Jurassic Park and the End of Man's Dominion

In which I ponder the new title for the upcoming third Jurassic World film, and how it relates to Robert Burns.

Because that's the sort of Venn Diagram this blog is all about.

Putting the Terror Back Into Terrible Lizards

The depiction of dinosaurs as monsters has long been a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, dinosaurs-as-monsters has kept them in the public consciousness, and acted as a gateway for more nuanced & naturalistic media, like documentaries. On the other, it can be dispiriting to see them depicted as run-of-the-mill bogles. One of the things I still applaud Jurassic World for its recognition of this dichotomy, exemplified by the Indominus & Indoraptor - warped, disfigured, monstrous abominations which bore little resemblance to the animals from whence they came.

So while I love media that presents dinosaurs as animals, or with a wide variety of temperaments, I also appreciate new ways of making them scary. The Velociraptors in Jurassic Park were iconic because not only were they savage & dangerous, they were also intelligent. This added a certain existential dread to their threat: you could outsmart a T.rex or a Dilophosaurus, but could you be so sure you could outsmart a Raptor?

With that in mind, a fellow RPG aficionado posed this question to me:

I need some truly nasty dinosaurs, real bastards, things that could lay waste to a tough band of adventurers. Real nightmare fuel. Thrill me.

Well, I couldn't not respond, could I?

Because I had such fun writing this, I thought I'd write it down on the blog for posterity.

Dinosauria Caspakensis: Diplodocus ajori

During the three days which followed, our progress was exasperatingly slow. I doubt if we made ten miles in the entire three days. The country was hideously savage, so that we were forced to spend hours at a time in hiding from one or another of the great beasts which menaced us continually. There were fewer reptiles; but the quantity of carnivora seemed to have increased, and the reptiles that we did see were perfectly gigantic. I shall never forget one enormous specimen which we came upon browsing upon water-reeds at the edge of the great sea.
 -  Edgar Rice Burroughs, Chapter 3, "The People That Time Forgot" (1918)

Most of the biota of Caspak are terrible creatures indeed, locked as they are in what seems like a constant battle for survival: they menace the crew of U-33, they pursue the hominids of the island, they feast upon each other and fight to the death. 

Diplodocus ajori ("Ajor's Double-Beam") is different: even among the beasts of Caprona, this animal is unique.

Dinosauria Caspakensis: Allosaurus whitelyi

The deer lay in a small open space close to a clump of acacias, and we had advanced to within several yards of our kill when we both halted suddenly and simultaneously. Whitely looked at me, and I looked at Whitely, and then we both looked back in the direction of the deer. "Blimey!' he said. "Wot is hit, sir?"

"It looks to me, Whitely, like an error," I said; "some assistant god who had been creating elephants must have been temporarily transferred to the lizard-department."

"Hi wouldn't s'y that, sir," said Whitely; "it sounds blasphemous."

"It is more blasphemous than that thing which is swiping our meat," I replied, for whatever the thing was, it had leaped upon our deer and was devouring it in great mouthfuls which it swallowed without mastication.
 - Chapter 5

You might be wondering why this series is named Dinosauria Caspakensis, given the first two entries into its records are not dinosaurs at all. I use the term quite deliberately: the Dinosauria was, in the first place, a loose grouping of three creatures. Owens had little notion of the sheer variety of forms prevalent in this great dynasty of beings in 1842, and indeed, the latest taxonomic tumult suggests in its most extreme form that an entire family of what we used to call dinosaurs weren't members of the Dinosauria at all!

There's also the fact that it isn't clear the "dinosaurs" of Caspak are dinosaurs as we understand them at all: likewise for the pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, prehistoric mammals, and even (especially) the humans. If we go by our current understanding of evolutionary biology, many creatures on Caspak must, logically, all be members of the same species, undergoing metamorphic upheaval that makes the life cycles of insects & amphibians positively stagnant in comparison. Nonetheless, for the sake of simplicity, and to evoke the style of the time - to pick the most dynamic and thrilling name - I decided to stick with Dinosauria over the more prosaic Fauna or Animalia, which would probably be more technically correct.

