This is part two of a series. If you have not read part one yet, please do here. Last time we left off at nineteenth century
advances in geology and paleontology. Before we continue there we will first take
a detour and look at astronomy in the age before spacecrafts and how it may
have influenced the idea of the Alien Prehistoric World.
That the planets and moons are other real, physical
objects like Earth that a human could theoretically stand on is a realization
that is relatively recent. From late-roman through medieval times most of
astronomy in Europe followed the Aristotelian model, according to which Earth
was the center of the cosmos and it and its atmosphere were encased by several
layers of crystal spheres. The stars, planets and even our moon were seen as
simple lights that were attached to these rotating spheres. In the late middle
ages and early modern period some people, like Giordano Bruno, Copernicus and
Galileo Galilei were beginning to doubt this model, stating that the Earth was
not the center of the universe and that humans could potentially physically
visit other planets, but they ran into often severe problems with the church
and theology. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Tycho Brahe could
conclusively disprove the existence of the Aristotelian spheres, while his
student Johannes Kepler showed that not only do the planets revolve around the
sun, but they do so in elliptical orbits. This explained the movements of the
planets better than the previous model of Copernicus, who assumed their orbits
were circular. Kepler wrote many technical works explaining his worldview, but
he also wrote one piece of fiction called Somnium or The Dream.
It is a story that was only officially released after his death, but it left a
big impact. In it Kepler describes how he one day fell asleep and dreamed that
he met a group of demons, who offered to transport him to the Moon. He accepts
and from there on describes what it is like to travel through space (he correctly
predicts that it would be very cold and hard to breathe) and stand on the
surface of the moon, looking down at Earth. He also describes the Moon's
seasons, lengths of days, geography and climates. About half of the book is
made up of references to his technical work and commentary in which Kepler
scientifically explains why he describes the things he sees in the way he does.
The purpose of the story is to show the reader of the time how a non-geocentric
astronomy could feasibly work. What is the most interesting for us today is
that Kepler also describes the inhabitants of the Moon. While speculation about
extraterrestrial life can be traced back all the way to antiquity, Kepler was
the first one to describe it in detail. He tells about their language
("Earth" in their tongue is called "Volva"), their cities,
their survival strategies during the Moon's extremely long days and about the
differences between the aliens that live on the Earth-facing side and the dark
side. We unfortunately never get a detailed description of a single Lunarian
species' appearance (and it seems like nobody ever tried illustrating them
during the 385 years since the Somnium came out), but from the hints we
are given they seem interestingly non-humanoid, which is atypical when you
think of classic science fiction like Star Trek. Some have wings, others
have "legs longer than a camel's", others are gigantic. In general
they are described as having scales similar to pinecones and are snake-like.
There actually seems to be some logical thinking behind this, as Kepler
correctly describes that a day on one of the Moon's sides can last 14 to 30
Earth days (with corresponding nights), making it change from an extremely hot
and dry climate to an extremely cold and wet one. He therefore likely assumes
that only creatures similar to reptiles and other desert-animals could live in
these conditions. Due to the combination of scientific observations with
fanciful speculation, the Somnium is considered by some, namely Carl
Sagan, to be the oldest work of science fiction. This is of course debatable.
During the 2nd century A.D., Roman author Lucian of Samosata wrote a novel
called Vera Historia or A True Story. In it the crew of a ship
gets caught in a storm and catapulted to the Moon, where the protagonists
witness a war between the inhabitants of the Moon and the Sun. The big
difference to the Somnium is that the True Story is meant to be a
parody of works like the Odyssey or the Illiad (the title is meant to be taken
sarcastically). One could also argue that science fiction as we know it today
was really first codified and popularized with nineteenth century writers like
H.G. Wells and Jules Vernes. What I think we can say with some certainty is
that the Somnium may be the first major work that describes
extraterrestrial lifeforms as reptile-like, a trend that still exists today in
movies, stories about UFO-encounters and insane conspiracy theories. The idea
that aliens might be reptile-like is probably an underlying foundation for the idea
that dinosaurs are alien-like.
