This paper tracks both famous and previously overlooked appearances of the premiere predatory dinosaur—Megalosaurus—in nineteenth-century imaginative literature, especially fiction. In so doing, it examines how Megalosaurus acted as both divinely designed, providentially exterminated relic of a bloodthirsty past and as unexpected embodiment of humanity's frailties and contradictions. The best-known literary megalosaur consists of a brief but suggestive reference in Charles Dickens's novel Bleak House (serialized 1852–1853) that has been widely discussed by critics. In subsequent decades, surviving specimens of the apex antediluvian predator appeared in several dystopian romances: the elimination of this predator by superhuman underground beings foreshadows the future colonization and extermination of humanity in Edward Bulwer Lytton's The Coming Race (1871), while, in James De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (written late 1860s; published 1888), Megalosaurus contributes to commentary on the tension between scientific imagination and hoaxing.

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