“Millions and millions of years ago this desert was a sea bottom. Maybe even the birthplace of man. Who knows? I read that in some science books. And I got to thinking this: If the ghosts of people who have lived can haunt houses, why can’t the ghosts of creatures long dead haunt where they once lived, float about in a ghostly sea?”
–Excerpt from “Fish Night” by Joe R. Lansdale
The short story “Fish Night” (2011) opens with two traveling salesmen stranded in the middle of the desert after their car breaks down. Knowing that they have a long wait before another motorist comes along to give them a lift, the older man passes the time with a ghost story: Twenty years ago, he was stranded along the same stretch of highway. As day faded into night, the barren landscape came to life with the spectral forms of fish and other sea creatures, swimming through the air around him as if he were standing on the sea bottom. The older salesman believes the specters were the ghosts of ancient lifeforms that lived in the prehistoric ocean that once covered the land. Now stranded again in roughly the same spot, he suspects that the two are about to witness another “fish night.”
If you want to know how the story ends, you can read it online or watch the animated adaptation that aired as part of the first season of the Netflix anthology series Love, Death & Robots. (I think the adaptation makes plot changes that undermine the theme of the story, but it remains visually striking.) I’ve been thinking a lot about “Fish Night” lately because, at the time I write this, Halloween is a few weeks away. Dinosaurs, prehistoric fish, and other ancient lifeforms are not your typical Halloween monsters, but in many of their appearances in fiction, they are portrayed as such, existing to terrorize the innocent and not-so-innocent alike.
The horror literary genre is huge, even if it is no longer the publishing juggernaut I remember from my youth, when rows of cheap paperback novels lined the periodical section of my local grocery store. Still, in the roughly three centuries since the publication of the first horror novel, countless writers have turned to paleontology for their monsters. Covering every scary story that references prehistoric animals is a Herculean task beyond the scope of a single essay. If you want a deeper dive into the topic, I recommend the works of Allen A. Debus, particularly Prehistoric Monsters: The Real and Imagined Creatures of the Past That We Love to Fear (2009). Here I instead provide a selection of stories I believe capture broad tropes used by writers to provoke prehistoric terror in their audiences.
Geologic g-g-ghosts!
This essay started with a ghost story, but the reality is there are few stories about ghostly prehistoric creatures. In Cowboys & Saurians (2019), a collection of 19th-century newspaper articles about encounters with alleged prehistoric survivors, author John LeMay noted the unfortunate lack of ghost stories among the bunch. The only example he found came from the much more recent book Fossil Legends of the First Americans (2007), in which folklorist Adrienne Mayor recounted a warning she received from an Oglala man about wandering the fossil-rich Dakota Badlands at night: “They say there are some strange animals, like none you see anywhere else, maybe still alive from dinosaur days. Snakes as big as telephone poles. Sometimes you see them at night going across the road.”
Another supposedly true story about a ghostly dinosaur encounter is found in The Spirits of America (1990) by Jeff Rovin, a collection of ghost stories from different periods in U.S. history. In “Rex,” which allegedly took place in 1987, amateur paleontologist Hillary Townsend and her dog Rex travel to the Havasupai Canyon in Arizona to view an ancient rock carving that vaguely resembles a dinosaur. While camping at night near the site of the carving, Rex begins acting strangely. A spectral T. rex suddenly materializes out of the darkness, letting out a roar accompanied by “a blast of fetid wind” before vanishing as quickly as it appeared. Afterward, Townsend surmises that the ghost is the inspiration for the rock carving. While billed as a “true” story, Rovin doesn’t cite his sources and claims in the book’s introduction that he changed the names of many of the people in the stories “to protect their privacy”—both signs that he probably just made it up. (Credit to Dino Diego for the heads up about this story.)
As far as fiction, the pickings are slim. The 1980 short story “Strata” by Edward Bryant, collected in Dinosaurs!, imagines an American West haunted by ghosts of the prehistoric past. Holly Messinger’s 2016 novella “A Romance of Certain Old Bones” follows a paleontology expedition in the Old West that uncovers the restless spirits of ancient animals. While not strictly horror, the 1934 dark fantasy short story “The Seven Geases” by Clark Ashton Smith has the protagonist discover the “Cavern of Archetypes,” where a ghostly tyrannosaur tries to devour the man several times only to give up because the poor guy oozes out of the creature’s ectoplasmic belly every time he is swallowed. In the tabletop roleplaying world, the horror Western Deadlands (1996 onward) features “Walkin’ Fossils,” which are the possessed fossilized remains of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals.
One work of fiction worth noting but not published at the time I wrote this essay is The Paleontologist (2023) by Luke Dumas. The novel is set in a haunted natural history museum and concerns “a blood-soaked mystery 150 million years in the making,” according to its cover blurb. It remains to be seen whether the ghost comes from the prehistoric past or is of a more recent variety. (Update: The ghosts are far older than humanity.)
