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.org/explore/news-blogs/richard-owen-aye-aye

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Presented and produced by Roland Squire
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🎥 YouTube: https://youtube.com/@jurassicpiratespod?si=DJOlBmPoF75YE8It
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🎵 Theme music: Caleb Burnett (@calebcomposed)
🎨 Cover artwork: @thejurassicartist

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 as a proof point for European audiences, Carl Hagenbeck's confidence in local reports, and the moment The Lost World lands in a culture already primed to believe extinct animals might still be out there.
From there we jump to Michael Crichton's Congo recycling Victorian "dark continent" tropes, the 1970s and 80s boom in monster expeditions (including Young Earth creationist funding for living-dinosaur searches), and the pull of reptiles in conspiracy thinking, from lizard people to the wider ecosystem of pseudoscience, flat earth belief and anti-expert politics.
Guest
Eddie Guimont
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eddieguimont?igsi=MWd0MnFhZGl0NDM3Ng==
Eddie's article
Hunting Dinosaurs in Africa, Contingent Magazine (2019)
https://contingentmagazine.org/2019/03/18/hunting-dinosaurs-africa/
Links
The Power of the Flat Earth Idea: History from the Marginalised
 (affiliate link)
https://amzn.eu/d/0gJkqRkk
When the Stars Are Right: H. P. Lovecraft and Astronomy
(affiliate link)
https://amzn.eu/d/0iKwNF3m
Further Reading
Beasts and Men, being Carl Hagenbeck's experiences for half a century among wild animals (1912) — free to read on the Internet Archive
https://archive.org/details/beastsmenbeingca00hage

Next episode will arrive on 16th September
Send a message to the show. Questions, corrections, favourite dinosaurs
Support the show
Enjoying the show? A quick rating and review on Apple Podcasts would mean the world, it’s one of the best ways to help fellow Jurassic fans discover us.
Presented and produced by Roland Squire
☕️Buy Me A Coffee:
https://buymeacoffee.com/roadtorebiq
🎥 YouTube: https://youtube.com/@jurassicpiratespod?si=DJOlBmPoF75YE8It
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jurassicpiratespod?igsi=cmswOTFwM29pOWhl&utm_source=qr
🎵 Theme music: Caleb Burnett (@calebcomposed)
🎨 Cover artwork: @thejurassicartist

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 across 25 years, from a London press day for The Dish in 2000 to a long lockdown phone call during the making of Jurassic World Dominion, and he shares every one of those encounters here!

We go through the James Mason phone call that followed My Brilliant Career, the daredevil early years of Possession and Omen III, and the Dead Calm breakout that convinced Spielberg he had found his Alan Grant. We get into the extraordinary 1993 of The Piano and Jurassic Park, the Bond screen test that never was, the John Carpenter collaborations, the grumpy joys of Jurassic Park 3 and the late masterpiece of Hunt for the Wilderpeople. And we finish on Dominion and the reunion of the original trio, the future of the franchise, the essential Sam Neill films to seek out, and the lovely story of the signed cards he sent out to bookshops when he could not meet readers in person.

Stay to the end for a listener message and my reflections on the Celebrating Sam Neill moment at DinoCon.

Guest
James Mottram
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mottram101 

James’s books
Jurassic Park: The Ultimate Visual History (affiliate link)
https://amzn.to/4wL0BYY
Jurassic World: The Ultimate Visual History (affiliate link)
https://amzn.to/4wL0BYY
The World of The Odyssey: A Visual Journey (affiliate link)
https://amzn.to/3UEFKc8
Filming The Odyssey: Inside the Making of Christopher Nolan’s Modern Epic,(affiliate link)
https://amzn.to/4xaHyrU

The Essential Sam Neill Films, as chosen in this episode
My Brilliant Career (1979)
Possession (1981)
In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
Event Horizon (1997)
Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016)

Links
Sam Neill, Did I Ever Tell You This? His wonderful memoir, read by Sam himself on audiobook (affiliate link)
https://amzn.to/4zvljyC

Send a message to the show. Questions, corrections, favourite dinosaurs
Support the show
Enjoying the show? A quick rating and review on Apple Podcasts would mean the world, it’s one of the best ways to help fellow Jurassic fans discover us.
Presented and produced by Roland Squire
☕️Buy Me A Coffee:
https://buymeacoffee.com/roadtorebiq
🎥 YouTube: https://youtube.com/@jurassicpiratespod?si=DJOlBmPoF75YE8It
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jurassicpiratespod?igsi=cmswOTFwM29pOWhl&utm_source=qr
🎵 Theme music: Caleb Burnett (@calebcomposed)
🎨 Cover artwork: @thejurassicartist

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.

