Boys and Dinosaur Toys

“I have wrought my simple plan

If I give one hour of joy

To the boy who’s half a man

Or the man who’s half a boy”

The above thought was written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, as a preface to his 1912 novel The Lost World, about an expedition led by the burly, bombastic Professor Challenger to a remote plateau in the Amazon River basin of South America where dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals still exist. Over a hundred years later, Doyle’s sentiment still rings true for boys who never tire of playing with dinosaur toys.

 

One of artist Harry Rountree's original illustrations
for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World

In pop culture, no boy loved dinosaurs more than Calvin, the mischievous six year old in Bill Watterson’s comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” who scarfied popcorn like a Tyrannosaurus rex devouring cavemen, converted his corrugated cardboard Transmogrifier into a flying time machine to photograph dinosaurs (which look oddly like blurry photos of his plastic toys), and imagined the evolutionary advantage of Tyrannosaurs piloting F-14 jets.

What could be more fun than a menagerie of plastic dinosaurs?...
A prehistoric mash-up of T-rex, Stegosaurus, Triceratops and cavemen!

The timeless appeal of dinosaurs, as suggested by amateur paleontologist Donald F. Glut, has a number of factors. Dinosaurs are “monsters” but are safely extinct, allowing for vicarious thrills. They appeal to the imagination, and they appeal to adults nostalgic for what they enjoyed as children.Practically every boy goes through a “dinosaur phase” when he eats, dreams, breathes dinosaurs. Heck, any kid can go see lions, tigers, and bears at a zoo, but dinosaurs are big and scary, dinosaurs do what they want, and they leave really cool skeletons.

Truth told, for thousands of years, humans have found dinosaur fossils and incorporated them into their cultural myths. For instance, the winged griffin of fantastic bestiaries (above) may be based on skeletons found in the Gobi Desert. In China, fossil remains of prehistoric mammals were mistaken for dragon bones and used as aphrodisiacs and as medicine. Fossilized sealife on mountainsides were considered proof of the biblical Flood.

Speaking of the Bible, some creationists believe dinosaurs are mentioned in the Old Testament. Whenever the word “dragon” is used, what is really meant is “dinosaur.” According to creationism, dinosaurs are thousands, not millions, of years old, since Genesis proposes a world only 6000 years old. God created them along with all the other animals. Creationists believe either all dinosaurs indeed fit on Noah’s Ark (which must have been one big boat) or dinosaurs were wiped out by the Flood. All of which proves, in the world of the creationists, that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time: Hello, Fred Flintstone! Then there are creationists who believe that God created dinosaur bones but no dinosaurs to test human will in denying scientific experts. Other creationists will tell you that Satan created dinosaur bones but no dinosaurs to contradict the Bible.

Painstaking scientific study of prehistoric reptiles began in 1820s England. In 1841, biologist-anatomist-paleontologist Sir Richard Owen (above) coined the word “dinosaur,” meaning “terrible reptile.” Owen was the driving force behind the first, large-scale public exhibition of dinosaur reconstructions in the Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park in 1854. Megalosaurus (the first genus of dinosaur to be validly named in 1824) was casually referred to in Charles Dickens’ 1852 novel Bleak House, when the author described London’s “implacable November weather”: “As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard…”

A cartoonist for the London humor magazine Punch offered
this skewed take on the Crystal Palace exhibition in 1855.

Arthur Conan Doyle was not the first imaginative author to conjecture interaction between dinosaurs and humans. In the 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jules Verne depicted a subterranean ocean, surrounded by a rocky coastline covered in petrified trees and giant mushrooms, in which Professor Lidenbrock and his party witness a battle between a giant prehistoric Ichthyosaur and a Plesiosaur. The intrepid explorers also encounter gigantic insects and a herd of mastodons in a primeval forest.

An illustration by Edouard Riou for Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth

In 1914, pulp fiction author Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan of the Apes and John Carter of Mars, penned At the Earth’s Core, the first in a series of fantastical adventures in the “hollow earth” realm of “Pellucidar,” inhabited by primitive peoples and prehistoric animals from various geological eras. Two years later, he cranked out his answer to Doyle’s The Lost World, titled The Land That Time Forgot, where the crew of a lost World War I German U-Boat discovers a tropical anomaly in the Antarctic inhabited by apelike humans and dinosaurs. The book was followed by The People That Time Forgot and Out of Time’s Abyss.