 |
Fig. 1: Venus
captured in 1979 by the Pioneer-Orbiter. Venus is in my opinion a somewhat
underrated planet. While yes, its surface is uninhabitable for human life, its
ridiculously dense atmosphere is so dynamic, complex and full of strange
chemistry that it deserves further study. Notably, strange, unidentified particles have been observed in the atmosphere that absorb UV-radiation. It has
been proposed that this might be a form of photosynthetic life existing in the
upper atmosphere. |
Kepler's thoughts and those of many others of his time led to a movement called
pluralism. Pluralism was the belief that all objects in the solar system, the
planets, the moons, comets and even the sun were inhabited by lifeforms and
even intelligent life, a movement that was popular all the way until the age of
the first spacecrafts. The problem before the invention of spacefaring-technology was
that Earth-based telescopes were not advanced enough to really see those
planets' surfaces in detail. This lead to a lot of observations influenced by
pareidolia, which itself was influenced by pluralist biases. The most famous
example of this are the waterways that Percival Lowell claims to have seen on
Mars and which he thought were irrigation-canals made by a dying civilization.
The idea that Mars is a planet past its prime, littered with ruins and
inhabited by aliens with advanced technology, is a common trope throughout
classic sci-fi, like War of the Worlds or A Princess of Mars. It
actually traces its origin back to a 1796 hypothesis about planet-formation by
Pierre-Simon de Laplace. According to him, the planets formed out of a dusty
nebula orbiting the sun and crystallized out of it from the outside
towards the center. In short: the planets get increasingly older the farther
away you go from the sun (today we think the inner rocky planets formed roughly
around the same time 4.5 billion years ago). Mars was therefore seen as older than
Earth and therefore, it was thought, in a later evolutionary stage than us.
Following the same logic, Earth must be older than our neighbour Venus. Venus'
surface cannot be viewed with conventional telescopes, the entire planet is
covered in a thick atmosphere of opaque clouds. It was thought that these
clouds were water-clouds and this coupled with the planet's proximity to the
sun lead to imagining Venus being a hot, wet, primitive world of jungles and
swamps underneath its cloud-cover. This was not just a fringe idea made up by
early sci-fi artists, but an almost universally accepted fact. In 1918 for
example, chemist and nobel prize winner Svante Arrhenius officially
declared Venus a swamp planet. In many writings Venus was explicitly compared
to Earth's Carboniferous period and other prehistoric eras. This is likely the
oldest and most concrete example of a prehistoric time period being compared to
an alien planet. This continued well into the 1960s and throughout that time
the thick cloud-cover of the planet allowed all kinds of speculations on what
might be living on this prehistoric world, as seen in books like Olaf
Stapledon's Last and First Men, Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr and the
Oceans of Venus, Ray Bradbury's The Long Rain and Edgar Rice
Burrough's Amtor-series, just to name a few. Speculations reached from
primitive civilizations, winged humanoids and all the way to, you guessed it,
dinosaurs. The oldest example of the latter I could find was Gustavus M. Pope's
Journey to Venus from 1895, where the protagonists get attacked by very
dinosaur-like aliens. Of course all of this fancy speculation ended with the
1960s soviet Venera program, which revealed that Venus was anything but wet and
teeming with life. However, the idea of Venus as an alien dinosaur world likely
left a lasting impact on how we imagine prehistory, thanks to circular
reasoning. If one thinks that Venus was a tropical planet with a dense, humid
atmosphere and a surface covered in swamps and if it is also an example of what a primitive planet looks like, then it is not hard to come to the conclusion
that prehistoric Earth must have been like Venus, with the same climate,
atmosphere and environment.
