BioFortean Review: Historical Notes and Reprints

Newspaper Headlines: Searching for Dinosaurs

In the early 1900s, newspapers sporadically offered interviews with intrepid explorers plunging into the swamps of some tropical region in search of beasts that were scaring the locals and stirring rumors of living creatures thought long extinct. Speculation of dinosaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, and other fossil species ran rampant, often with little credible evidence. (The Gapelle story, noted in one account, was a deliberate hoax.) Still, the accounts are interesting, and are reprinted here to show some of the history of organized (usually) cryptozoological investigations.

• Hunting a Live "Prehistoric Monster" (1910)
• Prehistoric Monsters in Jungles of the Amazon (1911)
• "Ain't No Such Animile," But— (1920)
• Does Pre-Historic Monster Still Live? (1921)
• Catch Him Alive! (1922)
• Seeking Monsters in Jungle Wilds (1925)
• Searching for Saurians in Africa (1928)
• African Mystery Beasts (1937)
• On the Trail of the Brontosaurus (1927)
• African Pterodactyls (1944)