Louis Pope Gratacap (1851–1917), curator of mineralogy and conchology at the American Museum of Natural History, was the kind of polymath whose commute — three hours round-trip from Staten Island — he spent reading voraciously. His novel The New Northland (1915) is arguably the first work of fiction to feature a Tyrannosaurus rex, beating Burroughs’s The Land That Time Forgot by three years. The story follows Americo-Nordic adventurers who discover a warm Arctic realm called Krocker Land (a barely disguised nod to the AMNH-sponsored Crocker Land Expedition, which was still in the field when the novel hit shelves) where they find prehistoric animals, lush valleys, and a decaying race called the Radiumites who transmute base metals with radium. The novel is so thick with metafictional play — a yellow-journalist editor named Azaziel Link frames the narrative, characters debate serialization rights and movie potential, and the text is flagged as having been “substantially emended” — that it nearly collapses under its own cleverness. Yet it was precisely Gratacap’s perch at the museum, under Henry Fairfield Osborn (who had named T. rex in 1905), that gave him access to paleontological knowledge unavailable to Doyle or Haggard. Richard Fallon rescues this eccentric, overstuffed novel from obscurity, showing how a museum curator’s serious play produced the first fictional roar of the tyrant lizard king.
Louis Pope Gratacap, A Curator in Lost Worlds — Public Domain Review
A curator of mineralogy at the AMNH wrote the first novel to feature a Tyrannosaurus rex — a metafictional lost-world odyssey as eccentric and overstuffed as the museum itself.