Hidden horrors!
The most popular horror trope involving paleontology is that of a lone prehistoric survivor emerging to menace the modern-day world. Sometimes humans encounter the creature because they have blundered into the isolated part of the globe that is its home. Other times the creature is forced from its habitat by some ecological imbalance, usually caused by humans. Then there are rarer instances where the animal has been frozen in ice only to thaw out millions of years after the rest of its kind have gone extinct.
These lone survivor stories include some of the earliest examples of paleofiction. The aforementioned Cowboys & Saurians collects several “true” accounts from 19th-century newspapers about ranchers and others encountering dinosaur-like creatures, and they count as paleofiction if you accept that most of the accounts were probably invented by journalists seeking to sell newspapers with sensational stories. Turning to fiction published as such, editor Richard Fallon collects several early stories featuring prehistoric creatures in Creatures of Another Age (2021), with many reading like horror stories. One example is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Terror of Blue John Gap” (1910), a short story in which the narrator investigates a series of sheep disappearances in the English countryside. He follows the clues to an old Roman mine, which is home to a blind prehistoric cave bear. Doyle, famous for being the creator of Sherlock Holmes, would later write The Lost World (1912), but where that novel aims for an adventurous tone, “The Terror of Blue John Gap” seeks to live up to its title:
“I have said that he reared like a bear, and there was something bear-like—if one could conceive a bear which was ten-fold the bulk of any bear seen upon earth—in his whole pose and attitude, in his great crooked forelegs with their ivory-white claws, in his rugged skin, and in his red, gaping mouth, fringed with monstrous fangs. Only in one point did he differ from the bear, or from any other creature which walks the earth, and even at that supreme moment a shudder of horror passed over me as I observed that the eyes which glistened in the glow of my lantern were huge, projecting bulbs, white and sightless. For a moment his great paws swung over my head. The next he fell forward upon me, I and my broken lantern crashed to the earth, and I remember no more.”
A similar tale comes from the world of radio. “Subbasement” was an episode in the radio horror anthology series Lights Out, first airing in 1943. In the story, a man leads his wife into a darkened subway system under his office building with the intent of killing her and then himself. The couple instead are hunted by a blind dinosaur whose ancestors fled the surface millions of years ago. It turns out that a construction team charged with expanding the subway’s tunnel network blasted a hole into the cavern where the dinosaurs live and paid for the intrusion with their lives.
Turning back to the written word, some novel-length examples of horror fiction featuring prehistoric survivors include Meg (1997) by Steve Alten and Extinct (1997) by Charles Wilson, both of which involve the survival of the Megalodon shark, and Burial Ground (2013) by Michael McBride. There are also several books and movies about prehistoric predators frozen in ice and later thawed to menace humanity. Two examples reviewed on this blog include Fatalis (2000) by Jeff Rovin, involving freeze-dried sabertooth cats, (no relation to the Rovin of The Spirits of America, as far as I know) and Carnivore (1997) by Leigh Clark, in which a T. rex egg is thawed out from the Antarctic ice. Perhaps the best-known example of this trope in film comes from the dinosaur-menaces-city movie The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), which was an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s spooky short story “The Fog Horn” (1951).
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention an obscure example but one that made a big impression on me as a child. “Sleeping Dragon” was a 1988 episode of the television horror series Monsters in which a team of paleontologists awaken a vicious humanoid dinosaur from its cryogenic sleep. The monster design is admittedly silly by modern standards but impressive for a low-budget show of the time.
Time-traveling terrors!
Dinosaurs Attack! (1988) was a collectible card series for kids seemingly designed to upset parents. A spiritual successor to the equally controversial Mars Attacks!, the backstory involved the evil god of dinosaurs using a time machine to transport his dinosaurian spawn to the present era. Most cards in the series featured gory illustrations of time-displaced dinosaurs hungrily munching on helpless humans, with children regularly on the menu.
Time travel is not a trope used often in prehistoric horror, but as Dinosaurs Attack! shows, it does pop up from time to time.
Comic books frequently use time travel to match tasty humans with voracious dinosaurs. The series Cavewoman (1994 onward) by Budd Root transplants an entire Oregon town to the Mesozoic, where most of its residents meet grisly fates. In Flesh (1977 onward), a comic set in the Judge Dredd universe, greedy corporations send cowboys to the late Cretaceous to turn dinosaurs into processed meat. The carnivorous dinosaurs, angry that most of their prey has been killed off, launch a bloody assault on the humans. In Rip in Time (1986), an off-duty cop plunges through a time portal in pursuit of the criminal who kidnapped his girlfriend.
As for long-form fiction, there are two notable examples incorporating time travel. The first is Deathbeast (1978) by David Gerrold, in which a group of thrill-seekers travel to the Cretaceous to hunt dinosaurs only to be picked off by a seemingly unstoppable T. rex. The second is Footprints of Thunder (1995) and its sequels by James F. David. In the novel, large parts of modern-day Earth are replaced by their Mesozoic equivalents, leading to a series of frightening encounters between dinosaurs and the surviving humans.
