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Volume 3671

DOORWAYS TO PELLUCIDAR
ZEALANDIA
By Rick Johnson

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INTRODUCTION

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Dinosaurs are occasionally seen all over the planet, though they tend to be localized in certain areas.  Few places are more known and controversial than those found in the Pacific, probably because of the vast size of the area.  Once we remove Isla Sorna and Nebular and even Caspak (we’ll get to those in another paper), we are left with dozens of dinosaur sightings scattered across the Pacific Ocean.  These sightings tend to run in a similar manner.

Someone visits an uncharted island, often by accident or shipwreck, discovers dinosaur-like creatures, manages to leave (after much of the party is eaten) just as the island explodes in a massive volcanic eruption that totally destroys said island, thus condemning the surviving witnesses to explain that their friends were eaten by a dinosaur and not murdered, all without proof to offer to the authorities.

I, myself, saw two dinosaur survivals while at Naha AFB, Okinawa.  The first was a Diploverdebron, a crescent-moon headed salamander 'extinct' for 300 million years, the other a giant 3' long scarlet centipede unknown to modern science so I have first-hand evidence that dinosaurs and giant 'bugs' DO exist.

Both Mark Brown and Den Valdron have written plausible papers on this subject which I note in the reference section, but Mr Brown and Mr Valdron miss the point, or so I believe.  To save you time (though  you really should read their papers) I offer a very edited description of their papers.  Once there was a massive continent in the South Pacific called Mu or Lemuria that was home to surviving dinosaurs and dinosaur-like creatures.  As the continent sank, the mountains became isolated islands where these creatures survived to the modern day.  That is until their home was blasted apart by a volcanic eruption.  Considering how many of these islands sank in the 20th century, one wonders how many Mu-Islands sank without our knowledge in previous centuries and why only dinosaur-inhabited islands do this?  Even Krakotoa and Santorini, two of the largest volcanic eruptions in history, failed to totally destroy their islands.

Yet these dinosaur-infested islands all managed to be totally destroyed.  The earliest known visit to a Mu-Island  was in 1830, the latest in 2004.  I found records of no less than a dozen separate islands, most of which were destroyed in a volcanic eruption between 1927 and 2004.  A dozen separate unknown islands large enough to contain dinosaur survivals being visited and destroyed within the space of 77 years.  That's one massive volcanic explosion large enough to destroy a very large island every 7 to 10 years!

You'd think that some geologist  would begin to wonder about this and start to look around.  Of course, when volcanoes erupt, tsunamis follow, causing devastation on islands hundreds of miles away.

Now, Den Valdron has located Mu, he refers to it as Zealandia and explains that New Zealand is the remains of Zealandia which sank 25 million years ago.  These dates are important, memorize them.

Map of Zealandia

See that long ridge running off North Island that looks like a tadpole swimming north and then turning south?  This is the Kermedec Group and will be referenced later.

I find his arguments quite convincing … save a couple unaddressed questions.

IF all these Mu-Islands are the remains of Zealandia, and if they contain dinosaur survivals, why don’t we see Dinosaurs on New Zealand or New Caladonia or any of the other islands in that area?  Why did they survive only on isolated smaller islands and not someplace large enough for them to stretch out? Ok, I’ll give you the Moa.  But…..

Also the Mu-Islands are right there in one spot!  That many volcanic eruptions of island-destruction size would have created tsunamis that would have washed Caladonia, North Island and the east coast of Australia clean.  Or at least caused so much damage that they wouldn't have been able to rebuild before the next hit!  Really, New Orleans still hasn’t rebuilt after Katrina and that place had the might of the US helping.  Yet….

So, though I agree that Zealandia was Mu and so is the focus for Pacific Dinosaur survivals, I disagree on the details and postulate a different story.

But first…

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BACKGROUND

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I think we need to define something here and to better understand this, you must read Mr Brown’s and Mr Valdron’s papers on dinosaur survival in the Pacific.  You’ll find them in the reference at the end of this paper.  I’ll wait.

Ready?

Good!

For purposes of these papers, we must become amateur paleontologists.  Not professionals because we must fudge the data a bit, dumb it down as it were.  But we will be educated amateurs.

Dinosaurs compromise two orders of (probably) extinct animals. The lizard-hipped beasts such as the cerotopsins, anklyosaurs, stegosaurs and so on, and the bird-hipped ones such as the carnosaurs (T-Rex and Velociraptor) and sauropods (Brontosaurus).  Pterosaurs and marine reptiles were NOT Dinosaurs, they were reptiles.  But, when you are being chased by a 100 foot lizard-thing, anatomical and toxological distinctions become meaningless.

