Sussex Iguanodon Footprints and the Writing of The Lost World
Sussex Iguanodon Footprints and the Writing of The Lost World is an article written by Dana Batory & William A. S. Sarjeant published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 8, 1998).
This article argues that Conan Doyle's discovery of dinosaur footprints near Crowborough in 1909 helped inspire The Lost World, and it reconstructs the scientific and literary context of that influence. It also traces how the novel drew on palaeontology, museum expertise, and later misidentifications of the tracks, linking Sussex fossil evidence to the writing and illustration history of the book.
Sussex Iguanodon Footprints
'Look at this!' said [Lord John Roxton]. 'By George, this must be the trail of the father of all birds!'
An enormous three-toed track was imprinted in the soft mud before us. The creature, whatever it was, had crossed the swamp and had passed on into the forest. We all stopped to examine that monstrous spoor. If it were indeed a bird-and what animal could leave such a mark?—its foot was so much larger than an ostrich's that its height upon the same scale must be enormous. Lord John looked eagerly round him and slipped two cartridges into his elephant-gun.
'I'll stake my good name as a shikaree,' said he, 'that the track is a fresh one. The creature has not passed ten minutes. Look how the water is still oozing into that deeper print! By Jove! See, here is the mark of a little one!'
Sure enough, smaller tracks of the same general form were running parallel to the large ones.
'But what do you make of this?' cried Professor Summerlee triumphantly, pointing to what looked like the huge print of a five-fingered human hand appearing among the three-toed marks.
'Wealden!' cried Challenger, in an ecstasy. 'I've seen them in the Wealden clay. It is a creature walking erect upon three-toed feet, and occasionally putting one of its five-fingered fore-paws upon the ground. Not a bird, my dear Roxton-not a bird.'
'A beast?'
'No; a reptile — a dinosaur. Nothing else could have left such a track. They puzzled a worthy Sussex doctor some ninety years ago; but who in the world could have hoped-hoped-to have seen a sight like that?'
This passage of intelligent ichnological deduction is to be found in the tenth chapter of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic adventure story The Lost World (1912), a story in which four Englishmen climb to the summit of an isolated South American plateau in circa 1907 and discover that it is still populated by dinosaurs, pterodactyls, apemen and cavemen. Perhaps more than any other book, this work has stimulated the imagination of young persons interested in fossils and has served as a dream wish-fulfillment even for professional palaeontologists.
The passage is somewhat misleading, for the good Sussex doctor must have been Gideon Algernon Mantell (1790-1852), who described and named Iguanodon not from footprints, but from bones. The first discoverer of the footprints of that dinosaur was a Sussex clergyman, the Reverend Edward Tagart, who mistook them for those of giant birds (see Sarjeant 1974, p. 347-8, Fig. 31). Challenger was correct, however, in interpreting the behaviour of Iguanodon. While imprints of the hind foot (pes) of this dinosaur are common, those of its forefoot (manus) have not yet been reported with certainty (see discussion in Lockley 1985, p. 3-135, 3-136). For the adventurers, Lord John's deduction was soon to be shown wrong, and Professor Challenger's correct:
- There were ... five of them, two being adults and three young ones. In size they were enormous. Even the babies were as big as elephants, while the two large ones were far beyond all creatures I have ever seen. They had slate-coloured skin, which was scaled like a lizard's and shimmered where the sun shone upon it. All five were sitting up, balancing themselves upon their broad powerful tails and their huge three-toed hind feet, while with their small five-fingered front feet they pulled down the branches upon which they browsed. I do not know that I can bring their appearance home to you better than by saying that they looked like monstrous kangaroos, twenty feet in length, and with skins like black crocodiles.
- 'Iguanodons,' said Summerlee. 'You'll find their footmarks all over the Hastings sands, in Kent, and in Sussex. The South of England was alive with them when there was plenty of good lush green-stuff to keep them going. Conditions have changed, and the beasts died. Here it seems that the conditions have not changed, and the beasts have lived.'
