“Then they looked out of the wood – and saw dinosaurs!”
The novelist put the papers down. “A good way of ending the episode?”
The palaeontologist nodded, “Wonderful, what an imagination you have.”
“You too must have imagination, to create lost worlds out of fragments of bone.”
“But not like you.”
As he left he thought of the bones in his workshop. His imagination had created something very special, the Missing Link, but no one would realise it wasn’t real for many years, if ever.
His friend was just a great writer, however he was the greatest scientific hoaxer ever.
The Glade of the Iguanodons, the scene described by Doyle.
In several of my blogs I have imagined several possible meetings between, possibly unlikely, characters from history, here and here. This meeting is, however, completely true. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was writing The Lost World, he sought out advice on prehistoric life from the Natural History Museum. They passed the request to a local expert palaeontologist, Charles Dawson ‘discoverer’ of the Piltdown Man and undoubtedly ‘the greatest scientific hoaxer ever.’
This is in response to Charlie Mills flash fiction challenge, in 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that includes an act of “peering from the woods.” Go where the prompt leads.
The Curious Archaeologist 