Fictitious Prehistoric Beasts That Turned Out To Be Real

 Titanoboa

Size Comparison of a human with Titanoboa

A titanoboa sculpt in New York's Grand Central Station

"Fictional" portrayals of the giant snake titanoboa in comics

Gigantic prehistoric serpents have appear in the comics medium, and perhaps elsewhere, for decades. Here are two examples. First, from the Gold Key comic adaptation of the original King Kong which substitutes a giant snake for the plesiosaurus. The other prehistoric beasts are still intact, unlike the 70s movie which removed the dinos, and substituted a huge serpent (which may have the result of island gigantism, as Kong seemed to be in that movie). The lower pic is from the Charlton comics version of the seventies Hanna Barbera TV series, Valley of the Dinosaurs. Young Greg Butler is saved from the titanoboa by a stegasaurus, to give an idea of what happens next. There was one other similarly sized serpent in a spider-man/Ka-Zar team up. And Lin Carter had two species of giant snake in his Zanthodon series, the Xunth, a giant burrowing serpent, and the Isst, a giant prehistoric python. In Tarzan at the Earth's Core, Edgar Rice Burroughs describes snakes large enough to swallow hadrosaurs whole. The trouble is, no such serpents were known to exist at the time these were written. There did exist huge snakes during the primal ages, such as madtsoia of the Cretaceous, and womambi of much more recent Plesticene Australia. But these were only a little larger than the largest snakes on record today. There was no serpentine equivalent of the giant croc deinosuchus or the giant turtle archelon.

 

That is, until the discovery of the snake vertebrae at least four times that of an giant anaconda in a Columbian coal mine in the early 2000s. These fossils date from the Paleoeocene, a slim band of geologic time sandwiched between the Fall of the Dinosaurs and Rise of the Mammals. At the time, earth is believed to be a gigantic greenhouse, a condition caused in part by the effect of the meteor impact  that ended the dinosaurs' reign. It was this unique condition, and the absence of other giant predators, that spurred the evolution of such a monster. Titanoboa lurked in humid, hothouse swamps, where it preyed on large crocodiles and giant terrapins. 

Ludadactylus

For decades, the giant Cretaceous pterosaur pteranodon has been portrayed with teeth in fiction and comics, even though the name itself, pteranodon means "winged toothless". This was infamous in the third Jurassic Park instalment, wherein male pteranodons (only females were shown in preceding films) were shown with tooth-lined bills. This was explained in a then-recent JP comic as being the result of mixing with frog DNA (I would assume Xenopus, the African clawed frog favored in labs), the same as the explanation for the film's raptors are naked of feathers. However, the discovery of ludadactylus, a Cretaceous pterodactyloid pterosaur sporting both a tooth-lined bill and a pteranodon-like headcrest de-fictionalized the existence of such a pterosaur. 

Often comics also portray pterosaurs with both pteranodon crests and rhamphorynchus-like spade-headed tales. Such a pteranodon subspecies was encountered by Tarzan in one his more recent forays into Pal-ul-don. However, as pteranodon and rhamphorynchus belonged to separate families, that such a pterosaur species will someday be found seems less likely. 

Tetrapteryx

Tetrapteryx was a hypothetical ancestor to Archeopteryx prosposed by scientist William Beebe to explain how feathers might have evolved for flight. The feathers on both fore and hindlimbs allowed the dinosaur to glide, and for its descendents to achieve true flight. It was eventually discovered that not just one gliding theropod, but an entire family existed, with some gliders sporting feathers on all fours!

 The most prominant were named microraptor and anchiornis. When microraptor was first discovered, it was essentially a real tetrapteryx, though these species were likely not direct ancestors of archeopteryx, as we now know evolution branches out into a myriad of forms to exploit niches. Doubtless, though, archeopteryx ancestry traced back to one of these gliding forms.

Bat-Winged Theropod

The real flying dinosaur from China, Yi Qi (Left), and fictitious vultasaur of Skull Island (Right)

Among the extensively detailed fauna of Skull Island, created for Peter Jackson early 2000s remake of King Kong, many of which are featured in the book, A Natural History of Skull Island, ( and many of which could be considered spec zoology), are small flying theropod dinosaurs with bat-like wings. The vultasaurs are depicted as naked, as are many dinosaurs, traditionally. However this proved prophetic, by the recent discovery of Yi Qi. It appears to be a member of the dino-bird family. But though Yi Qi was feathered, it sported bat-ribbed pinions, and without the plumage, would qualify as a bona fide vultasaurus! 