In fact, only three members of the Dinosauria are actually named in The Land That Time Forgot. The first of these was encountered by Tyler and Whitely while out hunting for some venison: I figured that since Olson was immortalised by the crew of U-33, and Tyler already has an eponymous taxon, that the very strange creature they encountered should be named Allosaurus whitelyi ("Whitely's Different Lizard").

Dinosauria Caspakensis: Pterodactylus tyleri

Above the trees there soared into my vision a huge thing on batlike wings - a creature large as a large whale, but fashioned more after the order of a lizard.
  - Chapter 4, "The Land That Time Forgot," Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1918

There are three general "groups" of animals which are not members of the Dinosauria, but due to their size, majesty, and the terror they instill, are included as "honourary Dinosaurs" in the public consciousness. There are the "pre-Mesozoic reptilimorphs" like Dimetrodon ("two measures of teeth"), Scutosaurus ("shield lizard"), and Gorgonops ("Gorgon face"), who may belong to wildly distinct groups, but are sufficiently morphologically similar that they are counted among them; there are the marine reptiles like the Plesiosaurs, Ichthyosaurs, and Mosasaurs; then there are the Pterosaurs, who are the closest related to the Dinosaurs as fellow members of the Ornithodira.

While Burroughs only granted a specific name to Plesiosaurus olsoni, I thought that the other fauna of Caspak deserved that honour. As Bradley coined P. olsoni in honour of the man who slew & subsequently cooked it, I figured that as the first person of the U-33 to see a Pterosaur should be its namesake. That being none other than Bowen Tyler himself, I introduce to you Pterodactylus tyleri, "Tyler's wing finger."

Dinosauria Caspakensis: Plesiosaurus olsoni

The Burroughs master illustrator J. Allen St. John's illustration of P. olsoni

Close by us something rose to the surface of the river and dashed at the periscope. I had a vision of wide, distended jaws, and then all was blotted out...
  - Chapter 4, "The Land That Time Forgot," Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1918

The first native of Caspak the reader encounters is, alas, not technically a dinosaur, though it is one of another ruling dynasty of the Mesozoic - a Plesiosaurus ("near lizard"). "The Land That Time Forgot" is not the first story to feature a Plesiosaurus, but as far as I can tell, it is the first to do battle with a German submarine, which earns it a special place in the annals of Man vs. Dinosaur.

100 Years of "The Land That Time Forgot": Dinosauria Caspakensis

It must have been a little after three o'clock in the afternoon that it happened - the afternoon of June 3rd, 1916. It seems incredible that all that I have passed through - all those weird and terrifying experiences - should have been encompassed within so short a span as three brief months. Rather might I have experienced a cosmic cycle, with all its changes and evolutions for that which I have seen with my own eyes in this brief interval of time - things that no other mortal eye had seen before, glimpses of a world past, a world dead, a world so long dead that even in the lowest Cambrian stratum no trace of it remains. Fused with the melting inner crust, it has passed forever beyond the ken of man other than in that lost pocket of the earth whither fate has borne me and where my doom is sealed. I am here and here must remain.
 - Chapter 1, "The Land That Time Forgot"

There are several significant anniversaries of particular importance to me. Obviously, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is out, as well as the much-anticipated 25th anniversary of Jurassic Park on 9th June. But there are some others:

• 2018 is the 50th anniversary of Robert T. Bakker's "The Superiority of Dinosaurs," an augur for what would become the Dinosaur Renaissance
• 30th August is the 100th anniversary of the death of Samuel Wendell Williston, the first palaeontologist to suggest birds developed flight cursorially, and (with Benjamin Franklin Mudge) co-discoverer of Allosaurus and Diplodocus, my favourite dinosaur
• 17th November is the 100th anniversary of the premiere of The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, Willis O'Brien's first dinosaur film, and the first film to combine live-action human actors with stop-motion dinosaur effects
• 2018 is the 150th anniversary of the first ever mounted dinosaur skeleton

And, of course, there is Edgar Rice Burrough's "The Land That Time Forgot."