What a pleasure, to have one's ichnological deductions so immediately confirmed-though we might be surprised to find slate-coloured reptiles dwelling in such lush green forests.
During Conan Doyle's lifetime (1859-1930), the earlier age, when voyages of discovery were motivated by the desire for profit, was giving way to a newer one, when a developing intellectual curiosity was causing a much more searching examination of the environments and inhabitants of the freshly discovered lands. Profit had ceased to be the sole motivation for investigation; knowledge was coming to be valued in its own right, as an enlargement of the horizons of humankind. Already a succession of scientists-Alexander von Humboldt, Alcide d'Orbigny, Thomas Huxley, Joseph Dalton Hooker, and Charles Darwin were just a few of them had, by making original observations in such lands, laid solid foundations for their scientific careers.
Yet scientific investigation in wild places involved considerable dangers. The archaeologists Frederick Catherwood and John Lloyd Stephens, hacking their way through Central American jungles; the zoologists Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace, paddling dugout canoes through Amazonian jungles in the quest for new insects; the scientific polymath Charles Darwin, carefully recording his observations in a Chilean earthquake and watching in fascination as an unfamiliar insect stung his finger (and, perhaps, implanted into him the germs of a disease from which he was never again to be free); and the geologist Frederick Vandiveer Hayden, making his observations under military escort and hastily retiring to a military fort when the Indians were rising all of them encountered adventures enough, sometimes modest, sometimes hair-raising, to entertain Victorian readers only marginally interested in their scientific achievements.
Novelists began to perceive the potential of such adventures as the bases for saleable stories. Henry Rider Haggard took the brilliant first step into this new field when, in King Solomon's Mines (1885), he linked the story of a treasure hunt-familiar enough ground with archaeological discoveries that evoked beguiling echoes of a lost civilization. In his later She: A History of Adventure (1887), this concept was developed into a dream-fantasy of a degenerate people living among the ruins of an ancient, much more advanced civilization.
'With this novel,' wrote Douglas Menville (1974, p. ii), 'he created an entire sub-genre of fantasy, now known as the 'lost world novel', and spawned many imitators who, over a span of more than 80 years, have produced numerous progeny of She. ...
Conan Doyle is to be ranked among the successors to Haggard. Yet he was more innovator than imitator, for he expanded Haggard's idea in a new direction. The important element in The Lost World is not the discovery of a surviving ancient human civilization, but of surviving ancient animals the dinosaurs.
In the early part of this century, dinosaurs had not yet come to capture the imagination of children and adults at large. Only a handful of scientific books, and a smaller handful of popular books, had been published about these giant denizens of the world in the past. Yet it remained possible for ordinary citizens, if fortunately situated, to gaze with awe upon the giant skeletons mounted in a few museums; among these were the British Museum (Natural History), the Palaeontology Museum of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, the Yale Peabody Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History. Even more striking were those first reconstructions of dinosaurs built for the 1851 Exhibition. Following the Exhibition's closure they were displayed in the grounds of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham.
There can be little doubt that Conan Doyle had visited the Crystal Palace and seen those fascinating, if inexact, recreations of vanished. animals. However, in 1909 he became interested in palaeontology by direct association. That year, shortly after moving to Windlesham at Crowborough, Sussex, he noticed the fossil tracks of dinosaurs in a neighbouring ironstone quarry into the Hastings Sands, a division of the Wealden Beds (lower Cretaceous Hauterivian to Late Barremian stages). The discovery must have been in May, for on 17 May Conan Doyle wrote to Arthur Smith Woodward (1864-1944) of the British Museum (Natural History)-Woodward, like Conan Doyle himself, was later to be knighted-enclosing a sketch of one of the footprints and requesting that someone come down to Sussex to examine them.
