Discovering the Living Fossil Short Story in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The founders of cryptozoology in the 1950s implied that their objects of investigation, animals elsewhere presumed mythical or extinct, were beyond respectable science. Back in the late eight-eenth century, Thomas Jefferson had been by no means idiosyncratic in believing that American fossils represented living animals. The subsequent near-consensus regarding extinction was, more-over, complicated in the mid-nineteenth century by evidence that early humans lived alongside mammoths, and by views that myths about monsters were based on human encounters with prehistoric creatures. Such creatures were soon incorporated into a genre of short horror stories. The origin of this familiar genre has rarely been considered in detail. Firstly, I explain, in a transatlantic context, why the ‘living fossil short story’ emerged when it did. Next, I argue that these stories displayed simultaneous urges, firstly, to disturb the natural order by putting the monstrous inhabitants of deep time in contact with contemporary humans, and secondly, to interrogate the directionality of nature by asking whether manly, modern St Georges can return these animals to extinction. I focus on two key examples written by American authors: Charles Jacobs Peterson’s ‘The Last Dragon’ (1871) and Wardon Allan Curtis’s ‘The Monster of Lake LaMetrie’ (1899).