 |
Fig. 2: The first mount of Hadrosaurus, showing
the rather awkward way in which this animal was envisioned to stand and walk. Before this there were reconstructions that, despite the long legs, showed it quadrupedally lying on its belly like a large frog. |
Back on Earth the understanding of dinosaurs was changing and advancing. Last
time we left off with the quadrupedal behemoths of the Crystal Palace Park,
which, as Clemens Setz put it, "look more like the bosses in a gameboy
game than dinosaurs". These quickly became outdated as in 1858 in
Haddonfield and 1878 in Bernissart the first nearly complete skeletons of
dinosaurs were found. These showed that at least some dinosaurs were in fact
bipedal animals, although instead of reconstructing them in a bird-like posture with
the spine held horizontally (like we do today) they were imagined as kangaroo-like
tripods (the first skeletal mounts of Iguanodon infamously had their
tail-vertebrae broken to achieve this erroneous pose). This was done to
reconcile the dynamicity that is associated with a two-legged animal with the
then preconceived notion that reptiles should be slow and inactive. The product
was an array of odd creatures with crocodile-like bodies, bird-like legs and
the upright stance of a macropod, but instead of being allowed to run like a
bird or jump like a kangaroo, they were forced to awkwardly waddle around and
drag their seemingly useless tails on the ground. There is pretty much no animal
living today that moves this way, making this image of dinosaurs quite bizarre
and alien. That this also made dinosaurs look a bit like humans in suits (sometimes
literally, when we consider famous movie-dinosaurs like Godzilla), additionally
gave them a certain level of uncanniness. Soon after, new types of dinosaurs were also
discovered, such as sauropods, coelurosaurs and Archaeopteryx (though it
was not yet recognized as a dinosaur at the time by most scientists), while the
focus of dinosaur-research shifted from Europe to North America. From the 1870s
to the 1890s a fierce battle was fought here, which we today call the Bone
Wars. This battle was the conflict between two famous paleontologists, Othniel
Charles Marsh of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale and Edward
Drinker Cope of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. While they
originally started out as colleagues, through differences in their
personalities and scientific opinions they became bitter rivals and dedicated
their careers to outcompeting the other by discovering and describing as many spectacular extinct animals as possible. For this purpose they funded
and undertook several expeditions into the American west, the regions of what
would one day become the states of Wyoming, Kansas, Colorado and Nebraska, and
also employed many minor fossil collectors to work for them. Espionage was used
to disrupt the expeditions of the other and sometimes fossil formations were
allegedly detonated with dynamite so that their rivals could not access them.
Regardless, the species discovered during this battle were to become iconic,
the first ones you think of when you hear the word "dinosaur".
Marsh and Cope first described dinosaurs such as Brontosaurus, Apatosaurus,
Stegosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Ankylosaurus, Allosaurus, Ichthyornis, Hesperornis,
Coelophysis, Diplodocus, Camarasaurus and Triceratops, as well as
other famous prehistoric animals like Elasmosaurus, Tylosaurus, Pteranodon
and Uintatherium. Only T. rex is missing from this
celebrity-list, because it was discovered in 1900 by Barnum Brown.
Unfortunately Marsh and Cope's eagerness to describe as many new species as
possible has led them to assign almost every new bone as belonging to a
separate species, even though they sometimes belonged to an already known
taxon. This has led to a lot of confusion that still affects us today, the Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus-controversy
being the most famous one (as of a study done in 2015, Brontosaurus is
recognized as different enough from Apatosaurus to be considered its own
genus and therefore valid, but this may change again in the future). If you are
old enough to remember names like Monoclonius or Trachodon from
your childhood dinosaur-books, which you cannot find again in modern ones, it
is likely their fault.
 |
| Fig. 3: Leaping Laelaps is an exception to the
rule of Charles R. Knight's dinosaur-illustrations. It is the only one that
shows dinosaurs with athletic behaviour and also the only one in which Knight
gives the dinosaurs accurately sized thigh-muscles. Please note again the
erupting volcano in the background. Laelaps is today classified as
Dryptosaurus, a distant relative of Tyrannosaurus. |
Since these two paleontologists made such a huge
contribution to our knowledge of dinosaurs, did they also influence our idea of
the Alien Prehistoric World? Surprisingly I do not think so. Marsh and Cope's
view of dinosaurs was rather progressive and similar to our modern one.
They saw them as successful animals that occupied similar niches as modern
mammals. Marsh, based on trace-fossils, also correctly deduced that they did
not drag their tails on the ground and even supported Thomas Henry Huxley's
theory that birds descend from dinosaurs (although he thought that they
descended from ornithopod dinosaurs similar to Dryosaurus). Cope also
recognized a significant similarity between birds and dinosaurs and was of the opinion
that they, despite their size, were active and fast-paced animals. He let this
idea of his be illustrated by Charles R. Knight in his description of
Laelaps (today known as Dryptosaurus). The painting, called
Leaping Laelaps is one of the most well-known pieces of paleoart today
as it is one of the oldest known depictions of dynamic dinosaurs. Charles R.
