The Pirates Don’t Eat The Tourists: Jurassic Park & Prehistoric Fiction

In 1912 Arthur Conan Doyle dragged four men to the far edge of the map and brought Dinosaurs back to reality! The Lost World is the first major work to put dinosaurs, rather than marine reptiles, at the centre of prehistoric fiction, and it remains the book that comes out on top whenever I ask a guest for their favourite.
I am joined by Richard Fallon, research associate in natural history humanities at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge, author of Contesting Earth’s History and currently editing a new scholarly edition of the novel. He has read it roughly twelve times, six of those in the last year alone!
Richard takes me through Edwardian palaeontology, the arrival of Dippy the Diplodocus, and the real men behind Challenger, Summerlee, Malone and Roxton. We get into the fake photographs and Doyle’s ambition to publish the whole thing as a hoax, the Piltdown Man connection, and what the manuscript gives away about Roxton’s voice. And we finish on the novel’s colonial logic, its homosocial heart, and the one illustration of Central Lake that Doyle cared about more than any other.
Guest
Richard Fallon
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/richardfallon.bsky.social
Cambridge profile: https://www.esc.cam.ac.uk/staff/dr-richard-fallon
Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences: https://www.sedgwickmuseum.org
The Book: The Lost World (1912)
Project Gutenberg, free, and the text Richard reads from in this episode
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/139
Richard’s books
Creatures of Another Age: Classic Visions of Prehistoric Monsters, Valancourt Books 2021 (affiliate link)
https://amzn.eu/d/07x8bkXX
Contesting Earth’s History in Transatlantic Literary Culture, 1860-1935, Oxford University Press 2025 (affiliate link)
https://amzn.to/4gbXuUD
Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature, Cambridge University Press 2021 (affiliate link)
https://amzn.to/4wysYdo
Richard’s writing, free online
Professor Megalow’s Dinosaur Bones: Richard Owen and Victorian Literature, The Public Domain Review.
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/richard-owen-and-victorian-literature/
Seen through Deep Time: Occult Clairvoyance and Palaeoscientific Imagination, Journal of Victorian Culture
https://academic.oup.com/jvc/article/28/2/143/6759198
Richard on his own book, Making Science Public blog
https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2025/04/03/contesting-earths-history/
Links
E. Ray Lankester, Extinct Animals (1905), Doyle’s key source and the book Challenger quotes at Malone. Free on Internet Archive
https://archive.org/details/extinctanimals1905lank
Allen A. Debus, Dinosaurs in Fantastic Fiction: A Thematic Survey (affiliate link)
https://amzn.to/4fCoPPH
The Lost World (1925) Free to watch on Internet Archive
https://archive.org/details/TheLostWorldCompleteVideoQualityUpgrade
Next time: a tribute to Sam Neill with James Mottram, 19 August.
Send a message to the show. Questions, corrections, favourite dinosaurs
Support the show
If you enjoy the show then it would mean a lot to me if you could rate & review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps this show find more Jurassic fans like you!
Presented and produced by Roland Squire
Theme music: Caleb Burnett (@calebcomposed)
Cover artwork: @thejurassicartist
Find us: @JurassicPiratesPod on Instagram

Can searching the rocks for sea dragons bring you back from the worst day of your life? In this week's episode I swap the underground for the shoreline with fossil hunter Matthew Myerscough, whose story starts with an avalanche on Yr Wyddfa and leads to the ancient seas of the Severn shores. Along the way we talk about Mary Anning and the two kinds of time travel, a plesiosaur paddle rescued from a Somerset boulder in fifteen pieces, and the fifty million dollar T. rex that sold at auction the very day we recorded.
For the first time ever, you can also watch this conversation on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Guests
Matthew Myerscough
@severn.sea.fossils
The Book
In Search of Sea Dragons: A Fossil Hunter's Odyssey - buy direct from Seren Books
@serenbooks
Links
Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem (affiliate link) - the book that inspired Matthew to write his own
National Museum Cardiff - new home of the Lavernock pliosaur jaw
Guided fossil walks for beginners:
Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre 
Fossilwise guided walks, Lyme Regis - https://www.fossilwise.com/
Whitby fossil hunting guide - https://www.visitwhitby.com/blog/great-tips-finding-whitby-fossils/
Wight Coast Fossils (Isle of Wight) - https://wightcoastfossils.co.uk/fossilwalks/
The Fossil Collecting Code - https://charmouth.org/chcc/the-fossil-collecting-code/

Next time: The Lost World with Richard Fallon - Wednesday 5th August
Send a message to the show. Questions, corrections, favourite dinosaurs
Support the show
If you enjoy the show then it would mean a lot to me if you could rate & review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps this show find more Jurassic fans like you!
Presented and produced by Roland Squire
Theme music: Caleb Burnett (@calebcomposed)
Cover artwork: @thejurassicartist
Find us: @JurassicPiratesPod on Instagram

In this weeks episode I head underground with The Lost Valley’s Cian Gill to trace how Jules Verne turns geology, ciphers and sheer wonder became the template for every lost world adventure. Along the way we talk about deep time dread, dodgy Victorian translations, and the sea-dragon spectacle that still makes modern monster stories work.