Genetic monstrosities!
Genetically engineered dinosaurs. Before we get to the most obvious example of this trope, let’s talk about Carnosaur. The 1984 novel by Harry Adam Knight has gained something of a cult following over the years, possibly because it served as the inspiration for a series of low-budget Jurassic Park ripoffs, and possibly because it is a genuinely entertaining read. The plot involves a British aristocrat who clones a small menagerie of dinosaurs using genetic material extracted from fossils. The novel has a dinosaurian cast similar to that of Jurassic Park, but it came out six years before its more famous cousin. Also, Knight leans more into horror as his dinosaurs dispatch dozens of unsuspecting English residents in grisly detail.
Jurassic Park, of course, is the most famous work of fiction to feature genetically engineered dinosaurs. The 1993 movie can be scary at times, but the 1990 novel is darker and leans heavily into the horrific aspects of the premise: One of the novel’s opening scenes has a pack of Procompsognathus feast on a newborn baby. The death scenes are also much more brutal. In the novel, when traitorous software engineer Dennis Nedry meets his demise at the teeth of a Dilophosaurus, his last sensation is holding his exposed intestines in his hands.
Jurassic Park has inspired a slew of imitators in both low-budget filmmaking and written fiction. One notable exception that doesn’t usually get discussed in this context is Relic (1995) by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. The novel is essentially a creature feature set in New York’s American Museum of Natural History, changed to Chicago’s Field Museum in the 1997 movie adaptation. The movie also changed the nature of the monster, turning it into a genetically mutated chimera of different animals. In the novel, the monster is a dinosaur-human hybrid, the result of exposure to an ancient retrovirus. (Preston also is the author of an upcoming novel about a Pleistocene version of Jurassic Park, titled Extinction, scheduled for publication in 2024.)
Demons of deep time!
Let’s get weird. “Cosmic horror” is a subgenre that, as explained by its Wikipedia entry, “emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than gore or other elements of shock.” Its most famous practitioner was H.P. Lovecraft, whose work inspired countless later authors. One rarely finds living dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures as the main threats in cosmic horror as works in this subgenre are more concerned with incomprehensible, reality-warping entities, but one defining element often overlooked is its use of deep time.
The terrors in cosmic horror are usually millions, if not billions, of years old. The ruins that its protagonists stumble upon in the deep desert or arctic waste were not made by human hands, but by creatures that lived on the Earth millions of years before the first humans evolved. In “The Nameless City” (1921), considered to be Lovecraft’s first “Cthulhu mythos” story, the narrator finds an ancient ruin built by creatures that resemble a mix of crocodile and seal. (Possibly intelligent mosasaurs, although they are also described as having horns.) Lovecraft would later write “The Shadow Out of Time” (1934), in which the consciousness of the modern-day narrator is transferred into a creature whose species lived during the Mesozoic Era. While trapped in that form, he learns that Earth has been inhabited by many different intelligent species throughout its long geologic history and will be again after humanity is extinct.
This expansive view of time is perhaps best illustrated in one of Lovecraft’s most famous stories, “At the Mountains of Madness” (1936). The tale follows a scientific expedition to the then-largely unmapped continent of Antarctica, where the expedition members find the unusually well-preserved fossils of strange sea anemone-like creatures alongside the more recognizable remains of dinosaurs and other extinct lifeforms. The narrator describes the continent’s geologic history in great detail, and the story is notable for embracing the concept of continental drift long before it became mainstream science. The “madness” of the title comes into play when, through a series of horrific discoveries, the narrator gradually pieces together the true history of the planet and the origin of life.
Lovecraft was one of the first authors to fully appreciate the vastness of geologic and cosmological time, as well as realize that such huge gulfs of time could hold countless secrets. Some of his contemporaries (and pen pals) also played around with this concept. The aforementioned Clark Ashton Smith wrote a series of dark fantasy stories set in Greenland before the icecaps, dubbed Hyberborea by the author. Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard penned the fantasy adventure “The Shadow Kingdom” (1929), which introduced shape-changing Serpent Men from the age of dinosaurs (and probably were the literary basis for conspiracies about “reptoids” who secretly rule the world).
Modern cosmic horror doesn’t seem to embrace the sciences of geology and paleontology the way that Lovecraft did, or at least not the stories I’ve read, but I can’t pretend to be widely read in the subgenre. One exception may be the works of author and paleontologist Caitlín R. Kiernan, whose work I admittedly need to seek out. Take Kiernan’s novel Threshold (2009), which concerns a fossil of a creature that should have never existed, “but it did, and still does,” the cover blurb warns.
If you have any examples of paleontology-themed horror stories you believe are worth a look, please leave a comment. And, of course, Happy Halloween.
Prehistoric Pulp 