Thus we will expand the colloquial term ‘dinosaur’ to include True Dinosaurs, Slow-Dinosaurs, Kaiju, Slurposaurs, large extinct mammals (like the wooly mammoth) and so on.

TRUE DINOSAURS are the Ornithischia and Saurischia that came into being about 230 million years ago and became (probably) extinct about 65 million years ago.  This date is important!  Remember it!  For our purposes we will include the Pterosaurs and marine reptiles and even those giant mammals that evolved post KT-boundary.  Think Jurassic Park.

SLOW DINOSAURS are cold-blooded (unlike the warm blooded True Dinosaurs, and generally slow and torpid. A carrot can outthink an apatosaur.  Think Valley of the Gwangi.

SlLURPOSAURS resemble giant lizards, often with added horns and frills.  Think One Million Years BC.

KAIJU are gigantic erect but very slow monsters that may resemble dinosaurs but when seen from safety, resemble some guy in a rubber suit.  Think Godzilla.

These are what we see on these islands.  It is also the distinction between these that is important.
 

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VISITS

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Although we have no real idea of how often these islands were and are visited (really, only those who survive to escape talk) our first known visit was in 1830 when a clipper ship, attacked by pirates of the New Hebrides Island (nka Vanuatu) chase said pirates (in a sailboat) to an unknown island where dinosaur-like beasts exist.  These beasts resemble Slurposaurs but are described as Dinosaurs.  (ref: Two Lost Worlds - 1950)

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It took a hundred years for another recorded visit, this by Hans Von Hammer (a former German WWI Ace) and Bartholomew Lash to Dragon Island.  This description revealed the island to be inhabited by True Dinosaurs.  (ref: Enemy Ace comic by DC)

In 1931, Doc Savage visited Thunder Island a few hundred miles from New Zealand and described it as a volcanic crater 20 miles across inhabited by True Dinosaurs.  It is curious that the island geology was tested and determined to be only 15 million years old!  What this means is that the island didn’t even exist until 50 million years after the Dinosaurs had become extinct. This island was reported destroyed!  Yet New Zealand, only a few hundred miles away recorded no tsunami. (ref: Land of Terror by Kenneth Robeson)

War That Time Forgot

Dinosaur island

Dinosaur Island

World War II arrived and there are numerous reports of American soldiers island-hopping to find themselves fighting True Dinosaurs on any of a number of unknown islands.  Are there Japanese reports that never made it into American history?  FYI: My father was a 15-year-old Marine humping a flame-thrower across the Pacific and never mentioned any dinosaurs, nor did he talk about some crazy GI who claimed to have seen dinosaurs.  So either the few survivors of these islands died in the War or were smart enough to keep their mouths shut or…. (Ref: Unknown Island - 1948 and Star Spangled War Stories comics by DC) I would like to point out here that I dislike using comic books as a source but will do so, with considerable distrust, ONLY if they support other sources.  And then, only in the most general way.

Lost Continent

Unknown Island

During WWII, a military aviator, Ted, flew over a Dinosaur inhabited island and in 1948, chose to return to photograph the creatures. He hired a former Marine, Fairbanks, who had been trapped there during the war (see above) to accompany him. The photos taken reveal a mixture of Slow-Dinosaurs and Kaiju. (ref: Unknown Island - 1948)

In 1951 an experimental Atomic Rocket went off course to crash on an uncharted Pacific Island.  A USAF team was sent to recover the instrument package and found the island to have been inhabited by Polynesians who deserted when the rocket arrived and crashed on the plateau.  The island was found to be radioactive and inhabited by Slow-Dinosaurs. The island was destroyed in a volcanic eruption as the surviving team left. (ref: Lost Continent - 1951)

Monster Island

In 1964, Doctor Henry Dodd was flying to Australia in a surplus Army blimp with his daughter and grandchildren when a storm wrecked the blimp on an uncharted island.  Finding a cave, the family took refuge to discover that the cave led down into a Mega-Cavern inhabited by True Dinosaurs and warring tribes of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnum people.  Later visits to the island showed it to be above the ocean.   (ref: Kona comics by Dell)  This is another example of a comic that I include only because two statements are important, the island is first underground, then above ground.

