As the Texas-based company Colossal Biosciences claims to have resurrected the dire wolf, and the Jurassic World franchise returns to cinemas once again, it bears remembering that the idea of encountering extinct animals in the present day was chiefly an invention of nineteenth-century popular fiction. This paper will show how the anachronistic encounter between modern human and dinosaur, mammoth, or pterodactyl first became a staple of imaginative media, fuelling the tradition of fiction that inspires Colossal’s sensational and controversial biotechnology today.
Early in the century, humans crossed paths with revivified monsters like Megalosaurus only in comic sketches, or forms veiled in the oneiric and supernatural. Inspired by the innovations of popular science writers, Jules Verne and George Sand in the 1860s were among the first to bring extinct animals into prose fiction. In subsequent decades, amid the ‘romance revival’ and emergence of illustrated magazines like The Strand, living fossils became literary conventions. In stories like Reginald Bacchus and C. Ranger Gull’s ‘The Dragon of St Pauls’ (1899), depictions of these animals typically functioned to complicate but ultimately to reaffirm the self-conscious hierarchies of late Victorian society: human over nonhuman, present over past, masculinity over femininity, white Briton over colonised subject.
Meanwhile, however, a more meditative strand, including H. G. Wells’s ‘Æpyornis Island’ (1894) and Clotilde Graves’s ‘The Great Beast of Kafue’ (1917), was clearing a space in which to explore a qualified sympathy for primitive beasts.
Richard Fallon is Deputy Leader in Collections and Culture at the Natural History Museum. His new monograph, Contesting Earth's History in Transatlantic Literary Culture, 1860–1935, was published by Oxford University Press this year. His previous book, Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021.
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