Knight, being perhaps the best-known paleoartist of all time, gets a lot of
credit for being this foresighted, but, as mentioned, Leaping Laelaps
was a comission done according to Cope's view. Knight's actual view of
dinosaurs was very different and shines throughout almost all his other
artwork. He viewed them as dumb, primitive and ugly brutes, monsters that
deserved to go extinct. His 1946 book Life through the Ages is testament
to that. In it we find descriptions of dinosaurs and their world like:
"All species were by now too big and too ungainly for their own good and
though they didn't realize it, were doomed to pass away completely, for Nature
had apparently grown weary of the great scaly cold-blooded monsters. They had
been in existence too long, for they were stupid, unadaptable and
unprogressive. And so the world was to grow away from these slow-moving dunces,
and little warm-blooded beings, furry, alert and aggressive, were to supersede
them... []. It must have been a most depressing world as we think about it now,
with huge, bizarre and ungainly shapes rising and subsiding in the landscape,
the earth covered in harsh and brittle scrub under tall palmettos, while both
on the ground and in the trees, small, sinister bright-eyed mammals awaited the
slow, but inevitable finale of the great Reptilian Era." (Knight 1946,
p. 20).
"Meanwhile, in an attempt to circumvent just
such killers as Tyrannosaurus, the vegetable-feeding species had branched out
into all manner of grotesque and awe-inspiring shapes. In any case, the whole
scaly, spiny lot have long since vanished, which perhaps is just as well,
because no more sinister beings ever walked the surface of this earth." (Knight 1946, p. 22).
Knight had a view of evolution that is today better
known as Orthogenesis, which was pretty much the norm of the time. He saw evolution as a march of progress, with humans as the
end-goal, in which more "primitive" creatures are destined to be
replaced by more "advanced", "perfected" animals.
"Ancient" therefore automatically means "primitive". We will see in a future post why this came out of fashion. Knight expresses this view of prehistory again in the chapter about prehistoric birds,
saying: "So far as we know there were no beautiful feathery beings in our
early world", basically calling all prehistoric birds, like Archaeopteryx,
Hesperornis or the Dodo, butt-ugly. The quality that Knight drew dinosaurs
in was also noticeably lower than how he drew modern animals. While his
drawings of modern animals are very beautiful and close to life, his dinosaurs
give off an almost cartoonish vibe, making them seem unreal. Frankly I would not count them among his
best work. Most notable is that despite having a very good grasp of anatomy and
muscle-mass when drawing living animals, Knight seemingly failed to notice that
dinosaurs had very muscular legs and instead chose to give them spindly,
lizard-like limbs. Knight had been illustrating prehistoric animals since the
late nineteenth century until his death in 1953, with his many paintings and
murals being exhibited in museums and reprinted in books. As such they had a
tremendous influence on the general public's view of prehistoric life. While
the dinosaurs found in the Bone Wars became famous through Knight's artwork,
Marsh and Cope's ideas about them, being written down in highly technical
accounts, did not and they remained in the minority with their view of dynamic
dinos. Knight is likely one of the largest causes for two of the sub-tropes
that we discussed last time: That the prehistoric world was more primitive,
brutish and violent than today and that things such as beauty did not exist
yet. The forward thinking on dinosaurs by people like Huxley, Marsh, Cope and
Henry Fairfield Osborn was being ignored or forgotten and views of past life similar to
Knight's became prevalent in paleontology. Dinosaur-science entered a deep
depression from roughly the 1920s onward, with very little research on them
being done. The view of dinosaurs during this time, which is called the
Dinosaur Doldrums by Robert T. Bakker, can be characterised by these ideas:
- Dinosaurs were not a natural group (as was
originally thought by Richard Owen) that descend from a single ancestor,
but an assemblage of unrelated groups of large archosaurs.
- Dinosaurs were all cold-blooded like modern
lizards, at best being mass-homeotherms.
