SOURCE:
"The Lizard" by C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne (The Strand, February 1898)

DESCRIPTION:"Its body was about the bigness of two horses. Its head
was curiously short, but the mouth opened back almost to the forearm; and sprouting from the nose were two enormous feelers, or antennae, each at least 6 ft. long, and tipped with fleshy tendrils like fingers, which opened and shut tremulously. Its four legs were jointless, and ended in mere club-feet, or callosities; its tail was long, supple, and fringed on the top with a saw-like row of scales. In colour, it was a bright grass-green, all except the feelers, which were of a livid blue. But mere words go poorly for a description, and the beast was outside the vocabulary of today. It conveyed, somehow or other, a horrible sense of deformity, which made one physically ill to look upon it. But worst of all was the musky smell. That increased till it became well-nigh unendurable, and though I half-strangled myself to suppress a sound, I had to yield at last and give my feelings
vent. The beast heard me. I could not see that it had any ears, but anyway it distinctly heard me. Worse, it hobbled round clumsily with its jointless legs, and waved its feelers in my direction. I could not make out that it had any eyes—anyway, they did not show distinct from the rough skin of its head; its sensitiveness seemed to lie in those fathom-long feelers and in the fleshy fingers which twitched and grappled at the end of them.
Then it opened its great jaws—which hinged, as I said, down by the forearm—and yawned
cavernously, and came towards me. It seemed to have no trace of fear or hesitation. It hobbled clumsily on, exhibiting its monstrous deformity in every movement, and preceded always by those hateful feelers which seemed to be endued with an impish activity.
For a while I stayed in my place, too paralysed by horror at this awful thing I had dragged up from the forgotten dead, to move or breathe. But then one of its livid blue feelers—a hard, armoured thing like a lobster’s—touched me, and the fleshy fingers at the end of it pawed my face and burned me like nettles. I leaped into movement again. The beast was hungry after its fast of ten million years; it was trying to make me its prey: those fearful jaws..." ("The Lizard" by C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne)

NOTES: The legs and tentacles of the lizard are features that show its inchoate nature, being an early form of life.

HISTORY: This story is one of the earliest dinosaur tales. Hyne gets a few ideas wrong of course. The legs of the lizard are stumps and it possesses hand-like tentacles. He did not understand that a primitive form of life need not be unsophisticated. All the same, a fun adventure story and a cool monster.

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