a similar (but much longer) stroll through the Dinosaur Comics, click here.  One comic land in particular featured a veritable Burroughsian dino-fest, The Savge Land of Marvel Comics. For the history of the Savage Land in comics, go here. Or here.

For DC fans, the Tomahawk comic provided dinos. Go here.