Long before First National Pictures began production on Doyle’s dinosaur story, a young marble cutter named Willis O’Brien was sculpting tiny T-Rex figurines. According to The New York Times, O’Brien began experimenting with animation models during an apparently slow day at work. Inspired by his background in boxing, he molded a mini fighter out of clay. His coworker whipped up another clay champion, and pretty soon the two men were acting out a full boxing match with their primitive action figures. Lo and behold, O’Brien’s next production was a short test film featuring a cave man and a dinosaur (made of modeling clay and wooden joints) shot atop the Bank of Italy Building in San Francisco.
Neither O’Brien nor the newsreel photographer he enlisted for help were especially gifted at stop-motion animation—the method of painstakingly moving figures by slight degrees and photographing each pose, to create the illusion of motion—but the footage was promising enough to secure funding for a real short: The Dinosaur and the Missing Link. Thomas Edison distributed the five-minute movie through his film company, establishing O’Brien as the go-to guy for prehistoric thrills. He would make at least 10 other dino shorts, including the 1918 epic The Ghost of Slumber Mountain.
The Lost World, however, would be his first feature, and O’Brien was determined to make an impression. In addition to live monkeys and bears, The Lost World would feature multiple animated dinosaur species, flying and fighting as the terrified humans looked on. Although the rubber models were only 18 inches tall, they towered over Professor Challenger and his cohorts thanks to an ingenious use of split screen technology, which allowed the beasts to appear in the same shot as the actors.
O’Brien’s first creation arrives around the 26-minute mark: a flying pterodactyl hovering over a plateau in the distance. Later, a brontosaurus appears, ripping a tree out of the ground with its teeth and tossing it aside, whole. A family of triceratops ambles across the screen, grazing on grass. The allosaurus—the “most vicious pest of the ancient world,” according to the movie’s intertitles—attacks indiscriminately, snarling in close-ups of his bloody, scaly face. Curiously, another prehistoric species appears: an “apeman,” who often poses a more immediate threat to the explorers than the reptilian predators. He is not an O’Brien original, but an actor in a hairy suit.
Early audience reactions confirmed that the effects were astonishing. In 1922, Doyle previewed some of the dinosaur sequences for the Society of American Magicians, headed by his friend Harry Houdini. He didn’t tell them it was from a movie, and he invited members of the press. One amazed reporter wrote that it was unclear “whether the sober-faced Englishman was making merry… or was lifting the veil from mysteries penetrated only by those of his school who know the secrets of filming elves and ectoplasm.”
“If fakes, they were masterpieces,” the journalist concluded.