That same year a DC-3 (if memory serves) was carrying 55-gallon drums of 'radioactive waste' and crashed on an island in the Pacific.  Thirty years later a US Navy Seal team chased a suspected terrorist to that same island to discover it inhabited by carnosaurs, specifically large Velociraptors and a Meglosaurus. Since the Seals never went far inland, it is unknown if other True Dinosaurs existed though they must have or the raptors would have starved long ago.  Note that the Seals claimed the drums contained weapons-grade plutonium, a fact I find unbelievable as even in 1964, it was impossible to get this material and it would NOT be stored or moved in a steel drum.   But it’s easier to justify such a military operation if you scare the public with imaginary threats of terrorist-owned nukes than by telling the truth. The island was destroyed by volcanic eruption as the surviving Seals escaped. (ref: Raptor island - 2004)

 Island of the Lost Dinosaurs

In 1968, an anthropologist and his family became stranded on an island inhabited by an unknown form of dinosaur.   (ref: Island of the Lost - 1968)

Nothing was recorded for another 25 years until 1993 when a flight carrying USAF prisoners crashed on an island inhabited by dinosaurs and (often topless) European-looking women.  The Slow-Dinosaurs are as interesting as the women being European and not Polynesian as were the previous inhabitants. (REF:  Dinosaur Island - 1993)

And there you have it.  All known and recorded visits to the Mu-Islands inhabited by dinosaurs.  Of course, we know of these only because someone made it off, alive.  We have no idea of how many people landed and were eaten, leaving no one to tell the tale.

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ANALYSIS

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If we look at this with a critical eye, we see a theme or trend.

Now I dislike the idea of a dozen or more unknown islands scattered across the Pacific, each containing living dinosaurs, yet none being large enough to support a viable population.  Occam's Razor requires the simplest explanation and this is it!  There is only ONE Island inhabited by Dinosaurs.  Call it Dragon Island or Monster Island or Raptor Island or Dinosaur Island or Unknown Island or Thunder Island or Lost Continent or… it has to be the same island.  One large island can remain undiscovered, a dozen or more, cannot!   So if we postulate one island, I can give the following information culled form the various sources.

First, the island has dinosaurs.  Early reports indicate Slurposaurs, then True-Dinosaurs, then Slow-Dinosaurs and Kaiju, then True-Dinosaurs again.  It’s almost like a migration, the Slurposaurs arriving first, then being replaced by True-Dinosaurs that degenerate into Slow-Dinosaurs and Kaiju, then being replaced by another wave of Slurposaurs and True-Dinosaurs.

Second, the island has successive waves of inhabitants.  Polynesians mostly but then Europeans or people who look European.

Third, the island often blows up in a volcanic eruption that destroys the entire island but somehow avoids the creation of devastating tsunamis or recorded shock waves.

The island itself is described as large, either flat with a volcano (always an active volcano), a plateau and lowlands.  Possibly a 20 mile diameter volcano.  But if we look at the only known photo of the island, we can see why the descriptions match yet do not:

The only known photograph of the island

Since we do not know compass direction, we will use ‘top’, ‘right’, ‘left’ and ‘bottom’ as our directions.

Note at Top the island is low with beaches.  At Bottom, it is high with cliffs.  And the active volcano in the middle.

Now, if you were sailing to the island by sea and you arrived at Bottom, you’d think the island was a high plateau. If from Top, you’d see flat island with a distant volcano. And once inside Bottom, you would think you were in a large crater.  It all depends on perspective.

I was on Lake Pleasant in my kayak last year and decided to paddle across the lake for some treasure hunting.  The problem is that when your head is 2 ½ feet above the water, islands merge into the mountains and you have no idea if that is an island or a peninsula. So navigation becomes a pain and knowing where you are is vital.  It is so easy to head for a promontory and back and tie your boat off, only to learn, when you climb the hill, that you are on an island and you still have miles to go for true landfall.

Thus, every description can easily be attributed to people simply landing on a different part of the island.  The one constant is the active volcano, which is very important.

And as for the devastating eruptions?

Well, the volcano IS active and probably does erupt regularly.  Look at Big Island in the Hawaiian chain. It’s currently going through an eruptive cycle.  I think the volcano erupts every decade or so, but not total destruction, just enough to sink one part of the island, build another part up.  But somehow, when you are terrified because half your party was just eaten by some giant lizard-monster, and they are chasing you for dessert, suddenly the ground shakes and gasses pour down and flames and lava…   you barely make it to a canoe or rowboat and the waves wash you way, it is only natural to believe that the island sank.