Inspiration for Doyle’s The Lost World came from the author’s friendship with Percy Harrison Fawcett (above), a British artillery officer-archaeologist-explorer whose expedition through nearly impenetrable forests to a remote plateau in Bolivia resulted in the discovery of “monstrous tracks of unknown origin.” Fawcett noted in his memoirs, “Monsters from the dawn of man’s existence might still roam these heights unchallenged (hence the name of Doyle’s Professor Challenger?), imprisoned and protected by unscalable cliffs.” (In 1925, Fawcett led a party of explorers, including his son, who all vanished as they tried to locate the fabled El Dorado, dubbed by Fawcett “Lost City of Z,” in the uncharted jungles of Brazil.)

Doyle was still alive when the silent film version of The Lost World was produced in 1925. In a seeming gesture of approval, he was filmed for a prologue, featuring the aforementioned “I have wrought my simple plan” preface. Wallace Beery - whose career would include an Oscar-winning performance as the tragic heavyweight boxer in the classic 1931 tearjerker “The Champ,” as well as roles as the peg-legged pirate Long John Silver in “Treasure Island” (1934) and as Mexican Revolutionary Pancho Villa in “Viva Villa!” (1934) – vividly enlivens the boorish character of the barrel-chested Professor Challenger (above), but we’d have to say when it comes to scene-stealers, nobody bests the nonstop array of dinosaurs brought to marvelous life by the genius of stop-motion animation pioneer Willis O’Brien (best known for his work on 1933’s “King Kong” and 1949’s “Mighty Joe Young,” which earned him an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects).

O’Brien (above) modeled the prehistoric creatures in “The Lost World” after paintings by then-famed dinosaur illustrator Charles R. Knight.

All the childhood favorites – and then some – parade across the screen: Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, Pterodactyl, Stegosaurus, Allosaurus (derisively dismissed by Challenger as “the most vicious pest in the ancient world”), and Brontosaurus (now accurately identified as Apatosaurus), the latter of which is transported live to London, where, foreshadowing the fate of O’Brien’s King Kong, it breaks free and runs amok through the fog-enshrouded city before collapsing Tower Bridge and swimming away in the River Thames.  (Filmmakers eschewed Doyle’s subplot of a conflict between the plateau’s indigenous people and a tribe of vicious apelike men.)

A prehistoric postman delivers the mail in Willis O'Brien's "R.F.D. 10,000 B.C."

Willis O’Brien later collaborated with the Thomas A. Edison Studio on a series of wholly stop-motion animated shorts, predecessors of Plasticene claymation, tossing goofy cave people and dinosaurs together in what he called “Mannakin Comedies,” among them “The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy” (1915), “R.F.D. 10,000 B.C.” (1916), and “Prehistoric Poultry” (1917).

In 1914, American cartoonist Winsor McCay, the creator of the popular early 20^th-century comic strip “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” made the earliest animated film about a dinosaur, a likable Apatosaurus (then called Brontosaurus) named “Gertie” who capriciously reacts to McCay’s offscreen commands. At the end of the 12-minute short (above), Gertie places the human McCay on her back and marches happily out of view.  An unfinished 1921 sequel, “Gertie on Tour,” depicted the precocious sauropod toying with a modern-day trolley.

An Allosaurus threatens cave people in D.W. Grffith's "Brute Force" (1914).

Silent comedy greats Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton took their turns portraying slapstick cavemen, in, respectively, “His Prehistoric Past” (1914) and “The Three Ages” (1914), while D.W. Griffith, the legendary filmmaker responsible for the controversial silent screen epics “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) and “Intolerance” (1916), made perhaps the first live-action picture combining cave-dwelling humans with dinosaurs in 1914’s “Brute Force,” otherwise known as “Primitive Man.”

In 1932, V.T. Hamlin, an Iowa-born veteran of World War I who survived a poison gas attack in France, created the newspaper comic strip “Alley Oop” (above), a stone hammer-wielding caveman who lives  in the prehistoric land of Moo with his girlfriend Oola (modeled after Hamlin’s high school sweetheart and wife) and pet dinosaur Dinny. Hamlin drew the comic strip for four decades, and it continues to appear in more than 600 newspapers.

