New dinosaur named after Dinotopia creator James Gurney

Want a dinosaur named after you? Then break out your paint brushes and get to work producing a series of critically acclaimed dinosaur art books.

A new species of dinosaur has been named after Dinotopia creator James Gurney. As Gurney explains on his blog:

Today a new dinosaur is being introduced to the world, and I'm thrilled and honored that that the paleontologists decided to name it after me. It's called Torvosaurus gurneyi. 

The dinosaur, which was discovered in Portugal, is one of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs from the Jurassic and the largest land-predator discovered in Europe.

Lead author Christophe Hendrickx of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Museu of Lourinhã says, “With a skull of 115 cm, Torvosaurus gurneyi was...an active predator that hunted other large dinosaurs, as evidenced by blade shape teeth up to 10 cm."

Mr. Hendrickx says he chose the name because of a childhood fascination with the book that I wrote and illustrated called Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time.

Congratulations to Gurney! And this might be a good time to add that the 20th anniversary edition of the third book in the Dinotopia series, First Flight, comes out April 23. (Full disclosure: Gurney sent me an autographed copy of his fourth Dinotopia book, Journey to Chandara, back in 2007.)

You can read more about the discovery over at NBC News.

New look. New comments policy. Not-so-new book.

Anyone who has visited this blog in the past will notice something different. Yes, Prehistoric Pulp now sports a new logo and a new look. I wanted a design that not only made posts easier to read, but gave me more control over how they appeared on the page. I also felt the previous logo was getting dated.

As for comments, I decided to turn off moderation. I turned it on in an attempt to thwart spammers, but they really haven't been a problem. Your posts should appear instantly now.

I also wanted to draw your attention to an interesting little book that came out in 2012. A Survival Guide: Living with Dinosaurs in the Jurassic Period was penned by geologist Dougal Dixon and is available as a cheap digital download on Amazon.com. It is a nonfiction book, but could prove a valuable resource for anyone writing dinosaur fiction. After all, how many books out there describe which dinosaur parts are best for eating? Here is a short review I wrote for The Miniatures Page last year:

Basically [A Survival Guide] is presented as a straight-forward survival guide, the big difference being it is about how to eek out a living in Jurassic North America - mainly because the time period is fairly well known in the geologic record. If you ever wanted to know which parts of a dinosaur would be best to eat, or how to build a shelter out of sauropod bones, or what ancient plants would be best avoided, then this is the book for you.

The book starts with a general overview of the Jurassic environment, detailing sources of water, the best places to gather the materials needed for basic needs, and the general climate (as it turns out, Jurassic North America was something like a giant desert oasis in that it got little rain but had lots of groundwater). Then it delves into the fauna and flora, spending several chapters on the dinosaurs you might encounter. One thing the author notes: There are a lot of meat eaters. But he points out they may have been fairly specialized in their choice of prey, so larger predators such as Allosaurs may just ignore you. I'm not sure if I buy that: Seems to me no predator would turn away an easy snack if one presented itself.

So, which dinosaurs could you eat? Well, forget sauropods (too big and their muscles are too tough, although their eggs and the soles of their feet might makes great meals). And forget armored dinosaurs such as stegosaurs - too dangerous. Your best bet would be the plant-easting Ornithischians, relatively gentle creatures that ranged from roughly deer-sized to cow-sized. Cut off the head, hands, feet and last two-thirds of the tail, and you have a lot of meat left. The author even delves into how to best cook the different muscle groups.

One thing to note about A Survival Guide – the author assumes you're pretty much dumped into the environment without the convenience of modern tools, so don't expect lengthy passages about what kinds of guns to bring along. Rather, the weapons are ones you can make from the environment. Hint: Learn how to throw a bola.

Let's be honest: Castaway would have been much better if Tom Hanks had been forced to dodge dinosaurs.