Here is a formula:  the distance to the horizon in kilometers about equal to  3.8 times the square root of your height in meters.
For Americans, the distance in miles is about equal to 1.3 times the square root of your height in feet.
Ok, you are in a canoe.  Your head is about three feet above the water  so the square root of that is… 1.7 feet.  Times 1.3 =  2.25 miles.
If you are 2 ¼ miles away from the shore, that shore is invisible.

A couple miles of rowing and the entire island is over the horizon and all you see is smoke pouring up from the sea.  THIS is why people think the island sank.

So where IS this place?

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LOCATION

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I think Den Valdron is right.  Dragon Island (The Chinese called it that long before Europeans arrived so they get right to name the place) is a part of Zealandia!  But where?

Doc Savage describes it as a few hundred miles from New Zealand.  Most people describe an active volcano.  This implies that it is on the Ring of Fire that surrounds the Pacific.  Or, to put it in geologic terms, right on the juncture of two tectonic plates.

Plates of the Pacific.

Note that New Zealand sits on the fissure between the Australian Plate and the Pacific plates, an excellent place for volcanic activity and island creation.  If we go south, we get into really cold Antarctic areas, snow, ice!  And as all the descriptions are tropical, we must go north.  So we go north and notice that if we follow the juncture north to where it loops around to the west, we find the Kermadec island group, a "few hundred miles from New Zealand"!  Remember that map of Zealand I mentioned earlier?  This is why!

There it is!  Dragon Island has been fixed on the map!  About 30 degrees south by about 178 degrees west in the Kermadec group of islands.  Go find your dinosaurs!

So, how about those dinosaurs?

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DINOSAURS

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Here is the problem. I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat myself now.  There is no island large enough to support a viable population of dinosaurs where they are reported.

A four-ton elephant eats 640 pounds of vegetation every day!  Multiply that by a herd large enough to breed without genetic problems.  How much land does it take to feed that herd?

Note that game preserves have very small herds, but they haven’t been established long enough for more than a generation or two so we don’t have long-term inbreeding happening, yet.

Now consider an eight-ton hadrosaur!  Multiply that by a breeding herd!

Now consider that it takes ten zebra to feed one lion.  How many lions or allosaurs to form a decent breeding population?  Whatever number you have, multiply it by ten to get a herd of hardosaurs. Now multiply that herd by the amount of vegetation to feed that herd.  Now, add in sauropods, ceratopsins, raptors, t-rex and so on…  Can you have all this on an island small enough to remain hidden for millions of years? Especially when the island itself is only about fifteen-million years old!

I think not.

So what’s going on here?

Polynesians and Melanesians and Micronesians have been criss-crossing the Pacific for thousands of years.  So why don’t we see mass legends all over the place warning people, "don’t go to that island or you’ll get eaten by monster lizards!"?   IF dinos lived on that island, someone would have made legends a lot more specific than some creation myth with an evil dragon.

I think the answer is in Dr Dodd’s visit.

He crashed his blimp on an island in a storm, then followed a tunnel into a Mega-Cavern that was already inhabited by dinosaurs and primitive men.  Giliks?  The Dinosaurs lived underground!  But what about those that were seen above?  Isolated colonsts?   Still….. why only recently?  And why the different types at different times?

THEORY

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We all have an idea of what happened.  Here is mine.  Feel free to refer to the above visits to double check my idea.

65 million years ago the KT boundary appeared and the dinosaurs began to go away.  Now, the non-paleontologists fell in love with the asteroid impact off Yucatan that created a ‘nuclear’ winter scenerio.  Millions of tons of dust blocking the sun for years or centuries causing plants to die from lack of sunlight, followed by starvation of the plant-eating Dinos and then the flesh-eating dinos.  Dinos died out within weeks, maybe a month, depending on how much fat reserves they had.  We even know where the asteroid hit!

It’s a nice story but, like all fairy tales, it aint’ really true.  The asteroid theory implies that 90% of life got snuffed out within a couple weeks or months or, at most, years.

The truth is that dinosaurs had been going away for millions of years before the KT event and many survived for millions of years after.  It took a dozen million years to wipe out the dinosaurs.  I’m not saying the asteroid never struck, maybe it contributed to the downfall that was already happening.  It just wasn’t a major cause.  In fact most of the iridium in the KT boundary was terrestrial in origin and comes from mass vulcanism in India and Siberia.  The KT boundary is too thick for a single impact, it took millenia to deposit that much iridium into that thick a layer.

So here they are, kings of creation, masters of the universe, lords of all they survey.  So powerful were they that our ancestors couldn’t get a grip other than as mice!  And they are dying off.