During 1940, Fleischer Studios, the animation studio that had brought Betty Boop, Popeye the Sailor, and Superman to the screen, produced a series of a dozen “Stone Age Cartoons,” throwing cave people and dinosaurs together in prehistoric takes on contemporary society, much like the later “Flintstones,” the first animated sitcom to air on prime-time television. (It was no secret that Hanna-Barbera’s “The Flintstones” was inspired by Jackie Gleason’s beloved working-class sitcom “The Honeymooners,” and Gleason allegedly considered suing Hanna-Barbera but decided he didn’t want to be known as “the guy who yanked Fred Flintstone off the air.”)

Looney Tunes offered dinosaur mix-ups like (left) "Daffy and the Dinosaur"
(1939) and (right) "Prehistoric Porky" (1940).

Cartoonist Johnny Hart (who, like your humble chronicler in the Moviehouse, was born in Endicott, New York) created the popular comic strip “B.C.” – depicting a community of cave people and anthropomorphic dinosaurs, flightless birds, and ants – in 1958. Hart, who also co-created “The Wizard of Id” (in 1964), died at his drawing board in April 2007. His daughter and grandsons continued the comic strip.

When producer-director Irwin Allen – who created a number of popular science-fiction TV series in the 1960s (“Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” “Lost in Space,” “The Time Tunnel,” “Land of the Giants”) before producing box-office hit disaster flicks (“The Poseidon Adventure,” “The Towering Inferno”) – remade “The Lost World” in 1960 for 20^th Century Fox, he recruited the 74-year-old Willis O’Brien as a special effects consultant. Sadly, Allen’s budget didn’t allow for the expensive and time-consuming process of stop-motion animation. Instead, dinosaurs were depicted by monitor lizards, iguanas, baby alligators, and geckos, adorned with glued-on rubber fins, horns, and frills and filmed in slow-motion close-ups on miniaturized sets, while poor old O’Brien prepared drawings and paintings that were never used. “They claim that the ‘live’ technique looks smoother,” he grumbled, “that animation is jerky. I don’t think so.” The fact that his name still appeared in the credits for the remake only aggravated his wound.

Jill St. John seems oblivious to the lumbering slurpasaurus
in Irwin Allen's 1960 remake of "The Lost World."

After this sour experience, O’Brien saw his recent idea of pitting his most famous creation, King Kong, against a gigantic Frankenstein monster taken over by a Japanese studio to become “King Kong vs. Godzilla,” and he was hired for one last special effects gig, a thankless assignment of animating the characters in “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” dangling from a broken fire escape and tossed about atop an out-of-control fire engine’s turntable ladder.

That cannot be comfortable...This unfortunate surpasaur is hoisted on a wire
to depict a bipedal dinosaur in "The Lost World" (1960).

The cut-rate method of optically enlarging reptiles fitted with plastic appendages to masquerade as dinosaurs in 1960’s “The Lost World”– which 20^th Century Fox had found satisfactory enough to make the previous year’s screen adaptation of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (starring James Mason and Pat Boone) a box-office success - earned the creatures their own name in moviemaking lore, “Slurpasaurs.”

A slurpasaur pesters Victor Mature and Carole Landis
in "One Million B.C." (1940).

Most popularly, slurpasaurs took center stage in 1940’s “One Million B.C.,” the caveman-meets-dinosaur saga of a Rock Tribe brute (Victor Mature) and a Shell Tribe flower child (Carole Landis), directed by Hal Roach (better known for working with Laurel and Hardy and The Little Rascals than with dinosaurs) and Hal Roach Jr.

Oh, there is an elephant in a silly wig passing as a woolly mammoth (above), a pig in a triceratops costume, and a man in a rubber T-rex suit, but the all too-evident mistreatment of real reptiles – monitor lizards, baby alligators, and iguanas with rubber prosthetics prodded to battle each other, buried under rock cascades, even set on fire – raised the ire of  the American Society of Cruelty to Animals.

The task of bringing dinosaurs to life in the 1966 reboot of "One Million B.C." - "One Million Years B.C." -- fell to Ray Harryhausen (above), who was hired as a protégé of Willis O’Brien on the Oscar-winning visual effects for “Mighty Joe Young” in 1949. In 1953, Harryhausen worked on his first solo assignment, “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” based on a short story by Harryhausen’s lifelong friend, Ray Bradbury.

Ray Harryhausen's dinosaur-that-never-was, the fictional Rhedosaurus,
rampages through New York City in "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" (1953).