Guests
Cian Gill
@the.lost.valley
Congo Book Episode 
Congo Movie Episode

The Book
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
F.A. Malleson 1877 Translation
Oxford World Classics - William Butcher Translation (affiliate link)
Penguin Classics - Frank Wynne Translation (affiliate link)
The Ladybird Classics Edition (the one with the music!)

Links 
Richard Fallon’s ‘Creatures from Another Age’  (affiliate link)
Alan A. Debus’s ‘Dinosaurs in Fantastic Fiction’ (affiliate link)
Tales from the Hollow Earth with Dr. Eddie Guimont - Wide Atlantic Weird Podcast (Cian’s other show and well worth a listen!)
Send a message to the show. Questions, corrections, favourite dinosaurs
Support the show
If you enjoy the show then it would mean a lot to me if you could rate & review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps this show find more Jurassic fans like you!
Presented and produced by Roland Squire
Theme music: Caleb Burnett (@calebcomposed)
Cover artwork: @thejurassicartist
Find us: @JurassicPiratesPod on Instagram

Dinosaurs are real, which is exactly why they are so hard to write. Humans never lived alongside them, so any prehistoric fiction that wants characters, conflict, and drama has to cheat time, bend geography, or invent new science. I’m joined by Adam Roberts, professor of nineteenth-century literature at Royal Holloway and a leading critic of science fiction, to unpack how writers solve that problem and what those solutions reveal about our fears and fantasies.

The Book List:
Jules Verne – Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Arthur Conan Doyle – The Lost World
Edgar Rice Burroughs – The Land That Time Forgot Trilogy
Ray Bradbury – A Sound of Thunder
Anne McCaffrey – Dinosaur Planet
Harry Adam Knight – Carnosaur
Michael Crichton – Jurassic Park / The Lost World
James Gurney – Dinotopia
Greg Bear – Dinosaur Summer
Robert T. Bakker – Raptor Red
Stephen Baxter – Evolution
Ethan Pettus – Primitive War
Lee Murray – Into the Mist
Guests
Adam Roberts
@adamroberts.bsky.social
https://profadamroberts.substack.com/
(Affiliate links below)
The History of Science Fiction - https://amzn.eu/d/0g4lGWhJ
Pre Order ‘Frankenstein Rex’ - https://amzn.eu/d/09joNsmM
Pre Order ‘An A-Z of J.R.R Tolkien’ - https://amzn.eu/d/0bjirGu0
Send a message to the show. Questions, corrections, favourite dinosaurs
Support the show
If you enjoy the show then it would mean a lot to me if you could rate & review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps this show find more Jurassic fans like you!
Presented and produced by Roland Squire
Theme music: Caleb Burnett (@calebcomposed)
Cover artwork: @thejurassicartist
Find us: @JurassicPiratesPod on Instagram

The Natural History Museum is the most visited attraction in the UK, and almost nobody looks up.

In this episode I walk through the museum as two things at once: a beloved London landmark, and a working scientific institution with hundreds of researchers behind the galleries. We start in the cathedral-like main hall and work outward, taking in the terracotta animals hidden in the stonework, the Darwin myths that refuse to die, Hope the blue whale, and Dippy the Diplodocus, whose arrival in 1905 kicked off British dinosaur fever.
Along the way we get into Hans Sloane and the British Museum roots, Richard Owen’s ambition to build a temple to nature, and what the museum is planning for its 150th anniversary.

Guests
Alastair Hendry
Tom Luker

Links
Natural History Museum: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/
Send a message to the show. Questions, corrections, favourite dinosaurs
Support the show
If you enjoy the show then it would mean a lot to me if you could rate & review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps this show find more Jurassic fans like you!
Presented and produced by Roland Squire
Theme music: Caleb Burnett (@calebcomposed)
Cover artwork: @thejurassicartist
Find us: @JurassicPiratesPod on Instagram