This is it. 100 years of the story from which this blog, itself almost nine years old, takes its name.

"The Land That Time Forgot" first appeared in the August 1918 edition of The Blue Book Magazine, the home of many of Edgar Rice Burrough's creations: it was closely followed by "The People That Time Forgot" and "Out of Time's Abyss," a series that became known as the Caspak trilogy.

Christmasaurus

8-Year-Old Reviews: Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom Trailer

Here we go again!

PrehiScotInktoberFest Day 25: Crassigyrinus scoticus

Man, this is much more difficult than I thought it was going to be!

PrehiScotInktoberfest Day 9: The Dinosaurs of Skye

Jurassic Skye catalogues a rather mysterious period of earth's history - the Middle Jurassic. While the Early & Late Jurassic are well-represented in the fossil records in Britain, Germany, and the Americas, the Middle Jurassic is a bit more mysterious. Even though it isn't the most prolific of dinosaur-bearing stratographic areas, Skye is nonetheless one of the most important for this little-understood period of our world.

PrehiScotInktoberfest Day 1: Saltopus elginensis

Our first Prehiscotinktobersketch is Saltopus elginensis, a wee beastie once thought to be a dinosaur, but currently considered a "dinosauriform" (i.e. give it a few million years).
 
You might have heard of Saltopus if you’re my age or older: for the longest time, it was famous as the first dinosaur to be discovered in Scotland. In 1910, William Taylor found a tiny piece of jaw in the Lossiemouth West & East Quarry: the Württembergian palaeontologist Friedrich von Huene named it Saltopus elginensis (“Elgin’s jumping foot”).

Finally, we Scots had a dinosaur to call our own, to stand beside the many dinosaurs discovered, described and adopted by England! Scotland’s previous claim to fame beforehand was ammonites, trilobites, graptolites, stromatolites, fish, shrimps, sharks, sea scorpions, dicynodonts, “Devil’s toenails,”  missing links, googly-eyed eels, elks, and trees – but no dinosaurs to call their own. Every country should have at least one dinosaur. Even the Cetiosaurus bones found on Skye are just a northern branch of a species discovered in England. Alas, it was not to be: Saltopus was demoted to dinosauriform – a very dinosaur-like dinosauriform, but not a dinosaur itself.

Isn’t that just bloody typical? Scotland finds a dinosaur, and it gets reclassified. Still, there’s something poetic in Scotland’s “dinosaur” being a creature that’s nearly there, but not yet.

BUT WAIT!

This Is Why I Never Get Anything Done

Right! Let's get going! I've sketched out all the pages of Bannockburn, it's more or less done. Now to begin the arduous task of inking it! (begins inking) Curses! I have drawn so much detail into each panel that it will take me forever to render the comic to the same standard! I cannot keep this up, even now I can feel myself hitting a brick wall. I need something to take my mind off this monster... Monster... Dinosaur...

Of course! Dinosaurs from the Pulps! I've compiled a database of over 200 short stories, novellas and novels which feature dinosaurs: of them, I've narrowed down 17 that I definitely want to include, which leaves 3 left; I have 18 on "standby" if one of the ones I've chosen is in copyright, and to draw the final 3 from. I sat and typed out an entire story from a reproduction because I can't get the damned scanning-to-text software to work. It's all going swimmingly! But wait! I need to write an introduction, but I don't want to editorialise too much or condescend to the reader! Perhaps I need a break from writing and drawing, and try reading...

