Heh, funny! Everyone knows chicago isn't real.

This is awesome, thanks for sharing.

You're welcome. This has to be one of the first "giant prehistoric monsters attacking a city" stories of the 20th century - King Kong didn't come along until the 1930s.

... and now we have those pranksters Fox 'News' fabricating stories on a daily basis.

If we're going to have fake news, I'd prefer dinosaur invasion hoaxes to culture war propaganda. On the other hand, I guess it was a good lesson in "don't believe everything you read" for the people of 1906.

King Kong is my favorite movie, so this piece of trivia means a lot to me.

Username checks out.

Lol. I forgot that was my username.

I'm dumb...

Well, at least the dinosaurs believed it was real enough to pay a visit!

You'd never see something this cool done today because of all the precious snowflakes who'd sue them because they were traumatized.

TIL that the plural of pterodactyl is pterodactyli

So this even pre-dates the famous "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast that tricked several people into thinking Martians were invading?

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It turns out it was just one local wizard with a T-rex skeleton.

By a bit over 30 years.

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When every day is fools day.

i need to get better about sneaking these into my dnd campaigns, the havoc and uncertainty would be delightful.

I wonder if perhaps this article inspired the rampage scene in The Lost World silent movie, which later inspired the rampage scene in King Kong and started the kaiju genre.

I was wondering the same thing. I mean, I guess the idea of dinosaurs attacking a city is inherently dramatic so it makes sense as a story trope, but as far as I know this article was the first major visual representation of that idea. When Doyle came out with The Lost World (novel) in 1912, the only creature that gets transported to London is a pterodactyl. Then by the time the movie's produced in the '20s, it's a brontosaur, and the rest is history.

This isn't Bielefeld

The effects of that broadcast are largely exaggerated. Some people were fooled but it didn't cause mass panic like many people think

some people will take old newspaper articles about 'giant skeletons' as facts

things like this should be an indication that old newspapers werent paragons of truth, but printed whatever outlandish things would get people to buy them

It's also true that people sometimes casually imagine that people of the past didn't have senses of mischief, or just senses of humor, as in this case.

Can confirm. I live in the area.

The plural of the same kind of fish is fish. When there are multiple kinds of fish they are called fishes. I don’t know what multiples of different kinds of fish are called.

Fisheses?

That's easy you just pluralize the word for multiples of a single kind of fish.

So: fishes.

I understood that reference

I bet at least one historical "fact" was an inside joke that was lost to time.

My guess is Abraham Lincoln having a high pitched voice. I bet it was deep and booming but it was funny to say otherwise.

Except that it isn't and Pterodactyl isn't even real, it's either Pterodactylus, Pteranodon (the one you think of) or Pterosaur (the order).

que?

The high-pitched voice was cultivated by public speakers before artificial amplification was available. The higher-pitched speaking voice is understandable farther away than a lower-pitched voice at the same volume.

Elmo would have been a very persuasive frontier politician. “Who’s against slavery!? WE are! YAAAAYYY!!!”