When dinosaurs ruled the pulps

Cover art for "The Death of the Moon"
by Alexander Phillips. Image source

Dinosaurs have been a staple of pulp fiction pretty much since the first pulp magazine hit newsstands around the start of the 20th century. Look at Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s seminal work The Lost World, which was first published in Strand Magazine in 1912. The novel was soon followed by a slew of imitators, the most famous being Edgar Rice Burroughs, who would go on to pen The Land That Time Forgot for Blue Book Magazine in 1918. Burroughs’ work would later be republished in Amazing Stories in 1927, this time accompanied by cover art depicting various prehistoric creatures menacing the U-boat of the story.

The Lost World and The Land That Time Forgot are the two most famous examples of paleofiction from the pulps, but there were several lesser-known stories that were just as entertaining. Unfortunately, many of them are now accessible only through microfilm in library collections. As a result, few people will ever get to read Alexander Phillips’ “The Death of the Moon” or Katherine Metcalf Roof’s “A Million Years Later.”

That said, a handful of pulp stories have managed to land on the Internet, thanks to expired copyright protections and the dedication of fans of the genre. Below are links to six of them.

We start with “When Reptiles Ruled” by Duane N. Carroll (1934), the first of three stories here published in Wonder Stories. The tale is told entirely from the perspective of an egg-stealing Struthiominus, making it an early precursor of works like Raptor Red and Walking with Dinosaurs. The story starts on page 76 and is continued on page 116.

The next story is my favorite of the bunch, “One Prehistoric Night” by Philip Barshofsky (1934). Martian invaders attempt to colonize prehistoric Earth only to find the wildlife is more than they bargained for. This is one of the few early dinosaur stories that actually tries to get its science right, placing the right dinosaurs in roughly the right time frame. It’s also a wonderfully gory tale. The story starts on page 54.

Next up is “The Reign of the Reptiles” by A. Connell (1935). The plot concerns a man who is kidnapped by a trio of scientists who want to try out their time machine. He is sent back to the Mesozoic, where he encounters an intelligent race of reptiles experimenting on early humans. Yes, this was just one example of a bad habit in the pulps: Mixing cavemen and dinosaurs together. The story starts on page 8 and is continued on page 109.

We move over to Famous Fantastic Mysteries for the short novel Before the Dawn by John Taine (1934; republished here in 1946). The story is about group of scientists who witness the Age of Dinosaurs using a "time viewer." Also of interest is another short novel by Taine, The Greatest Adventure (1929), which involves the discovery of a lost world in Antarctica and its dinosaur-like inhabitants.

Amazing Stories gives us the next two stories. First is the World War II-era “Blitzkrieg in the Past” by John York Cabot (1942), which is a humorous tale about three U.S. soldiers who are accidentally thrown back in time with their M2 tank. Sadly, despite the dinosaur vs. tank battle we see on the magazine’s cover, the story is largely dinosaur free. It is instead populated by cavemen who are millions of years out of place.

The second story – “The Lost Warship” by Robert Moore Williams (1943) - also was published during World War II, but this time it involves a warship that has been hurdled into the ancient past. This is the only story I haven’t had time to read before posting this list, but glancing over it, the work appears a caveman-and-dinosaur adventure in the spirit of Burroughs.

Out now: "Cryptids" by Alec Nevala-Lee

Sadly, it doesn’t appear we will get any long-form works of paleofiction this year, but we do have one excellent novelette gracing the May cover of Analog Science Fiction & Fact: “Cryptids” by Alec Nevala-Lee.

“Cryptids” is a thriller that will remind some readers of Michael Crichton. Karen Vale is an ornithologist in New Guinea who is about to run out of funding for her field work when she is approached by a biopharmaceutical company with an offer she can’t refuse: The company has taken a keen interest in Pitohui, one of the world’s few poisonous birds. If the company can find out where the bird is ingesting the poison, then it could extract the chemical for its research. The trail leads Vale and her team to an isolated island holding a deadly secret.

That secret is pretty much spoiled by the magazine’s otherwise wonderful cover art, but don’t let that discourage you from picking up the story. The May issue of Analog is now available on newsstands and as a digital download.