OK! I just got Dinosaur Lords, it could be good - problem is it's quite long, and I'm a slow reader. Maybe I should try a short story collection, like The Big Book of Monsters? Or should I go with something Scottish, read up on the Middle Ages in Scotland, or old Border Reiver tales? I could always go for one of those intriguing paperbacks I found at a charity shop like Footprints of Thunder. Perhaps I should go for something completely unrelated to swords, sorcery and dinosaurs: another Peter Høeg book like The Woman and the Ape? I enjoyed Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow. There's always the late James Herbert for a ripping horror yarn - not read The Spear yet. Wait... I've spent more time trying to decide what book to read than actually reading. Argh! I'm missing that documentary on the Franklin expedition-

Hold on! I was working on a comic about the Franklin expedition! That's what I'll do: fairly minimalist, lots of silhouettes, white and black space, practically done already. Just need to find the right font. Can't be Verdana, Arial, or any of those ones. Copperplate too overused - even that documentary used it. Hmm, so many fonts, and even the most subtle of changes can alter the layout and tone of a page. Zounds! This is taking forever. Perhaps I need a break from all this ice and bleak northiness. Ice... bleak northiness...

Ah-HA! I haven't played Skyrim in ages! I often come up with some great creative ideas while playing open-world games like this. Time for a new character: Babarracus, a Redguard, an Alik'r wanderer, Monster Hunter-for-hire, seeks the greatest challenges. Each "companion" he hires is a client offering a reward for slaying a beast: they rarely hire Babarracus for multiple contracts. No guilds, only progress the main story far enough to get access to Solstheim & start dragon attacks. Good fun so far: managed to slay a giant at level 11 with a mixture of misdirection, a friendly sabercat and good aim. Not sure how much longevity Babarracus has, though. Hmm, wonder who I could create next. Maybe try a pastiche on some comic or film characters. Hmm, what films have I seen lately...

Ach! So many films I've seen and meant to review for the blog due to links to my interests, but never got around to: Godzilla, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Interstellar, Mad Max: Fury Road, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Kung Fury, Attack the Block, Let The Right One In, Dinotasia, even The Dino King - and I never thought I'd see a more infuriating waste of potential than Walking With Dinosaurs in 3D, but somehow Korea managed it. And I can't even be bothered with the new Conan film. Hey, what happened to Conan?

Huzzah! 80 Years of Conan! I keep going back to it, but always get stuck on some complex or thorough thing, and still wanted to publish them in the order of the stories' original publication. What was I on this time: ah, "The Tower of the Elephant." What was stopping me that time? Oh, Indian mythology and Howard's exposure to it through Dr. Howard. Man, I really wish Howard did a story about Scotland, not just Bran Mak Morn's Caledonia, but involving the heroes and villains of my country's history: Simon Fraser, William Douglas of Nithsdale, Aonghas Óg the last Lord of the Isles, the notorious Armstrongs of the Border Marches, the Black Douglases, Robert the Bruce...

Wait! Robert the Bruce! Bannockburn! ...

And so it continues. Dozens of things I'm working on simultaneously and one-at-a-time. One of these days, I'll get one of them finished. I suppose it's better working on something even if it's scatterbrained than not doing anything: at least I'm producing something, even if it means the net creation is going at a snail's pace.

Back to work. What am I doing now...

Dinosaurs from the Pulps!

One of the joys of getting into Robert E. Howard fandom is the vast world it opens up before you. Before I got into it, I relied mostly on luck and happenstance to find stories and art that intrigued me, and living in Scotland as I do the availability of those classic American tales could sometimes be hard to come by.

But after years of infiltrating the echelons of Howardom, needling information and hints from the experts and polymaths in funny hats, it's amazing the things you find. On my last Scottish Invasion of Cross Plains, I learned that one of these behatted genii was leaping into the vast sea of pulps in search of one of his other great interests: zombies! And sure enough, he even produced an anthology of twenty classic tales of the undead ripped from the musty yellowing pages of those lurid tomes.