- Most dinosaurs were swamp-dwellers, similar to
turtles and crocodiles, with many being semi- or even fully aquatic.
Sauropod dinosaurs were especially often depicted as amphibious as it was
thought that they were too large to support their weight on land.
Hadrosaurs were also often thought of as water-dwellers due to a
superficial resemblance of their beaks to the bills of ducks and
fossilized skin around their hands that was mistaken for webbing.
- Dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures were
inferior to modern animals in almost every way. Dinosaurs were slower and
dumber than mammals. They had no social behaviour, did not move in herds or packs nor cared for their young. Pterosaurs could not
actively fly like birds or bats and marine reptiles could not give life
birth like whales so they had to awkwardly crawl on land like sea turtles
to lay their eggs. The only reason why these creatures were able to dominate
prehistoric Earth was their brute force and size.
- Quadrupedal ornithischian dinosaurs, like Stegosaurus
or Triceratops had erect hind-legs, but sprawling front-limbs,
forcing them to do a very awkward reptilian crawl.
- Like mentioned above, bipedal dinosaurs walked
upright similar to a man in a lizard-suit, with their tail uselessly
dragging on the ground.
- Theropod dinosaurs, the bipedal carnivores,
were simply split up into two groups: Carnosaurs, which encompassed all
the large theropods, and Coelurosaurs, which encompassed all the small
theropods. Carnosaurs were seen as little more than mindless killing-machines,
virtually brainless and doing nothing but sleep, eat and mate. Coelurosaurs were simply like lizards on two legs.
- Many of the bizarre ornamental features of
dinosaurs, the characteristic head-shields, horns, crests and plates, were
explained through a concept called racial senescence. According to which,
as evolutionary lineages grow older, they actually age and degenerate like
an individual old person would. The horns and spikes were therefore seen
as useless features that grew out of control due to the advanced age of
the dinosaur-lineage.
- Dinosaurs died out without leaving descendants due to being incapable of
adapting to environmental changes. Either the swamps they lived in dried
out, an ice age did the cold-bloods in or they were simply usurped by the
mammals. Their extinction was slow, gradual and uncatastrophic, in accord
with the view of uniformitarianism. They were destined to go extinct and
be replaced by mammals. The bigger mystery was not how they went extinct,
but rather how they managed to dominate the Earth so long.
The exact reasons for the
Dinosaur Doldrums and their character-assassination of our favorite prehistoric
animals are hard to pinpoint. At least one large influence was the 1926 book The Origin of Birds by Danish amateur-ornithologist Gerhard Heilmann. In
it the author concludes that birds could not have descended from dinosaurs
based on the mistaken assumption that the latter did not have collarbones like
birds (we now know they did). Instead he thought that they must have descended
from earlier reptiles called thecodonts, while any similarity to dinosaurs was
superficial. Despite lacking a formal training in paleontology or ornithology,
Heilmann's book was widely successful among academic circles, perhaps thanks to its impressive artwork, and seen as the definitive work on the origin of
birds. It led to the consensus that dinosaurs died out without leaving living
members, making them evolutionary failures and dead-ends in the progressivist
minds of the time, despite having ruled the planet for 150 million years. As
such, dinosaurs moved out of the focus of evolutionary biology and
paleontology, which was now more focused on prehistoric mammals and human
ancestors. It should also not be understated that the world was going through
major financial crises and wars during these times, with many European museums
that held important fossils being destroyed in World War II. That is how we
lost the original type specimen of Spinosaurus for example. The Dinosaur
Doldrums would hold on almost unchanged until the 1970s.
 |
| Fig. 4: A more typical dinosaur illustration by
Charles Knight. The limbs are spindly and undermuscled, the tails long and
dragging on the ground, while in the brontosaur the legs are even splaying to
the sides. The reconstruction is very obviously inspired by lizards. The action
is also a lot more static than in Leaping Laelaps, despite being 49 years younger. |
As scientists largely abandoned the study of
dinosaurs, the public image that had been (literally) painted of the
prehistoric world by people like Charles Knight became lucrative to another
guild of people: Storytellers, especially filmmakers. While this alien world of
bizarre and brutish evolutionary misfits never had humans in it, it made for
good scenarios of heroes fighting monsters. So what if some of these beasts from
a bygone era and parts of their world somehow managed to survive to modern day
in some uncharted corner of the earth? Ideas of extinct animals surviving into
modernity go as far back as the 1700s. When Georges Cuvier first proposed that
animals could go extinct over geologic time, he was first met with scepticism,
as it was thought unlikely that God would let his own creations go extinct.