BUT..

There was one place where dinosaurs survived, and did so well.  One place where they were safe from asteroids, cosmic rays, Indian/Siberian vulcanism, even safe from alien or time hunters!  And that place was Pellucidar!  Ok, it took me a dozen pages to mention the "P" word but I've done it.

There were two major openings between Earth and Pellucidar, and both were tropical during the time of the dinosaurs.  Even Antarctica was semi-tropical and had herds of dinosaurs.  So, many of these dinos simply wandered through the openings and some stayed there.  Thus when the outer world went through one if its periodic mass-extinctions, the ones in Pellucidar remained alive.

Then the climate shifted and the polar openings froze over and the surviving dinosaurs were trapped within.

BUT, as mentioned before, the Earth is not solid!  It’s hollow and porous.  Caves formed all over.  Tunnels formed to connect some of these caves and some of these cave/tunnel networks reached to the surface.  And the volcanoes simply opened some and closed others.

Oh, the first dinos that tried to reach the surface or Pellucidar via the tunnels died.  But the second ate the body and went further until he died.  And so on.

What comes out of a cow is remarkably similar to what goes into a cow.  Even human poop contains tomato and corn that is visable in our poop!   That’s why you don’t fertilize with human poop.  Aside from disease that is easily passed on, spread your poop and you get tomatos in your cornfield.   Ever see what grows from a cowpie?  Ask any farmer or rancher.

I don’t see sauropod or hadrosaur poop being any different.  Undigested seeds germinating, feeding the next wave of herbavoires…

It would take centuries, maybe thousands of years but eventually the dinos would find a path between Earth and Pellucidar.  And sow that path with undigested seeds and fertilizer to create a park that could easily be followed.  Probably they were doing this for the last half-a-billion years.  So in addition to the polar openings, cave-systems would be explored by accident and regular migrations would occur, each adding new life to Pellucidar (how long would it take to hike that far?) and Pellucidar replenishing life on Earth.  Once established, some dino would wander into a giant cave and follow the vegetation to the surface.

Here is a hint!  Any cave system large enough for the Pellucidaran dinosaurs to follow, will be overgrown with fertilizer (read poop) and plants adapted to the dark.  Probably in some areas, glow-in-the-dark moss showed up.  So, unlike crawling through narrow tunnels, any spelunker would find himself strolling along a thousand-mile game-trail within a massive park all the way to the Inner World.

Imagine Von Hardwigg and Lidenbrock who entered that Icelandic volcano to find that mega-cavern with mammoths!  Had they followed those pacyderms instead of the sea, they would have come out , not in Sicily, but in Pellucidar! (ref:  Journey to the Interior of the Earth and Journey to the Center of the Earth, both by Jules Verne)

So, 25 million years ago, Zealandia/Mu sank!  By then the surface Dinosaurs were extinct so no big loss other than some bird on a mountain woke up to discover that he was now on an island and that he could finally give up flying and grow into a giant Moa.  Life is strange.

About 15 million years ago the Pacific and Australian Plates crashed one time too many and the Kermadec Islands began to form.  One island was isolated and grew large as it was directly over the fissure.  BUT, for some reason, the Dragon Island volcano was located near an uranium field and the lava it spewed out was uranium rich.  And that much radioactivity caused problems.  Cancer, thyroid, sterility…  you get the idea.  Doc Savage even mentioned the sterility of the outer volcanic cone.

Dragon Isle was far from the paradise it resembled.  Once colonized, life adapted to a highly radioactive environment or it died.

A few thousand years ago, the Pacific Migrations began.  Dragon Isle was colonized, but abandoned, probably a hundred times.  Sometimes it was because of the volcano erupting at the worst times.  Sometimes it was because the people got sick and died.  The island got the rep of being cursed or sacred.

In 1579, Francis Drake visited an island in the Pacific where the locals dumped their infected, sick and dying.  They said the island was Tapu (Taboo) and they were giving their sick to the Gods of the Dead.  Drake watched some rotting corpses stagger from the trees, attack the sick placed on the shore and drag them away.

Were these rotting corpses the Zombies Drake described or were they simply victims of advanced radiation poisoning?

But no legends of dinosaurs or monsters existed.  At least none that were different from any other island and nation anywhere.  I think it was Krakatoa that changed things!

Oh not that Javan volcanic explosion per se.  But there were a number of erupting volcanos at that time.  It was a century of active vulcanism and Dragon Isle was one of them.