Harryhausen’s singularly independent artistry as master of stop-motion animation came to the forefront in the back-to-back film fantasies “The 7^th Voyage of Sinbad” (1958), “The Three Worlds of Guliver” (1960), “Mysterious Island” (1961), and “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963).

The first prehistoric reptile seen in “One Million Years B.C.” is (surprise!) a slurpasaur (above), but that could be because Harryhausen had a trick or two up his sleeve. Perhaps he was tipping his hat to the quaint special effects of the 1940 original, or, more likely, he was just setting the audience up for the jaw-dropping array of animated wonders to come, including a cantankerous giant sea turtle, an avaricious Allosaurus, and an aerial dogfight between rival flying reptiles.

Tumak (John Richardson) defends the Shell People
from an Allosaurus in "One Million Years B.C."

Harryhausen stages a show-stopping, earth-shaking battle royal between a horn-nosed Ceratosaurus and a Triceratops, matched only by the live-action, hair-tugging catfight between animal skin bikini-clad cavewomen Raquel Welch and Martine Beswick (below), which brings a whole new meaning to “Homo erectus.”

“One Million Years B.C.” was so popular that the production company, Hammer Film, launched a series of movies featuring scantily clad cave women and prehistoric creatures, beginning with “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth” (1970). Sir James Carreras, the founder and production executive at Hammer, personally searched for a new starlet to rival Raquel Welch. He chose 25-year-old Victoria Vetri (below), who (as Angela Dorian) was Playboy’s 1968 Playmate of the Year.

The disyllabic caveman language in "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth"
was supposedly based on Phoenician, Latin, and Sanskrit sources...Uh-huh.

Written and directed by Val Guest (best known for the 1950s cult science fiction films “The Quatermass Xperiment” and “The Abominable Snowman”), from a treatment by J.G. Ballard (author of the semiautobiographical novel Empire of the Sun), “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth” featured stop-motion effects by Jim Danforth, whose credits included “Jack the Giant Killer” (1962), “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm,” and “7 Faces of Dr. Lao” (1964). There is, unfortunately, a tussle between two slurpasaurs as well as a ridiculous rubber man-eating plant, but among the dinosaurs Danforth brought to life was a charmingly sympathetic, four-footed carnivore, a fanciful, nonexistent species with more than a passing resemblance to the fictional “Rhedosaurus” created by Ray Harryhausen for “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.” Danforth eventually worked with his idol, Harryhausen, animating the winged horse Pegasus in the original, 1981 “Clash of the Titans.”

“When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth” was, basically, the beginning and end of the screen career for Victoria Vetri, who got off on the wrong foot with the filmmakers when she refused to dye her hair blonde and instead wore a wig. Director Guest would remember her as “a real nothing, and a very strange mixed-up lady…It was tough to take her. She was…a nitwit.” In October 2010, Vetri shot her husband of 24 years and pleaded no contest to attempted voluntary manslaughter. In 2011, she was sentenced to nine years in prison.

Unlike Raquel Welch before her, Victoria Vetri doffed her Stone Age bikini
for a love scene in "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth" (1970).

By 1971, Hammer Film, tightening its purse strings, eschewed any dinosaur effects for the misnomered “Creatures the World Forgot,” directed by Don Chaffey (“One Million Years B.C.”). However, writer-producer Michael Carreras, son of studio boss James Carreras, did not forego the box-office attraction of half-naked Cro-Magnon pinups when he cast Norwegian model Julie Ege as the film’s fair-haired cave girl-in-peril. Ege, a former Miss Norway, Miss Universe, and Penthouse Pet, who had made her big-screen debut as “The Scandinavian Girl” in the1969 James Bond adventure “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (featuring George Lazenby as Sean Connery’s onetime 007 replacement), retired from acting and was working as a nurse in Oslo before she succumbed to breast and lung cancer in1998 at age 64.

Julie Ege in "Creatures the World Forgot" (1971)

Senta Berger, an Austrian-born theater and film actress-turned-chanteuse-turned-author-and-producer best known to American audiences for her role opposite Charlton Heston in director Sam Peckinpah’s 1965 western “Major Dundee,” starred as a half-naked cavewoman in 1970’s “When Women Had Tails.” On the website Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings, Dave Sindelar remarked, “This is the best Italian caveman sex comedy with a score by Ennio Morricone that I’ve ever seen.” Unfortunately, as noted by Sindelar, “There are no dinosaurs in this movie…There is a camel and a man in a bear suit even worse than the one used in ‘Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.’” The inevitable sequel, “When Women Lost Their Tails,” at least had Senta living inside a dinosaur skeleton.