Living mammoths or dinosaurs must surely still exist in some undiscovered
corners of the Earth, it was thought. While this idea gradually lost its
religious connotations (at least outside young earth creationist-circles), it
was ever prevalent throughout literature during colonial and imperial times as
more and more of the world was being discovered. Rumors abounded about
dinosaur-like animals still living in Africa, South America or even the Wild
West. Most of these, like the Mokele Mbembe of the Congo Basin, were purely made up by
colonials for publicity and have pretty much no tangible origin in the local folklore
like is often claimed. They still left a large impression on people back in
Europe and inspired literature. The codifier of what is generally known as the
Lost World Genre was, of course, The Lost World, a 1912 adventure novel
by Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle (although he certainly was not the
first one that wrote scenarios about humans meeting extinct animals, as that
credit goes to Jules Vernes and his Journey to the Center of the Earth).
In it a British crew of explorers finds an isolated plateau in the midst of the
South American rainforest that is home to dinosaurs, ape-men and human natives.
The dinosaurs are described as brutish and exceptionally dumb, deserving
extinction. The general tone of the novel is that the plateau is a horrific
place that needs to be subjugated by Western civilization, an overtly
imperialist message that is often missing from future adaptations (the 2001 BBC
mini-series actually completely inverts this by having the protagonists decide
to lie about the plateau's existence in order to preserve its life from the
industrialized world). The novel was adapted into a movie of the same name in
1925. While still being made in the silent era, it is was revolutionary in a
lot of ways. It was the first feature length movie to use stop motion as its
main special effect. The effects were made by the legend that is Willis O'Brien
and were so good for the time that, contrary to the novel, the dinosaurs nearly
become the main stars, with many scenes simply consisting of the explorers
observing the saurians almost like in a nature documentary. Despite their
design being heavily based on Charles Knight paintings, they are shown as
surprisingly active. They move in herds, the brontosaurs are outside of the
swamps and a Triceratops is shown caring for its child. Some like the Allosaurus
also look a lot more lithe and skinnier than it would be depicted later in the 50s
and 60s. On the other hand, they are often shown in mortal combat, constantly
fighting and hunting each other. Notable is a scene where an Allosaurus
slays an Agathaumas and while feeding on its carcass snaps a
Pteranodon out of the air to also feed on it. The movie also gave birth to
an entire different genre of movies: Prehistoric monsters in the big city. In a scene not
present in the original novel, the explorers bring a living Brontosaurus
with them to London. Of course, to the delight of the audience, the animal
escapes and wreaks havoc in the city. This scene would inspire countless of
other movies with similar ideas, such as The Beast from 20'000 Fathoms,
Godzilla and King Kong. The ending of the second Jurassic Park
movie, named The Lost World: Jurassic Park, where a T. rex
attacks San Diego, is likely also somewhat of an hommage to the 1925 movie. If you are interested in watching The Lost World, the movie is in the public domain and can be watched in full on Youtube here.
