"Cowboy Dinosaur" for the masses

[Adrienne Mayor <afmayor@aol.com>]

This sounds a bit like the plot of the short story by Sharon Farber, 
"The Last Thunder Horse West of the Mississippi." It appeared in Isaac 
Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine 12 (Nov 1988): 20-44. The story has 
Cope and Marsh encountering a relict Brontosaurus, with a wonderful 
illustration by Robert Walters of cowboys lassoing the rearing 
sauropod.

The plot of a hidden valley of live dinosaurs is a popular fiction 
device, from Arthur Conan Doyle's "Lost World" and the 1950s-60s "Turok 
Son of Stone" comic books, to George Gaylord Simpson's posthumous story 
"The Dechronization of Sam Magruder" and the late paleontologist 
William A. S. Sarjeant's novels about "lost islands of living 
dinosaurs" (written under his pen name Anthony Swithin). Another 
example is Ivan A. Efremov, the Russian paleontolgist who discovered 
the Tarbosaurus bataar in the 1940s. He saw the cinematic possibilities 
of the old plot device: Efremov wrote a sci fi novel in which fossil 
hunters find a cave wall covered in resin that had acted as a natural 
photographic film, capturing images of the Tarbosuarus when it was 
alive. In Plains Indian traditions, similar "time warp" experiences, 
sometimes sought on vision quests, were called "medicine holes" (see 
"Fossil Legends of the First Americans" pp 133, 330, 370, etc)

>>I may have missed it, but did anyone mention that a film was made back
in the 60's or 70's that included both cowboys and dinosaurs?  In the
film the cowboys got into a hidden valley that was full of dinosaurs.
It kind of used the "King Kong" plot, and they roped a dinosaur, brought
it back to civilization, exhibited it in a carnival, it broke loose,
etc.
Mary Sue