Our cultural fascination with the great lizards of prehuman Earth has inevitably led to much sf in which – as never in history – humans encounter living dinosaurs. This may take place in an anachronistic deep past, as in In the Morning of Time (coll of linked stories 1919) by Charles G D Roberts. A modern enclave of surviving dinosaurs is somewhat less risible. This notion is best known from the novel that gave the Lost World subgenre its name, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912), filmed as The Lost World (1925); Greg Bear's Dinosaur Summer (1998) is a nostalgic Young Adult sequel in which dinosaurs captured for a circus are at last returned to their habitat. Edgar Rice Burroughs's Pellucidar series is also infested with dinosaurs, perhaps recollecting those encountered Underground in Jules Verne's Voyage au centre de la terre (1863; exp 1867; trans anon as Journey to the Centre of the Earth 1872); his Tarzan meets dinosaurs in Tarzan the Terrible (29 January-26 February 1921 Argosy All-Story Weekly; 1921). Another early sf example is Frank Savile's Beyond the Great South Wall (1899), featuring an Antarctic brontosaur. Wardon Allan Curtis's "The Monster of Lake LaMetrie" (September 1899 Pearson's) uses the eponymous surviving elasmosaur as recipient of a human brain transplant (> Identity Transfer). Diggings for the London Underground release subterranean dinosaurs in W J Passingham's "When London Fell" (18 September-4 December 1937 The Passing Show). James Blish attempts, not entirely successfully, to portray the dinosaurs of a lost African valley as emblems of heart-of-darkness Horror in The Night Shapes (1962); James Gurney's art book Dinotopia (1992) and its sequels imagine an idyllic nineteenth-century coexistence of human and dinosaur on an Island.
Dinosaur rationalizations of the Loch Ness Monster (which see) are frequently encountered.
Another popular access route to dinosaurs is Time Travel, generally leading to hunting and safari scenarios which tend to go badly wrong, as in Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" (28 June 1952 Collier's), L Sprague de Camp's "A Gun for Dinosaur" (March 1956 Galaxy) and Brian Aldiss's "Poor Little Warrior!" (April 1958 F&SF). David Drake treats this subtheme at some length in Time Safari (coll of linked stories 1982; exp vt Tyrannosaur 1994).
Dinosaurs are, notoriously, extinct. Their passing is observed through a Time Viewer in John Taine's Before the Dawn (1934), is the subject of rival theories tested by Time Travel in Robert J Sawyer's End of an Era (1994), and is shown with relentless detail in Stephen Baxter's Evolution (2002) – powerfully dramatizing the modern theory of the Chicxulub comet impact as an extinction event. But suppose the saurians had survived? A comic Parallel World of intelligent modern dinosaurs is visited in Robert Sheckley's Dimension of Miracles (1968). Harry Harrison's West of Eden (1984) is an Alternate History in which the dinosaurs' highly evolved descendants confront primitive humanity. In Robert J Sawyer's Quintaglio Ascension sequence, beginning with Far-seer (1992), dinosaurs were long ago transported to another world where their Evolution continued.
The popular theme of creating Clone dinosaurs from ancient DNA is long established in sf, an early example being "The Hunting Season" (November 1951 Astounding) by Frank M Robinson. Tyrannosaurus rex is Cloned in Roger Zelazny's Roadmarks (1979), George R R Martin's Tuf Voyaging (coll of linked stories 1986), and most famously – along with other dinosaurs – from recovered fossil DNA in Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (1990), filmed as Jurassic Park (1993). An earlier Genetic Engineering approach to dinosaur production was John Brosnan's Horror novel Carnosaur (1984) as by Harry Adam Knight, itself filmed as Carnosaur (1993).
Further filmic dinosaurs appear in One Million B.C. (1940), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), the dire Reptilicus (1962), The Valley of Gwangi (1969), When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1969), At the Earth's Core (1976), My Science Project (1985), and others. The most durable example is the Japanese Gojira (1954), alias Godzilla.
Such is the attraction of the dinosaur that a few authors have posited Aliens closely resembling particular species. James White's Sector General hospital story "Trouble with Emily" (November 1958 New Worlds) deals with a patient very like a brontosaurus – hence the punning name Emily, though the creature would now be termed an apatosaurus. Piers Anthony's Prostho Plus (stories November 1967-October 1970 If and November 1967 Analog; fixup 1971) features a chatty extraterrestrial trachodon or duck-billed dinosaur.
Relevant anthologies include The Science Fictional Dinosaur (anth 1982) edited by Robert Silverberg, Martin H Greenberg and Charles G Waugh, The Ultimate Dinosaur: Past, Present, Future (anth 1992) edited by Byron Preiss and Robert Silverberg – which includes speculative nonfiction essays by scientists – and Dinosaurs: Stories by Ray Bradbury, Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Many Others (anth 1996) edited by Martin H Greenberg. [DRL]
see also: Irwin Allen; Biology; Donald F Glut.
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