The magic of pulps is that there are just so many different stories and trends out there, you could easily fill a themed anthology with them. Amazons from the Pulps! could feature the likes of "Black Amazon of Mars," "The Golden Amazons of Venus," "Queen of the Panther World," "Slaves of the Jackal Priestess," "Sword of Gimshai," "Black God's Kiss," and other adventures of warrior women. "The Metal Monster," "The War of the Giants," "The Metal Giants," "Between Dimensions," "The Reign of the Robots," "The Ideal," "A Dictator for All Time," and countless more tales of Metal Men could shamble through Robots from the Pulps! Crom knows we have plenty for Stephen Jones' The Mammoth Book Of... series, as he always manages to find at least a few from the Age of Pulps.

And then there were dinosaurs...

8-Year-Old Reviews: Jurassic World

We’re going to grow old but never grow up.
We’re going to stay 18 years old and we’re going to love dinosaurs forever.
 - Ray Harryhausen & Ray Bradbury made a pact together. They never broke it as long as they lived.

A review 22 years in the making.

Terrible Steeds

 A world made by the Eight Creators on which to play out their games of passion and power, Paradise is a sprawling, diverse, often brutal place. Men and women live on Paradise as do dogs, cats, ferrets, goats, and horses. But dinosaurs predominate: wildlife, monsters, beasts of burden – and of war. Colossal planteaters like Brachiosaurus; terrifying meateaters like Allosaurus and the most feared of all, Tyrannosaurus rex. Giant lizards swim warm seas. Birds (some with teeth) share the sky with flying reptiles that range in size from batsized insectivores to majestic and deadly Dragons.

Thus we are plunged into Victor Milán's splendidly weird world of The Dinosaur Lords, a place that for all purposes mirrors 14th century Europe with its dynastic rivalries, religious wars, and byzantine politics…and the weapons of choice are dinosaurs. Where we have vast armies of dinosaur-mounted knights engaged in battle. And during the course of one of these epic battles, the enigmatic mercenary Dinosaur Lord Karyl Bogomirsky is defeated through betrayal and left for dead. He wakes, naked, wounded, partially amnesiac – and hunted. And embarks upon a journey that will shake his world.

Oh come on. 

8-Year-Old Previews: Lego Jurassic World

Well, this is a pleasant surprise. I was aware of the upcoming sets, but I wasn't expecting a game to be part of the deal. (Perhaps I should have, given the mid-credits cameo at the end of Lego Batman 3.) This is relevant to my interests.

My niece is only a bit older than I was when I saw Jurassic Park in cinemas, and my youngest cousin is still a babby. As such, I feel I have Uncle's/Older Cousin's Rights to be excited about a dinosaur game I could play with my younger family members. However, when it comes to suggestions for the game, I must defer to 8-Year-Old Aly. He knows a lot more about dinosaurs than I do, after all.

Enough talking, 30-Year-Old Aly, let's get down to business.

Right-o.

Palaeontology Weeps in a Jurassic World

It's been... jings, over four months!?! As many of you will know, I've been very preoccupied over the last few months, but with that over, I'm getting back to normal - if you can call it "normal."

Since I was talking about dinosaurs, I feel like I should make a few comments about the Jurassic World trailer, especially after my typically far-too-detailed analysis.

Of course, you cannot trust a trailer to always give an accurate representation of a film, yet at the same time, I'm not sure what I think.

The Dinosaurs of Jurassic World

Taking a brief break from work on my various projects to do a wee post. What about, what about...

Dinosaurs?

Dinosaurs.

8-Year-Old Aly Reviews: Walking With Dinosaurs IN 3D CANCELLED

29-year-old Aly here. A while ago, I saw Walking With Dinosaurs in 3D, figuring it would make for a good 8-year-old review. But unfortunately shortly after returning from the cinema, 8-year-old Aly was suddenly unwell, and is now in his room with a hot toddy.

Please ignore the ominous rumbling, I assure you there is nothing to worry about...