Senta Berger, the star of "When Women Had Tails" (1970)

A decade after livening up “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth” with his animated, precocious prehistoric beasts, Jim Danforth was hired to design the dinosaurs for the 1981 Mel Brooksian comedy “Caveman,” starring Ringo Starr and Barbara Bach. Rudy De Luca, a veteran TV comedy writer who worked with Brooks on the screenplays for “Silent Movie,” “High Anxiety,” “Life Stinks,” and “Dracula: Dead and Loving It,” and wrote and directed the 1985 comedic misfire “Transylvania 6-5000,” scripted “Caveman” with the film’s director, Carl Gottlieb. Gottlieb, who directed the 1977 Oscar-nominated live action short “The Absent-Minded Waiter,” written by and featuring Steve Maritn, contributed to the screenplays for “Jaws” and “The Jerk.”

Barbara Bach as the alluring Lana in "Caveman" (1981)
...Best known as Bond girl Anya in the 1977 film "The Spy
Who Loved Me," Bach married Ringo Starr a year after
they first met on the set of "Caveman."

Apart from his appearances in The Beatles’ films “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!’ Ringo Starr’s eclectic screen roles included a sexually curious Mexican gardener in “Candy,” a Mexican bandido named Candy in the spaghetti western “Blindman,” a homeless orphan adopted by billionaire Peter Sellers in “The Magic Christian,” and Pope Pius X in “Lisztomania,” but he was never so disarmingly likable as he was as Atouk in “Caveman” – a schlemiel haplessly in love with Lana (Barbara Bach), the skin-deep beauty of his tribe, already claimed as the prize of alpha male Tonda, a brainless hulk masterfully played by the late, great NFL Oakland Raiders defensive end John Matuszak.

Like most of our Stone Age protagonists, Atouk finds himself banished from his tribe, only to fall in with a motley collection of misfits, including Dennis Quaid (in a dimwitted characterization that would have been more appropriate for his goofball older brother, Randy Quaid), Shelley Long, and Jack Gilford. Together, they confront hungry dinosaurs; discover fire, cooking, music, and mind-altering drugs; learn how to poach a pterodactyl egg and how to walk upright.

Besides designing the dinosaurs, including a pudgy, stoned T-rex (above), Jim Danforth was originally going to be credited as co-director with Carl Gottlieb, but he left “Caveman” in mid-production when the Directors Guild of America prohibited his onscreen credit. The hands-on stop-motion animation was done by David Allen, Sneaky Pete Kleinow, and Randall W. Cook, the latter a three-time Oscar winner as part of the visual effects team on the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

It’s high time in the Moviehouse to set history – or prehistory – right. The last dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. Humans, or, at least primitive hominids, have been around for only three million years. Do the math and one comes up with a gap of 62 million years between the exit of dinosaurs and the entrance of human beings.

The time has come, as well, to reconsider the awe and wonder of the prehistoric megafauna that shared the Earth with the earliest humans – giant mammals, birds, and sealife that rivaled the mightiest dinosaurs in size and ferocity, from nine-feet-long saber-toothed salmon to ten-feet-tall, flightless “terror birds,” to 15-feet tall, 20-ton hornless rhinos – the largest land mammals ever.

In the 1870s, before dinosaur exhibits became popular, skeletal remains of huge, extinct mammals – the likes of woolly mammoths and giant sloths – drew the masses in museums worldwide. By the 1890s, however, fossil quarries in the American Midwest began to provide complete dinosaur remains, which were publicly displayed in the opening decades of the 20^th century, Add the appeal of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, and from then on, dinosaur skeletons took center stage in natural history museums, while the giant mammals were relegated to dusty museum basements and remote, forgotten wings. Much as they were on the motion picture screen…

…That is, until recently. 1981’s “Quest for Fire,” based on an obscure 1911 Belgian novel, depicts the struggle for the creation and control of fire among vastly different subspecies of human coexisting in Paleolithic Europe 80,000 years ago.