The letter and sketch survive in the Museum Archives. A brief memo is attached, probably by Woodward's secretary, offering possible dates for a visit; and there is also a second, undated letter from Conan Doyle to Woodward, expressing the fear that 'the objects may be unworthy of your pains' but giving the train times to Groombridge Station and indicating that Woodward would be met by car. The exact date of the visit is uncertain, but it was probably in June 1909 and certainly on a Monday, for Conan Doyle, writing to his mother, noted:
- ... I have another expert of the British Museum coming on Monday to advise me about the fossils wer get from the quarry opposite. Huge lizard's tracks. (Quoted in Nordon, 1966, p. 329)
The tracks were, in fact, judged to be those of the herbivorous. dinosaur Iguanodon. However, Woodward cannot have considered them of great interest, for similar tracks had already been reported. widely from the Wealden sandstones of Sussex and the Isle of Wight and from the somewhat older Purbeck Beds (Late Jurassic [Portlandian] to Early Cretaceous [early Hauterivian]) of Dorset (see Sarjeant 1974, pp. 347-58). Consequently, no scientific account of the footprints was ever published.
Nevertheless, Conan Doyle was interested enough to have casts made from these tracks and to display them in his home. He was also intrigued by the prehistoric relics to be found in the Sussex countryside. According to A. St John Adcock (1912), it was the combined effect of these finds that set his imagination working and produced his classic novel. Describing a visit to Windlesham, Adcock wrote:
- ... on the floor of the billiard room stand two huge fossil feet [i.e., casts of footprints!] of the prehistoric Iguanodon, and on the table above them is the flint head of an arrow that has survived from the Stone Age. It was the discovery of these relics on the downs that stretch for miles before his own front door that set Sir Arthur's imagination at work on the period to which they belong and resulted in the creation of the astonishing Professor Challenger, the sending of him and his search party to that almost inaccessible plateau in the wilds of South America which they find still inhabited by men and animals of the prehistoric type, and, in a word, the writing of The Lost World which is at once one of the most realistic and one of the most romantic of his books-its wild imagination wearing an air of sheer reality from the Defoe-like matter-of-fact manner of their narration.
Yet the direct cause of Conan Doyle's writing of the book was a wager. The story is recounted by H. Greenhough Smith, editor of The Strand Magazine (1930):
- Anything like puffery was against the very nature of the man, and advertisements were apt to stir his ire. The following announcement he drew up himself, and it is of two-fold interest-it shows his own idea of how such a notice should be written, while it also tells the striking origin of another of his plots:
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's serial story, 'The Lost World', which begins in the April number of THE STRAND MAGAZINE, had its genesis in a curious. way. A friend had been discussing with the author as to the possibility of opening up a new type of story of action. He contended that the possibilities had been exhausted and that with the pirate ship, the treasure hunt, and the other well-known forms of adventure books no new thrill was possible. The novelist, on the contrary, upheld the view that there was a large field which had not yet been worked, and that it should develop upon the lines of a combination of imagination. and realism each pushed as far as the writer's capacity would carry him. The argument ended in a small bet and a promise by Sir Arthur that he would vindicate hist opinion by producing such a book. The result is The Lost World. It must be admitted that in his Sherlock Holmes tales Sir Arthur recast the stereotyped detective story of our childhood, and it will be interesting to see how far he succeeds in this new attempt at fresh methods of treatment. (Smith 1930, p. 395)
Conan Doyle was extremely thorough in working up the backgrounds for his literary work; only when he felt he had properly mastered the necessary facts would he put pen to paper. He had become acquainted with Sir Edwin Ray Lankester (1847-1929), who had recently retired from the Directorship of the British Museum (Natural History); their acquaintance may well have been a consequence of Conan Doyle's finding of the footprints. The text and illustrations of Lankester's book Extinct Animals (1905) served as further inspiration for Conan Doyle. He enjoyed very thoroughly the writing of the book:
- Each evening through October-November 1911, Conan Doyle would read aloud to his wife and any guests present what he had written during the day; laughing, gesturing-living the very part as he went along.
