HERE LIES JOHN TIPPET

ENGLISHMAN

KILLED BY TYRANNOSAURUS

10 SEPT., A.D. 1916

R. I. P.

— The grave-marker whereon Bowen Tyler discovers the fate of Tippet in The Land That Time Forgot, and quite possibly the greatest epitaph I've ever read.

When I was nine months old, I discovered dinosaurs. So my mother tells me, at least: it all started that fateful day Mam got me an illustrated book of prehistoric life. She recited the names to me as I sat transfixed, wide-eyed and mouth agape, at these incredible creatures. While I think every boy goes through a period of going dinosaur-crazy - and, no doubt, many a girl too - my obsession went a bit beyond the average. Thanks to Mam's dutiful dictation, I could pronounce the taxonomy of dinosaurs before I could read their names. I recalled the various periods species lived in before I could do simple maths.

It was natural, then, that I would want to read more about dinosaurs beyond the old textbooks and picturebooks: what about fiction? Too young to read, I started off with the classic dinosaur films: King Kong, 1 Million Years B.C., The Valley of Gwangi, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, the Rite of Spring sequence in Fantasia, to more modern examples like The Land Before Time. Even films with only a tenuous link to dinosaurs like the British Nannies vs Chinese Intelligence caper in One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing were part of my diet.

However, as soon as I could read at a sufficient level to tackle real books, I was introduced to a vast range of dinosaur fiction. My first dinosaur book was Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (or, more properly, the Ladybird Children's Classics version which was brilliantly illustrated by Arthur Aitchison and actually rather faithfully adapted into simple language by Joan Collins), and between the iconic Professor Challenger and the setting of Maple White Land, I knew this was what I wanted to read. 

Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote another great story of man meeting denizens of a younger earth: The Land That Time Forgot.

”I shall never forget one enormous specimen which we came upon browsing upon water-reeds at the edge of the great sea. It stood well over twelve feet high at the rump, its highest point, and with its enormously long tail and neck it was somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred feet in length. Its head was ridiculously small; its body was unarmored, but its great bulk gave it a most formidable appearance. My experience of Caspakian life led me to believe that the gigantic creature would but have to see us to attack us, and so I raised my rifle and at the same time drew away toward some brush which offered concealment; but Ajor only laughed, and picking up a stick, ran toward the great thing, shouting. The little head was raised high upon the long neck as the animal stupidly looked here and there in search of the author of the disturbance. At last its eyes discovered tiny little Ajor, and then she hurled the stick at the diminutive head. With a cry that sounded not unlike the bleat of a sheep, the colossal creature shuffled into the water and was soon submerged.

As I slowly recalled my collegiate studies and paleontological readings in Bowen's textbooks, I realized that I had looked upon nothing less than a diplodocus of the Upper Jurassic; but how infinitely different was the true, live thing from the crude restorations of Hatcher and Holland! I had had the idea that the diplodocus was a land-animal, but evidently it is partially amphibious. I have seen several since my first encounter, and in each case the creature took to the sea for concealment as soon as it was disturbed. With the exception of its gigantic tail, it has no weapon of defense; but with this appendage it can lash so terrific a blow as to lay low even a giant cave-bear, stunned and broken. It is a stupid, simple, gentle beast—one of the few within Caspak which such a description might even remotely fit.”
--Tom Billing's description of one of my favourite dinosaurs in The People that Time Forgot.

Since Richard Owen coined the term in 1842, dinosaurs have captured the imagination of the world. It isn't difficult to see why: here were real animals that could rival dragons, sea serpents, and other fantastical beasts of myth and folklore in size, ferocity, strangeness, grandeur, and magnificence. Dinosaurs were thus natural fits for science fiction and adventure stories: all the awesome spectacle of legendary beasts, but lent a degree of verisimilitude thanks to their scientific discovery. This was perfect for the Lost World genre, exemplified by H. Rider Haggard, and followed by Conan Doyle, Kipling, Burroughs, Merritt, and many more.

The Land that Time Forgot was originally printed in three parts across Blue Book in 1918, before being combined into a single novel published in 1924. Much like its predecessor The Lost World, The Land That Time Forgot centres around a time-lost land where anachronistic flora and fauna are inexplicably present in modern times. However, Burroughs' adventure differs from Conan Doyle's in a few key ways. The most intriguing of the differences to me is in the ecology of Caspak.

In most Lost Worlds, creatures from across time and space happen to end up in the same place, frozen in time for 65 million years or more, without any consideration of the vast gulfs in age & distance. Animals not known to the South American fossil record at any point in prehistory - Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, Megaloceros - make anomalous appearances in The Lost World, at least insomuch that such a place can have "anomalous fauna." The Lost World's fauna also picks creatures from many points in prehistory, from the Pleistocene to the Late Triassic - a separation of almost 200 million years. It reads rather like Howard's Hyborian Age on a geological, instead of historical, scale.

Caspak, however, not only acknowledges this seeming incongruity, but it is an integral part of the worldbuilding. Evolution on Caspak is very strange in comparison to the rest of the world: rather than evolving over millennia, an individual being could cross species within a single lifetime. This brings the idea of evolution from a Deep Time that spans eons, into a Human Time that spans decades, if not years - an exploration of incremental change that can be observed in real-time by human observation. This phenomenon, named "cor-sva-jo" ("from the beginning") by the people of Caspak, is the source of most (but not all) of life within the lost land: exceptional individuals like Co-Tan and Ajor are cos-ata-lu/lo, "no-egg-man/woman," born directly from the womb without undergoing the vast egg-bound odyssey.