Links from this episode

- Jurassic Outpost on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JurassicOutpost 
- The Hollywood Reporter on Gareth Edwards leaving the Rebirth sequel: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/jurassic-world-rebirth-sequel-loses-director-gareth-edwards-1236666236/
- DinoCon UK: https://www.dinocon.co.uk/
- Terrible Lizards with Dave Hone and Iszi Lawrence: https://terriblelizards.libsyn.com/
- The Lost Valley Podcast with Cian Gill: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-lost-valley-podcast/id1448284008

Send a message to the show. Questions, corrections, favourite dinosaurs
Support the show
Enjoying the show? A quick rating and review on Apple Podcasts would mean the world, it’s one of the best ways to help fellow Jurassic fans discover us.
Presented and produced by Roland Squire
☕️Buy Me A Coffee:
https://buymeacoffee.com/roadtorebiq
🎥 YouTube: https://youtube.com/@jurassicpiratespod?si=DJOlBmPoF75YE8It
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jurassicpiratespod?igsi=cmswOTFwM29pOWhl&utm_source=qr
🎵 Theme music: Caleb Burnett (@calebcomposed)
🎨 Cover artwork: @thejurassicartist

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 has read it roughly twelve times, six of those in the last year alone!
Richard takes me through Edwardian palaeontology, the arrival of Dippy the Diplodocus, and the real men behind Challenger, Summerlee, Malone and Roxton. We get into the fake photographs and Doyle’s ambition to publish the whole thing as a hoax, the Piltdown Man connection, and what the manuscript gives away about Roxton’s voice. And we finish on the novel’s colonial logic, its homosocial heart, and the one illustration of Central Lake that Doyle cared about more than any other.
Guest
Richard Fallon
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/richardfallon.bsky.social
Cambridge profile: https://www.esc.cam.ac.uk/staff/dr-richard-fallon
Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences: https://www.sedgwickmuseum.org
The Book: The Lost World (1912)
Project Gutenberg, free, and the text Richard reads from in this episode
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/139
Richard’s books
Creatures of Another Age: Classic Visions of Prehistoric Monsters, Valancourt Books 2021 (affiliate link)
https://amzn.eu/d/07x8bkXX
Contesting Earth’s History in Transatlantic Literary Culture, 1860-1935, Oxford University Press 2025 (affiliate link)
https://amzn.to/4gbXuUD
Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature, Cambridge University Press 2021 (affiliate link)
https://amzn.to/4wysYdo
Richard’s writing, free online
Professor Megalow’s Dinosaur Bones: Richard Owen and Victorian Literature, The Public Domain Review.
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/richard-owen-and-victorian-literature/
Seen through Deep Time: Occult Clairvoyance and Palaeoscientific Imagination, Journal of Victorian Culture
https://academic.oup.com/jvc/article/28/2/143/6759198
Richard on his own book, Making Science Public blog
https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2025/04/03/contesting-earths-history/
Links
E. Ray Lankester, Extinct Animals (1905), Doyle’s key source and the book Challenger quotes at Malone. Free on Internet Archive
https://archive.org/details/extinctanimals1905lank
Allen A. Debus, Dinosaurs in Fantastic Fiction: A Thematic Survey (affiliate link)
https://amzn.to/4fCoPPH
The Lost World (1925) Free to watch on Internet Archive
https://archive.org/details/TheLostWorldCompleteVideoQualityUpgrade
Next time: a tribute to Sam Neill with James Mottram, 19 August.
Send a message to the show. Questions, corrections, favourite dinosaurs
Support the show
Enjoying the show? A quick rating and review on Apple Podcasts would mean the world, it’s one of the best ways to help fellow Jurassic fans discover us.
Presented and produced by Roland Squire
☕️Buy Me A Coffee:
https://buymeacoffee.com/roadtorebiq
🎥 YouTube: https://youtube.com/@jurassicpiratespod?si=DJOlBmPoF75YE8It
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jurassicpiratespod?igsi=cmswOTFwM29pOWhl&utm_source=qr
🎵 Theme music: Caleb Burnett (@calebcomposed)
🎨 Cover artwork: @thejurassicartist