Ron Perlman, Everett McGill, Nameer El-Kadi,
Rae Dawn Chong in "Quest for Fire" (1981)

Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud (whose pictures include “The Name of the Rose,” “The Bear,” and “Enemy at the Gates”) and shot on breathtaking locations in British Colombia, Scotland, and Kenya, the mesmerizing film featured Everett McGill (familiar to fans of David Lynch for his roles in the 1984 movie “Dune” and in the early ‘90s TV series “Twin Peaks”), scene-stealing, Turkish-born Nameer El-Kadi (now known as Nicholas Kadi), and, in his film debut, Ron Perlman (destined for small-screen fame as the star of “Beauty and the Beast” and “Sons of Anarchy,” as well as big-screen cultdom as the star of “Hellboy”) as the intrepid Neanderthals in search of the elusive, life-preserving flame.

On their trek into terra incognita, they get treed by saber-toothed cats (SPOILER ALERT: saber-toothed tiger is a misnomer) and rescue a naked Cro-Magnon girl (played by 19-year-old Rae Dawn Chong, daughter of Tommy Chong, of Cheech & Chong comedy renown) from a tribe of cannibalistic hominids. A couple of decades later, on the film’s DVD commentary, Chong reminisced, “In fact, I liked being naked,” and Ron Perlman chimed in, “I’ve been asked to thank you from the entire crew.”

In one of the film’s most powerful moments, Everett McGill’s character boldly confronts a herd of imposing woolly mammoths (“portrayed” by a troupe of circus elephants elaborately adorned with extensive fur overcoats and prosthetic tusks) with a handful of brush, singlehandedly bonding with the towering behemoths, which, in turn – like the cavalry in an old-fashioned western – rush in to rescue the Neanderthal pilgrims from the clan of man-eaters.

Overlooking its misplaced message of female empowerment personified by the anachronistically beautiful Daryl Hannah as a prehistoric proto-feminist, “The Clan of the Cave Bear” (1986), at least, attempted to authentically represent contemporary wildlife, including the long-extinct cave lion and cave bear.

And then there were the impressive computer-generated woolly mammoths in 2008’s “10,000 BC” (above), writer-producer-director Roland Emmerich’s jigsaw puzzle of all things prehistoric, geographic, anthropologic, zoographic, and archaeological.  Criticized for playing fast and loose with facts, addle-brained auteur Emmerich maintains he’s “a filmmaker not a scientist” who provides “popcorn entertainment” by creating his own science and history. A.V. Club’s Keith Phipps acknowledged Emmerich for summoning “up a dead world, only to kill it again.”

In his review of the otherwise interminably boring reboot of director John Ford’s beloved western “The Searchers,” Rolling Stone magazine writer Peter Travers observed the picture’s “best acting comes from digital creatures,” including the aforementioned mammoths, flora-stomping, flesh-eating terror birds and a cuddly saber-toothed lion-tiger-hybrid reenacting the classic Aesop fable of the lion and the mouse (below).

Many megafauna species became extinct, dying off – along with primitive human species - as glaciers dominated North America and Eurasia and modern humans expanded out of Africa and southern Asia in the Late Pleistocene Age 11,700 years ago. Causes of their extinction have been attributed to climactic changes, disease, hunting by spreading Homo sapiens, even an impact from an asteroid or comet, which had sealed the fate of dinosaurs before them.

Not surprisingly, many people have suggested that some megafauna and other prehistoric species still exist, hidden in remote reaches of the Earth, waiting to be found, bringing us back full circle to The Lost World of Arthur Conan Doyle. For example, coelacanth, a fish thought to have been extinct for millions of years, was caught off the coast of South Africa in 1938.

From the 19^th century into the early 20^th century, there were reports of a bear-like beast – dubbed the “Nandi bear” – living in the forests of western Kenya, which cryptozoologists think could belong to a lost population of Chalicotherium (above), a large, knuckle-walking herbivore distantly related to ground sloths believed to have gone extinct over three million years ago.

There are those who believe sightings of sea serpents might be living examples of Basilosaurus (above), a prehistoric, shark-eating whale, while some people maintain woolly mammoths still roam Siberia. The giant ground sloth Megatherium roamed the plains of South America until only a few thousand years ago; in the 1890s, an explorer reported close encounters with such a creature in Patagonia.

Last but not least, surviving Neanderthals are held by some to be responsible for sightings of Yeti (abominable snowmen) in the Himalayas of Nepal and Tibet.