Like many others stories by Lovecraft also Mountains of Madness is retold from a first-person perspective: Geologist William Dyer is one of the few survivors of an Antarctica expedition that in 1930 studied the geology of the frozen continent. Lovecraft (1890-1937), written in February/March 1931 and originally published in the February, March and April 1936 issues of one of the first pulp-magazine of history: ' Astounding Stories'. ' At the Mountains of Madness' is a science-fiction/horror story by the American writer H. Here the primordial world populated by tropical forests and of course dinosaurs is located again near Antarctica on the island of Caprona, first reported by the (fictitious) Italian explorer Caproni in 1721.

Curiously Edgar Rice Burroughs published in 1918 the first part of ' The Land That Time Forgot', maybe hoping to exploit the celebrity of Doyle's tale. Only in 1912, maybe also in response to the successful expeditions to the South Pole, Arthur Conan Doyle reinvented ' The Lost World' in a remote region of the Amazonian forest.

The novel narrates the adventures of a sailor shipwrecked on an unknown part of the Antarctic continent, where volcanic activity enables a tropical lost world to flourish. In 1888 the novel ' A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder', by Canadian James De Mille, was posthumously published ( Brian Switek recovers these lost tales on his Dinosaur Tracking post ' Who Wrote the First Dinosaur Novel?'). 100 years ago only segments of the coast and the approximately contours of Antarctica were known - a perfect scenario for the imagination of writers. This week we remembered the struggle and final triumph to reach one of the last large white spots of the globe: the interior of the southern continent of Antarctica. We wished also to obtain as great as possible a variety of the upper fossiliferous rocks, since the primal life history of this bleak realm of ice and death is of the highest importance to our knowledge of the earth's past.' ' вЂ¦we expected to unearth a quite unprecedented amount of material - especially in the pre-Cambrian strata of which so narrow a range of antarctic specimens had previously been secured.

Beyond the mountains of madness