'I think it will make the very best serial (bar special S. Holmes values) that I have ever done, especially when it has its trimming of faked photos, maps and plans,' wrote Doyle to editor Smith. 'My ambition is to do for the boys' book what Sherlock Holmes did for the detective tale. I don't suppose I could bring off two such coups. And yet I hope it may.' (Carr 1949, p. 319)
The Lost World was serialized in The Strand Magazine from April through November 1912. It was quite lavishly illustrated, the drawings including several of dinosaurs that were based on Lankester's restorations. Conan Doyle's accuracy in describing the details of that place of his imagination, and the plausibility of the reasons he advanced for the survival of such a prehistoric environment, alike received praise from scientists. A letter received in August 1912 from his technical adviser' Dr Lankester must have given him especial gratification:
- You are perfectly splendid in your story of the 'lost. world' mountaintop. I feel proud to have a certain small share in its inception as you indicate by quoting the book on extinct animals in the start. It is just sufficiently conceivable to make it 'go' smoothly. I notice that you rightly withhold any intelligence from the big dinosaurs, and also acute smell from the apemen. (Carr 1949, p. 318)
The Lost World was published in book form very shortly after its magazine appearance, by Hodder and Stoughton in London and simultaneously by other publishers in New York and Toronto. Though the earliest edition (1912) contained two maps, including one of the plateau, and many other illustrations, it was not in the 'realistic' format of Conan Doyle's hopes. These were attained instead in a magnificent edition, undated but published later in the same year, which was done in the fashion of a lavish expedition report. It was in generous format (7.0' x 9.5' x 2.3'), its cover decorated with a sequence of stylized iguanodont footprints, as if to stress the part that the dinosaur footprints had played in the genesis of Conan Doyle's inspiration (Fig. 2). The illustrations included two photographs of the expedition's leader, George Edward Challenger, one in colour and signed 'Yours truly (to use the conventional lie!)' — and a black and white group photograph of the expedition's members (Figs 1, 3). These were in fact Conan Doyle himself, equipped with false beard as Challenger, and, as subsequent research has shown, W.H. Ransford, the photographer whom Conan Doyle credits in his Foreword to the book, and Patrick Forbes, whose image served as both Summerlee and Roxton, and who is also credited for his artwork in Conan Doyle's Foreword. (Researches by the first author, independently confirmed by Pilot and Rodin 1996, pp. 247-9.) Moreover, under the caption of 'The First Footprint in Maple White Land' there is actually a photograph of one of Conan Doyle's Iguanadon footprints from Crowborough — the only illustration of a part of this trackway ever to be published. It is here reillustrated (Fig. 4).
Conan Doyle's book was to made into a film by First National, in which the liberties with the text that are customary in the film industry were taken; nevertheless, the film remains of great interest for its relatively early restorations of moving dinosaurs and pterodactyls. During the 1940s The Lost World was serialized on radio by the British Broadcasting Corporation (Fig. 5); this was a very faithful rendition of the story that kept the the second author of this article enthralled over many weeks. The book itself has gone through many editions and remains. popular, readable, and very much in print today.
An unforeseen and unfortunate by-product of Conan Doyle's story may have been to help implant in the popular mind the misleading idea that dinosaurs and early man were contemporaries. This is not implied in The Lost World; Conan Doyle knew better, and quite evidently visualized the cavemen and apemen as having ascended at a much later date to the plateau. However, a careless reading of the book may perhaps have been one source for the numerous later stories in which men and dinosaurs are contemporaries and for the numerous cartoons depicting such impossible, but often amusing, situations as a caveman being pursued at high speed by a ravening brontosaur!
As to the footprints themselves, however, less can be said. Though an earlier find in a waterworks excavation at Crowborough had received a brief published mention (Herries 1907; see also Sarjeant 1974, p. 350), the track which Conan Doyle found has never been mentioned in any scientific publication. No specimens from Crowborough are to be found among the holdings of the British Museum (Natural History) or in any other major British collection (see Sarjeant 1983) and the fate of Conan Doyle's own casts of the footprints is not known to us. Moreover, both Sir Arthur Smith Woodward and Lord John Roxton were incorrect in their identification of the footprints Conan Doyle had obtained. At that time, any three-toed dinosaur tended to be attributed to Iguanodon. However, even as far back as 1862, the Sussex amateur geologist Samuel H. Beckles was writing sagely:
- It is certain that other Dinosaurians beside the Iguanodon had the same [pedal] modifications and we must not refer these pachydactylous trifide to that animal exclusively.
