The latest story to make its way to Project Gutenberg from our Digital Library (with significant help from the Distributed Proofreaders project) is a work of early science fiction: Dick and Dr. Dan; or, The Boy Monster Hunters of the Bad Lands. This story was serialized from March 17 to May 3, 1900 in the Happy Days story paper and was never collected in book form (until now).

The story tells of two boys sent by the National Museum to investigate reports of a Plesiosaurus sighting in the Bad Lands of Wyoming. In addition to featuring standard story paper subplots involving romance, the value of hard work, and stolen inheritances, the story has quite a bit of action involving prehistoric monsters, which is unusual for a paper whose stories were more frequently dominated by more down-to-earth themes like baseball and fire fighting. The fact that the story was quickly forgotten and had no immediate follow-ups or imitators suggests that it came out a bit ahead of its time; a few decades later, this type of story would generate a lot more excitement with young audiences. The similarity between the Plesiosaur’s first appearance here, as portrayed in the cover image, and that of Godzilla in his first film is striking, if almost certainly entirely coincidental.

If you want to check this one out for yourself, the full text can be read online or downloaded in popular eBook formats through Project Gutenberg.