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

While I’m ensconced in the maintenance shed getting ready for the next few episodes I’m going to bring you my extended interview with Natalie Lawrence. In it we talk about her love for the Pangolin and Richard Owen’s fascination with the Aye-Aye.

Enchanted Creatures
https://amzn.to/4dQqtuK (affiliated link so I might earn commission on items bought)

Links 

Mark Witton: Unicorns, dragons, monsters and giants https://markwitton-com.blogspot.com/2018/04/unicorns-dragons-monsters-and-giants.html?m=1

Richard Owen and the Aye-Aye

https://www.amnh.or...

You're in a canoe, sweating in thick jungle heat, and something enormous stirs in the water ahead. That's the mood pulling us into Mokele-mbembe, the legendary "living dinosaur" of Central Africa, and the bigger question we can't stop circling: why do we keep needing monsters, especially when the world feels like it's running out of mysteries?

I'm joined by historian Eddie Guimont, whose research into dinosaur hunting, lost cities and conspiracy culture shows how cryptozoology ties into colonial exploration, museum prestige and the politics of who gets to call something a discovery. We talk about the okapi...

How did a self-described character actor become the beating heart of the biggest film franchise on Earth? At the beginning of July we lost our dinosaur man, Dr Alan Grant himself, Sam Neill. This is an episode I never expected to make, but I could not let the moment pass without turning a very sad event into a celebration of a remarkable life and career.

I am joined by James Mottram, author of the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World Ultimate Visual Histories and the Jurassic Park script book. James interviewed Sam Neill a handful of times...

Who should direct the next Jurassic film now that Gareth Edwards has walked away? In this free sample of Hey, Roland!, the monthly bonus show for subscribers, I work through the director shortlist name by name, report back from DinoCon 2026 in Birmingham, and set up next week's very special tribute to Sam Neill with James Mottram.

I also want your voice on that tribute episode. Tap the Fan Mail link at the bottom of these show notes and leave me your memories of Sam Neill, Jurassic or otherwise, and I will share them on the show.
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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 ha...

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...

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...

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<...

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...

Plymouth, summer of 1841. Richard Owen stepped before the British Association for the Advancement of Science and coined a word that would reshape our understanding of the deep past: Dinosauria. This episode follows that word from Owen’s meeting hall to South London, where sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins turned fragmentary bones into life-size stone giants.
I am joined by palaeoartist and author Mark Witton for a conversation about the history of the site and then Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs trustee Andrew Brady, and Jurassic Outpost’s Caleb Burnett and I go for a walk through the world’s oldest...

Charles Dickens opened Bleak House with a megalosaurus waddling up Holborn Hill. This episode traces the stories we told about the bones in the rock before we knew what they were. I’m joined by Bexhill Museum curator Julian Porter and author Natalie Lawrence.

For the extended interview with Natalie Lawrence, you can hear it by subscribing to the Plus version of the podcast in Apple Podcasts or clicking the ‘support the show’ link below.

A huge thank you to Guy Adams for the opening narration!

Guests

Julian Porter...