That warning was scarcely heeded for more than a century. Indeed, it is only recently that the character of Iguanodon footprints has been defined precisely (Sarjeant, Delair and Lockley, 1998). We note (pp. 4-5) that: ... though attributed to Iguanodon, the footprint illustrated by Conan Doyle ... was surely that of a carniverious. dinosaur.' So it was an Allosaurus or some other large dinosaurian carnivore that made those footprints! Well, whatever dinosaur it was, that creature has helped to enrich, in unique fashion, the field of literature. Whatever the trackmaker, those footprints have contributed to the progress of science by serving to stimulate interest among the many budding palaeontologists who, over the years, have enjoyed The Lost World.
Acknowledgement
The authors are indebted to Dr Ron Cleevely for courteously checking Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's letters to the British Museum (Natural History) on their behalf.
References:
Adcock, A.D. St. J. 1912. 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle'. The Bookman (London). November issue, pp. 95-110.
Beckles, S.H. 1862. 'On Some Natural Casts of Foot-prints from the Wealden of the Isle of Wight, and of Swanage.' The Geologist (London), 5: 310-11.
Carr, J. D. 1949. The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. London: Murray.
Doyle, A. C. 1912a. The Lost World. (London: Hodder and Stoughton). 309 pp., frontis. + 6 illus., I map.
————— n.d. [1912b]. The Lost World. New edition. (London: Henry Frowde, Hodder and Stoughton) vi-x+11-319 pp., 2 colour pls., 20 b & w pls., 2 maps, dec. endpapers.
Haggard, H.R. 1885. King Solomon's Mines. (London: Cassell) 320 pp., folding frontis. (map).
————— 1887. She: A History of Adventure. (London: Longmans, Green) 317 pp., 2 pls.
Herries, R.S. 1907. 'Excursion to Crowborough'. Proc. Geol. Assoc. London. Vol. 20, pp. 163-6.
Lankester, E.R. 1905. Extinct Animals. (London: Constable) xxiii + 331 pp.
Lockley, M.G. 1985. 'Vanishing tracks along Alameda Parkway. Implications for Cretaceous dinosaurian paleobiology from the Dakota Group, Colorado' in Chamberlain, C.K. (ed.). A Field Guide to the Environments of Deposition (and Trace Fossils) of Cretaceous Sandstones in the Western Interior. (Golden, Colorado: Society of Economic Paleontists and Mineralogists) pp. 3-131-3-142.
Menville, A.D. 1974. 'Introduction to H. Rider Haggard: Eric Brighteyes. Forgotten Fantasy Library. (North Hollywood, California: Newcastle Publishing Co.)
Nordon, P. 1966. Conan Doyle (London: John Murray) x + 370 pp.
Pilot R. & Rodin, A.E. 1996. The Annotated Lost World. (Indianapolis: Wessex Press) xxi + 264 pp.
Sarjeant, W.A.S. 1974. 'A history and bibliography of the study of fossil vertebrate footprints in the British Isles. Palaeogeogr., Palaeoclimat., Palaeoecol. 18 (4): ii + 160 pp.
————— 1983. 'British fossil footprints in the collections of some principal British museums' Geol. Curator 3 (9): 541-60.
Sarjeant, W.A.S., Delair, J.B., and Lockley, M.G. 1998. The Footprints of Iguanodon: A History and Taxonomic Study.' Ichos 2: 1-20.
Smith, H.G. 1930. 'Some letters of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle'. The Strand Magazine, October, pp. 390-5.
A version of this article first appeared in Dinosaur Tracks and Traces. 1989. Gillette, David D. & Lockley, Martin G. (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The editors of ACD wish to acknowledge the permission of Cambridge University Press to reproduce relevant material in this article.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
