The First Dinosaur Novel

A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder 

by James De Mille

"It looked like one of those fabled dragons such as may be seen in pictures, but without wings. It was nearly a hundred feet in length, with a stout body and a long tail, covered all over with impenetrable scales. It hind-legs were rather longer than its fore-legs, and it moved its huge body with ease and rapidity. Its feet were armed with formidable claws. But its head was most terrific. It was a vast mass of bone, with enormous eyes that glared like fire; its jaws opened to the width of six or eight feet, and were furnished with rows of sharp teeth, while at the extremity of its nose there was a tusk several feet long, like the horn of a rhinoceros, curving backward. All this I took in at the first glance, and the next instant the whole band of hunters, with their usual recklessness, flung themselves upon the monster."

The  ebook on Gutenberg Project.

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An Introduction to the Text

The collection of the Royal Society contains many strange and curious artifacts, and you now hold in your hands the first printing of one of the most eccentric texts.  The author presented his narrative to the Society’s President and Council in 1671, with the stipulation that the work be only available to Society Council members and then only those researching the more bizarre aspects of natural history.  The work was not to be released to the public for three centuries and thirty years, a request as strange as this narrative.

            In the eighteenth century zoology, taxonomy, and the classification of species, would find their beginnings with the works of Linnaeus; comparative anatomy, and its offspring paleontology was later to be born of the works of Cuvier.   When Dr. Christopher Lemuel, a naturalist as well as physician, set sail from Portsmouth in 1665 on the British privateer Worcester, he may have known that large fossilized bones had been found in Britain and on the Continent, but was unlikely to have had an inkling as to what sort of creatures they belonged to.  This ignorance, strangely enough, has added an element of verisimilitude to his story, as you shall see.

            We have taken the liberty of modernizing some of Dr. Lemuel’s spelling and period literary quirks – he had the tendency of the times of Capitalization For Emphasis, as well as the haphazard period spelling; for example the word pistol is spelled variously as  “pistoll” and “pistolle” throughout the original.

                                                                       

Who Wrote the First Dinosaur Novel?

 "Who wrote the first dinosaur novel? For a long time, I thought the answer was Arthur Conan Doyle. His 1912 adventure yarn The Lost World set the standard for dinosaur-inhabited literature—at least until Jurassic Park came along—and Doyle’s story has lived on in at least six film adaptations that run the gamut from landmark film to cinema trash. But contrary to what I had previously believed, Doyle wasn’t the first author to prominently feature dinosaurs in a novel."

the rest at the Smithsonian's Dinosaur Tracking.