#pal-ul-don

[chernobog13]

Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes (vol. 1) #135 (May, 1963). Cover by George (I'm not Dennis the Menace's neighbor!) Wilson.

That time Tarzan punched Bigfoot right in the solar plexus!

[rjalker]

They have alcohol

and there was also a drink that the women of the Ho-don made by allowing corn to soak in the juices of succulent fruits, to which they had added certain other ingredients best known to themselves.

[vintagegeekculture]

[majingojira]

Lost Worlds and Certatopsians

So, recently I worked on an article of sorts going over some of the “Lost Worlds” in fiction, focusing mainly on those on the surface (the biological logistics of Inner Earths/Massive Cave Systems was just too much to work with).  This included the original Lost World of Maple White Land, Skull  Island, The Lost Land, Caprona/Caspak, Pal-Ul-Don, and several different “Ice Age” survival locations I just lumped into “The Mammoth Steppe of Europe and North America” for various reasons. 

Most of them showed a wide variety of prehistoric life, but the point of this project was to create a plausible version of such places. 

Which did mean removing the Transmutation of Caprona’s life, but it added so much more. 

When looking at these locations, I looked at what was reported in the various tellings, re-tellings, media adaptations, followups, sequels, and homages of any major capacity that I could get my hands on.  

For the most part.  

Jongor of the Lost Land is something I stuck to reference material for.  And the less I say about just how many bad The Lost World  stories I’ve slogged through, the better. 

The best The Lost World follow-up story ever produced is Disney-Pixar’s Up in case you are curious. 

Anyway, one of the big problems is that many of these places were set in what was, in the Jurassic, known as Gondwana (or Gondwanaland).  Maple White Land (The Lost World), Caspak/Caprona (The Land that Time Forgot), Skull Island (King Kong), and Pal-Ul-Don (Tarzan the Terrible) are all on that former supercontinent. 

And they mostly have a similar problem: Ceratopsians.  

For those who don’t know, Ceratopsians or Horned Dinosaurs like Triceratops, are primarily known from Asia and North America. In Asia, they were mostly small animals like Protoceratops.  It is only on the continent of Laramidia (Western North America) that Ceratopsians got huge.  That’s where all the big names are: Triceratops, Styracosaurus, Centrosaurus, Chasmosaurus, etc. 

But writers at the turn of the last century didn’t really know the prehistoric dinosaurian fauna of anywhere but the northern hemisphere.  It’s only in the last few decades that any information has come out at all. 

And almost no Ceratopsids.  

So, I tried to work out just how to make the Ceratopsians work. 

Sometimes I had to take into account Continental Drift.  

For Skull Island, I proposed it broke off from Asia some time in the late cretaceous and followed a path of being a reverse India.  The volcanic crevasses allowing some of the medium-sized dinosaurs to survive and repopulate after the KT Extinction event.  This actually included quite a variety of animals. 

For others, I had to look at “This MAY be a ceratopsian, but we don’t know for sure” dubious fragments such as Notoceratops (South America) for Maple White Land, and Serendipaceratops (Australia) for Caprona and The Lost Land. 

But I could not get a Ceratopsian to Pal-Ul-Don. Which is a big problem because they’re central to some plot elements (and also portrayed as Omnivores, so that’s fun). 

The same occurred with the ubiquitous Stegosaurs.  Stegosaurs didn’t survive to even see the KT Boundary, undone by Ankylosaurs and more intelligent predators.  So, I had to find something to fill in.  At first I thought large herbivorous crocodilians could do it, but then I remembered Meiolaniid tortoises, a club-tailed turtle, and had one convergently shape its shell with serrated edges and boom, we had a stegosaur fit the old-outdated description. 

But, in all honesty, the biggest surprise was just how many weird mammals I could get. 

Both South America and Australia had a TON of weird mammals in the Neogene and Paleogene.  And a lot of those stories had prehistoric mammals just plucked up and put in wherever.  There were enough analogues to get in some real fun things.  

And thanks to a scientific paper I found with an actual formula for “Land Mass to body weight ratio for Herbivores and Carnivores based on if they are endothermic or ectothermic”, I was able to figure out how large an area would need to be to get things that could threaten a human. 

Minimun size is about as big as Borneo, New Guinea, or Madagascar, by the way. That way we can have a dinosaurian carnivore of at least 1 ton and a mammalian herbivore also of about 1 ton.  

And a Sauropod DInosaur of about 10 tons. 

Overall, it’s been pretty good setup stuff. 

But one thing still bugs me on a “Should I do this” level. 

Should I have Homo floresiensis on Skull Island or not? That way, Gigantopithecus can be “Kong Sized” to the natives. 

[dellcomics]

map of Pal-Ul-Don by Jesse Marsh

Tarzan’s Jungle Annual No.1 (1952)

[chernobog13]

Mark Schultz’s beautiful cover for Russ Manning’s adaptation of Tarzan the Untamed.   The collection also includes the sequel story, Tarzan the Terrible, in which Tarzan discovers the prehistoric land of Pal-Ul-Don which, like all prehistoric lands, is populated by dinosaurs.

[dellcomics]

DELL GIANT No. 25 (1959)

Tarzan’s Jungle World

[fredandrieu]

L'incroyable Pal-Ul-Don

Tarzan the Terrible, Part 2: Incredible Pal-Ul-Don

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Gaylord Du Bois et Russ Manning

Publication originale : Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes # 167, Western - Gold Key (mai 1967)