SOURCE: "The Last Haunt of the Dinosaur"(The English Illustrated Magazine, 1908) by Henry Francis

DESCRIPTION: "As the light increased, they followed the tracks, when emerging into the open a terrible sight was revealed. On a rock, about two hundred yards distant, in a glade of the forest and overhanging the stream, a horrible looking monster, with a body like an enormous rat, a tail like an alligator, with a long neck and head like a python, was tearing to pieces and devouring their late comrade. Somers took a deliberate aim and fired at the creature, which merely looked up, and, as if not liking the noise of the gun's report, carried the remainder of the unhappy negro's body in its mouth, and sliding off the rock into a pool of water formed by the stream, disappeared from sight." ("The Last Haunt of the Dinosaur" by Henry Francis)

NOTES: Two Englishmen go to Africa to find fossils and shoot antelope. There they hear of the"Valley of Death" where a mosnter eats anyone who ventures there. Visiting the place they find a dinosaur who eats one of their bearers then wounds the two whites in a fight. The thick skin of the dinosaur can not be pierced by rifle bullets. They succeed in blinding the creature but I escapes into a lake. The Englishmen return home and correct their drawings of dinosaurs.

HISTORY: This story may have inspired Valley of the Gwangi (1967). The dinosaur is, of course, hugely inaccurate but not so bad as Hyne's "The Lizard". The dinosaur sounds like a brontosaur, a vegetarian, not a meat-eater. The author makes the dinosaur violence crunchy and gory (a future echo of Jurassic Park).

Ray Harryhausen's Gwangi