 |
| Fig. 5: A Brontosaurus partially destroys London
in 1925's The Lost World. While I am not from the UK myself, I can
imagine this being a preferable scenario to Brexit. |
King Kong, specifically the original movie from 1933, could be seen as a soft
remake of Lost World. Willis O'Brien was back to do the effects and
re-used many clay-models from previous movies. The big difference, apart from
many technical advancements, is that the dinosaurs took a back-seat
to the main star, a giant gorilla. As a primate, Kong was able to express
emotions and gestures that a human viewer could relate to. Given his tragic
role, somewhat of a retelling of The Beauty and the Beast, this was necessary and could not be done with just dinosaurs, as they
were viewed as unsympathetic monsters by the audience. The reptiles were thus
degraded to antagonists. They either chased and killed the explorers or served
as adversaries for Kong. While the Brontosaurus at the end of The
Lost World was a scared and confused animal in an unfamiliar environment,
in this movie it becomes a Nessie-like swamp monster that, despite being a
herbivore, actually grabs and eats a man. Kong heroically wrestling and killing
a T. rex and a giant, bat-winged Pteranodon to save the woman Ann
evokes iconic imagery of knights and heroes slaying dragons and monsters to
save their princesses. It also reinforces the idea that mammals are superior to
dinosaurs, the latter being abominations deserving death. King Kong
is one of the most influential movies of all time and it cemented the public
idea of dinosaurs as movie-monsters rather than animals. What the actual themes
and symbolism of the movie mean has been hotly debated over the years. It is
accused by some of holding a racist message, with Kong's tragic infatuation
with Ann being allegorical for interracial marriage and the giant ape that got
abducted from his home being a symbol for black people in America. The
directors and writers of the movie, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack,
have frequently denied such accusations. According to them the movie is about
the dichotomy between the civilized and the primitive world and how the former
will inevitably destroy the latter. While this may also be interpreted as
vaguely racist, the creators have emphasized how their sympathy actually lied
with the primitive world, which is shown by the tragic portrayal of Kong's
death. The movie's story is loosely based on a real incident, believe it or
not. In a 1926 expedition, William Douglas Burden captured an individual of the newly
discovered komodo dragon and brought it from its home island to the Bronx Zoo,
where it died shortly after. In Cooper's eyes it was civilization that killed
the dragon.
 |
| Fig. 6: Gregory S. Paul is a big fan of this scene,
citing it as the only good dinosaur-fight in cinema as of 1988: "There is
one very good motion picture dinosaurian wrestling match, the classic match in
the original King Kong between the main character and T. rex -
not only because of the power and thrilling atmosphere of this cinematic tour
de force, but because of its sense of humor. At one point Kong puts the
tyrannosaur in a text book half-nelson." (Paul 1988, p. 411). I do not
think Paul knew this, but Cooper and Schoedsack were wrestlers before they
became filmmakers and actually gave visual reference when O'Brien animated the
fight. |
The Lost World genre, as codified by the Conan
Doyle Novel, its movie adaptation and King Kong, had in my opinion a big influence on
the Alien Prehistoric World trope. The dichotomy that was created in them
painted prehistory as directly opposed to modern times, a separate world from
our own full of danger, monsters and strangeness. It also popularized the trend
of lumping together animals from all sorts of different time periods and
regions all into the same place. This makes prehistoric times seem far more
packed and bizarre than ours and makes it seem like there was only a single prehistoric period where everything lived together. Of course given how these stories
are about presumably extinct animals surviving into modern times, these anachronisms could be
explained simply through more hypothetical survivals, but at some point this
just gets silly. As geologist Dougal Dixon puts it:
"These lost worlds all seem to suffer from two
rather obvious faults. The first is that the isolation of the lost world is
never absolute. Not only can the modern day explorers penetrate their
mysteries, but other creatures appear to have broken in at various times. Thus,
as well as dinosaurs, pterosaurs and plesiosaurs from the Mesozoic era, there
are also mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers. The originators of the genre are
responsible for this fault. In Journey to the
Center of the Earth there are mastodons as well as plesiosaurs, and amidst
the flora of the subterranean world and the famous forest of giant mushrooms,
are coal forest trees from the Carboniferous period. In The Lost World
there are giant Irish elk and armadillo-like glyptodonts as well as stegosaurs.
The newcomers have been slipped in quite comfortably and exist in ecological
balance with the animals and plants already there. In the real world such an
invasion would almost inevitably have lead to the extinction of the original
fauna and its subsequent replacement by the newcomers." (Dixon 1988,
p. 109)
The second fault Dixon talks about is the fact that
all of these lost worlds (apart perhaps from Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar)
are far too small to support such a wide array of large sized (or rather
oversized given the genre) animals. Such environments would instead lead to dwarfism, like we see
with actual island-dinosaurs like Europasaurus. That, with an additional
66 million years of time, surviving dinosaurs would surely evolve further and
change their form instead of staying the same as they were in the Mesozoic is
something many writers seem to ignore when writing these stories. It could however be argued that this might be deliberate to show how unadaptable dinosaurs are. To at least
give some credit where credit is due, the 2005 Peter Jackson remake of King
Kong does attempt to address these problems by both evolving its cast of
animals into new speculative species and by explaining that Skull Island used
to be a lot larger before gradually sinking into the sea for the last couple of
thousand years. By accident they thus made Skull Island's geologic history
resemble that of New Zealand, which once used to be part of the real life lost continent
Zealandia that also gradually sank beneath the ocean since the Cretaceous. Jackson is a very
patriotic kiwi, even when he does not realize it.