Remember Dr Dodd?  A Mega-cavern had formed under Dragon Isle and had been colonized over millions(?) of years from Pellucidar until it had established its own eco-system, complete with warring tribes of giliks.

Then a couple hundred years ago, an eruption opened a way from the surface to that Mega-Cavern.  Dinos began to move up!

It wasn’t easy for the path was difficult and there wasn’t enough time for anything to grow.  Not even guano existed.  So how?

Here’s a hint.  If you are ever stuck on Gilligan’s Island, check the fauna!  If all you see are reptiles, don’t bother to build a raft as it’ll soak up water and sink long before you reach anyplace.  If you see mammals, sail upwind!  The larger the animals, the closer you are to the mainland.  If you see rats, sit tight and wait for that tourist ship to come by again!

Why?  Because islands are colonized by storms.  Some storm rips trees off a large island or mainland and blows them around the ocean until they reach an island where they can dislodge their passengers.  Deer can’t hang on for long.  Lions starve quickly so if you see mammals, you are within a few days to a week of a large land mass.  Reptiles can last far longer without food and water.  Lizards lap at the dew and eat the bugs in the tree.  A good lizard can live for months on a single floating palm tree.  So if you only see reptiles, you are so far away that all the mammals starved before they beached.    And rats?  Rats come along in ships.  The come aboard in one port, then swim to the nearest island when the boat anchors.

So, the first creatures to move from the Mega-Cavern to Dragon Island were the reptiles.

Now I cannot be certain if they were normal sized that grew to gigantic size because the radiation caused massive thyroid and pituitary problems.  Do lizards have a thyroid?  Or maybe they were actual giant slurposaurs that crawled the miles of new caves to the surface.  But once there, they settled in.  Paradise with no T-Rex chasing them!  And the people!  Ever watch a gecko eat?

I have a family of geckos living under my front porch light.  When the sun sets, I turn the light on to feed them.  They come out and sit motionless on the wall.  Then the bugs arrive and… I never see the geckos move.  They are there, then they are someplace else, their tongue lapping up all the nearby bugs, then they are someplace else.

I can see that happening.  Momma Melanesian puts her kids to bed with a story about the Pacific Bogeyman.  Daddy tells her she is frightening the kids with nonsense, momma laughs, then a tongue snaps in and daddy is gone.  Momma is gone, sleeping babies are gone.  Within a few minutes, the village is gone!  Cousin from the next island arrives and maybe he gets off alive, maybe not.  The island gets a rep as a bad place to be but it doesn’t have enough time to really process into legend.  It’s just superstition now.

Remember that Russian nuclear reactor that melted down?  Chernobyl?  Go there today and aside from the radiation, you will find giant earthworms!  A by-product of radiation.

It's 1830 and those pirates, chased by the clipper ship arrive and… the Slurposaurs feed.

A century later the True Dinosaurs manage to arrive and there go the Slurposaurs.  The largest slurposaur is no match for a pack of large and hungry raptors or a T-Rex.  And so Dragon Island has new tenants.

A couple decades later, the Dinosaurs are vanishing. The True Dinosaurs that ate our and the Japanese soldiers during WWII are dead.  Those that survived the guns and cannon of the soldiers succumb to radiation.  Remember the USAF expedition of 1951 that reported uranium? The dinos are slowing down due to radiation sickness and becoming Kaiju.  Large, slow, deformed.  Now the slurposaurs have a fighting chance and recover.

The next few visits see slurposaurs but no True Dinosaurs.  In the 1960s, the Giliks move up, bringing with them their tamed dinosaurs from the Mega-Cavern.  By the 1990s, tribes of giliks that resemble Europeans are on the island.  Occasional visitors arrive like that USAF prison aircraft and these are assimilated into gilik society or are eaten by the wild dinosaurs.  Some, like the SEAL-Team never make it far enough inland to meet the giliks.  But the current crop of dinosaurs and people are doomed.

Between the radiation in the ground, poisoning the food and the all-too often eruptions, they will mutate, suffer cancer, and die.  Unless they are eaten!

And there we stand

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CONCLUSION

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It is clear to me that Dragon Isle, one of the Kermadec Islands, is a recent migration route from the surface to Pellucidar.  Mostly uninhabited save the occasional diseased human struggling to live with an active volcano, a day-night cycle they forgot a dozen thousand years ago and rogue dinosaurs.

I’ve given you the topography, the geology, even the location.  If you go there, take pictures and if you survive, let me know where the opening to Pellucidar is on the island and what you found there.

That is, if you come back!

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