Shringasaurus

The shringasaurus was a Triassic herbivorous reptile discovered in 2017. Fronts its sprawling limbs and potbellied wieght, it was unrelated to dinosaurs. However, its two forward-curving horns, and general build make it a dead-ringer, for a fictional "dinosaur", played by a rhinoceras iguana featured in the cheesy 1960 remake of Conan Doyle's The Lost World! Even though the real shringasaurus was smaller than its movie counterpart, many have noted the bizarre simlilarity.

Fin-Backed Crocodilian 

The Triassic fin-backed land-croc Arizonasaurus

In early movies about prehistoric beasts and cavemen, lizards were often blown up to impersonate dinosaurs. In the original One Million BC a giant tegu lizard battles a dwarf alligator sporting a fin. A similar scene as enacted in the 1960s Lost World remake with a goanna lizard and another fin-wearing gator. 

One Million BC's infamous fin-wearing gator

     The discovery of arizonasaurus in 2002 proved that fin-backed crocdilians, however, really did exist. Perhaps a more fitting analogy for the movie monster, though, would be spinosaurus. The battle between the t-rex and the spino in JP may have been a partial homage to the antique black and white movies. However, it is now known that spinosaurus was far more like a crocodile than JP3 portrayed, being more adapted for water than land. It was also primarily a fish-feeder, and unlikely to have been able to snap the neck of a t-rex. 

   The actual spinosaurus, which was finally revealed as resembling a gigantic fin-backed croc

Spike-Backed Sauropod

Dinny, the fictitious saurpopod-like dinosaur that was a a companion to Ally Oop, possesseda row of small spiks down his back more recently, scientists discovered that real sauropods like apatosaurus and diplodicus actually possessed spikes similar to the ones sported by Dinny.

Utahraptor

Now this is a more controversial one, for me anyway. It was discovered shortly following the release of the first Jurassic Park movie, and was of incredible size for a member of the dromeosaur family (commonly called raptors) of theropod dinosaurs. The JP book and movie were criticized by some for exaggerating the size of velociraptor, which was in reality only a little bigger than a turkey. Once this monster was unearthed, dinosaur paleontologist Robert Bakker remarked that it was "like digging up a fossil of King Kong!" The thing is though, that the JP raptors are essentially deinonychus, the first dinosaur that John Ostrum porposed might be warm-blooded and active, only called by the wrong name. It was roughly man-sized, same as JP's "velociraptors."  Perhaps in the JP universe, the names were reversed! Utahraptor though, was near the size of a ceratosaurus or adult dilophosaurus in size. Much larger than either of the other two dromeosaur species!

Missing Link

The above photo is of the co-star of Willis O'Brian's early stop-motion film, The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1915). This was still nine years before the discovery of first fossil of Australopithicus Africanus in 1924. And after that, well, the link between man and ape was no longer missing!

The O'Brian creature's longish limbs, however make him resemeble ardipithicus a bit more, and he is believed to represent the link between tree-dwelling apes and australopithicus.

Ambulocetus

The link between land-dwelling whale ancestors and true whales (above) appeared in the BBC documetary The Velvet Claw. It is essentially an ambulocetus (save for the tail) but the documentary was made a few years before it was actually discovered!

Are There More?

Are there more heretofore considered fictional creatures awaiting discovery in the rock layers? Could something like Edgar Rice Burroughs trodon (no relation to the theropod troodon) be found? It's unlikely that a dragon-like flying creture with an extra-set of limbs ever existed, but who knows. Exceptions to rules abound. There will, without a doubt to further evolutionary links uncovered. The transitions between tree-living gliders and active flyers, in the case of both bats and pterosaurs have so far never been found.

        A depiction of a hypothetical transition between modern bats and planetotherium, an Eocene gliding mammal

 UPDATE: Though not a prehistoric beast, it is now known that the gigantic prehistoric mushrooms from Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth really existed! Giant fungi pretty much dominated the land prior to the incursion of plaint life. The primitive mastodon-herding giant human from the same novel may also have had an analogue in meganthropus, but that remains to be seen.

Illustration from Verne's Journey