What the Lost World genre further did is instill a
fear in the public of the "primitive" world and that creatures like
dinosaurs could still exist somewhere and manage to come to civilization, where
they would surely create chaos. About two months after King Kong's
release a man of the name George Spicer, who later admitted to have watched the
film, reported seeing a large, long-necked, prehistoric animal, very similar to
the movie's Brontosaurus, emerging out of the Loch Ness, giving
birth to the famous myth of the Loch Ness Monster. In reality he likely just
saw a deer swimming through the water and his fantasy, influenced by the movie,
ran wild. The aforementioned Mokele Mbembe and many other similar cryptids likely
originated from similar fears. The idea of prehistoric monsters attacking
civilization may also be relevant for our topic, as not only does it
monsterize extinct animals, but it seems somewhat related to the genre of alien
invasions. The latter is basically the same scenario, just with an enemy that
is technologically more advanced rather than more brutish than us. A bizarre outgrowth of this are conspiracy theories that claim that cryptids such as the thunder bird (a North American cryptid often claimed to either be a living pterosaur or Argentavis) or even Nessie are actually extraterrestrial creatures or even spacecrafts, linking them to UFO-sightings. Later works
of fiction like Star Trek and Doctor Who would go as far as
presenting us with humanoid alien species that turn out to have actually
evolved from spacefaring dinosaurs, but more on that in a future post. As
another example of this interconnectedness I would like to point out the 1957
movie 20 Million Miles to Earth. In it the crew of a spaceship sent to
Venus crashes back down on Earth and accidentally brings with it a Venusian
alien egg. Out of it hatches a stop-motion dinosaurian beast (animated by the
great Ray Harryhausen) and wreaks havoc. We have come full circle.
I promised last time that we would also get to discuss Disney's Fantasia and its dinosaur-segment, but this post is already too long and I found the topic so interesting that it deserves its own post. I hope you enjoyed this entry and that we'll see each other next time.
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Literary sources:
- Bakker,
Robert Thomas: The Dinosaur Heresies. New Theories Unlocking The Mystery
of the Dinosaurs and Their Extinction, New York 1986.
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Paul/ Naish, Darren: Dinosaurs. How they lived and evolved, London 2016
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Steve: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. A New History of a Lost World, New
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John/Kosemen, C.M./Naish, Darren: All Yesterdays. Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals, UK 2012.
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Stephen Jay: Wonderful Life. The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History,
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Dougal: The New Dinosaurs. An Alternative Evolution, London
1988.
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Charles Robert: Life through the Ages, New York 1946 (Commemorative
Edition).
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Daniel/Prothero, Donald Ross: Abominable Science!. Origins of the Yeti, Nessie and other famous cryptids, New York 2013.
- Marsh,
Othniel Charles: The Dinosaurs of North America, Washington 1896
(Hardpress reprint).
- Mcloughlin,
John: Archosauria. A New Look at the Old Dinosaur, New York 1979.
- Naish,
Darren: Hunting Monsters. Cryptozoology and the reality behind the myths,
London 2017.
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Scott: Predatory Dinosaurs of the World. A Complete Illustrated Guide, New
York 1988.
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Workshop: The World of Kong. A Natural History of Skull Island, London
2005.
- Witton, Mark:
Recreating an Age of Reptiles, Marlborough 2017.
- Witton, Mark:
The Paleoartist's Handbook. Recreating prehistoric animals in art,
Marlborough 2018.
Online sources.
Image sources:
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Fig. 4: Knight, Charles Robert: Life through the Ages, New York 1946, page 13 (Commemorative Edition).
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Fig. 6: King Kong (1933), RKO Pictures.