Burrough's ladder of hominid tribes - the apelike Ho-Lu ("Ape Man") is less advanced than the Neanderthal Bo-Lu ("Club Man"), who is succeeded by the Cro-Magnon Band-Lu ("Spear Man"), then Sto-Lu ("Hatchet Man"), then Kro-Lu ("Bow Man"), & ultimately Galu ("Rope Man"), was reflective of the then-popular (now abandoned) orthogenesis theory of evolution - that the evolutionary process was progressive towards an ultimate goal. The pre-eminent visual example is the now infamous Rudolf Zallinger illustration "March of Progress" (Life Nature Library, 1965), the source of countless satires & misunderstandings of evolution that persist to this day.

In addition, the distribution of lifeforms on the island appears to mimic the prehistoric timeline. The insects, amphibians, & reptiles of the Palaeozoic dwell in the southern reaches of the island; the mighty dinosaurs & marine reptiles of the Mesozoic rule the central lake & its surroundings; finally, the mammals of the Cenozoic roam in the island's northern realms. Some of the more powerful creatures, like the monstrous pterosaur that duelled Billings in the sky, have free rein over the entire island, only the chilling air above & beyond the icy Walls of Caprona keeping them from menacing the world beyond. Combined with the dislocation of a lush, verdant jungle land somewhere in the region of Antarctica, which is surrounded on almost all sides by sheer cliffs and ice, the mystery of Caspak is deep indeed, and one never truly explained within the narrative.

One of the eternal foils of speculative fiction based on science is that science has the stubborn propensity for marching on. The "evolution" seen among Caspak's denizens is quite unlike any form of evolution in the rest of the world: were it operating under the wider world's rules, each individual lifeform in Caspak from the microbes to the mighty Tyrannosaurs would have to be a single species, undergoing multiple metamorphoses of astounding complexity & diversity. That extends to the nature of the species-stage of each creature: what was accepted by palaeontological consensus in the early 20th Century is vastly different from the cutting edge of later decades. As with Maple White Land, Caspak's inhabitants really have become lost to time - though in this case, it is a time of science left behind, where the cutting edge of 1910s palaeontology may as well be describing the fauna of Barsoom.

In the original conception of the humble Iguanodon, Gideon Mantell had only a few scraps to work from: teeth, claws, a mess of jumbled bones. Because the fossil's teeth resembled that of an iguana, his first sketch resembled a giant-sized version of the lizard. Even within Mantell's lifetime, its appearance evolved: by the end of his life, Mantell believed the heavy-set, rhinoceros-like beast immortalised by the Crystal Palace models had more slender limbs. When articulated skeletons were discovered in Bernissart, half a century later, everything was thrown into disarray: the "horn" was revealed to be a thumb claw, its forelimbs were smaller than its hind limbs, and it was believed to be a biped. Even now, evidence and theory has changed, bringing it back to a quadrupedal (albeit still considered a facultatively bipedal) creature, & raising its tail off the ground.

Burrough's imagination added plenty of life & variety to his species. The Land That Time Forgot was written long before modern understanding of dinosaurs as warm-blooded, active, bird-like creatures (birds themselves considered to be part of the Dinosauria); however, it was also written before the mid-20th Century perception of cold-blooded, sluggish, reptilian monsters. As such, Burroughs' Allosaurus had a peculiar form of locomotion akin to a gigantic kangaroo, using its strong tail to lope through the trees - possibly informed by The Lost World's Megalosaurus, which itself was likely inspired by the theories of Edward Drinker Cope regarding fellow theropod Dryptosaurus (then Laelaps). The Caspak Tyrannosaurus appeared to be armour-plated, like its "relative" Dynamosaurus, which has since been rediagnosed as a Tyrannosaurus surrounded by Ankylosaur dermal plates - I'd like to see Kong try his luck against that monster! Even the Diplodocus, which managed to be comparatively close to the scientific conception of the time, seemed rather more skittish than one would expect a creature the weight of a whole herd of elephants to be, though that just adds to the charm.

Yet still, there is that unfathomable mystery at the heart of Caspak - how can a creature cross the animal kingdom throughout a lifetime? There are hints - the weird science of the malevolent winged Wieroos offering a possible unearthly origin - but the best mysteries are ones that remain unsolved, & there are times in fiction when the explanation is so unsatisfying, it ruins the mystique.

The Land That Time Forgot uses science to build the world of Caspak, but the foundations are pure adventure. Burroughs combines all sorts of wild concepts into a ripping yarn worthy of any adventurer's library - wartime subterfuge & tension on a U-Boat; the discovery of an impossible world with unthinkable wildlife; challenges to humanity's understanding of science and the natural world; and, of course, lots of action & romance. It is a story I return to time and again, and the land is not one that is easily forgotten.

Al Harron is an artist & writer born & raised on the West Coast of Scotland, and became an aficionado of weird and fantastic fiction from an early age. He currently operates the weird fiction blog The Blog That Time Forgot, and the Scottish cultural & current affairs blog A Wilderness of Peace.