![]() It had even brought along a series of very large trumpet-shaped lunar flowers that released great quantities of pure oxygen, thus enabling itself and the Doctor to breathe while flying through the airless vacuum of space between the Earth and the moon.Īnd this is precisely what happened, with the Doctor’s astounding lunar discoveries and adventures (accompanied throughout by his sagacious old parrot, Polynesia) taking up the entire content of Book #8, Doctor Dolittle in the Moon (1928). And this particular individual had been sent to Earth as a messenger - to locate Doctor Dolittle, and then personally transport him to the moon to solve what was at that stage a still-unrevealed problem there. To cut short a rather long story (one third of the entire novel, in fact), it transpired that this astonishing insect was a giant moth that belonged to an entire race of such creatures living upon the moon. The enormous foot which had softly struck the window still rested on the sill. The enormous wings were folded close to the thick furry body, giving the appearance of the gable-end of a house – and quite as large. His shoulders behind the head, which was pressed close against the panes, towered up to a height of at least two storeys. With trembling hands I did as I was told.The moth positively seemed to fill the whole garden. Then we’ll be able to see the rest of him better.’ ‘Heaven preserve us!’ I heard the Doctor mutter at my elbow. Set close together, bulging outward, shimmering like vast iridescent opals in the pale candlelight from the room, they made us feel as though we were gazing through a powerful magnifying glass at an ordinary moth’s head. But to us, in spite of their positively gigantic size, they were unmistakably the eyes of a moth. Anyone but those who, like the Doctor and myself, were intimately familiar with the anatomy of insects, would quite possibly have taken them for something else. But there was no mistaking the eyes – strange and very beautiful eyes. ![]() In fact the entire window, at least six feet high by three feet wide, only encompassed part of it. It was so large that you did not take it in or see the connexion, at first, between the various features. To begin with, it took one quite a while to realise that it was a face. Used as John Dolittle was to strange sights and unusual things, this vision outside the glass for a moment staggered even him. So the Doctor and his assistant, Tommy Stubbins, opened the curtains to see what was there. The evening in question was moonlit, and the Dolittle household’s members were chatting animatedly, when, abruptly, they heard a mysterious, muffled tapping sound on one of the windows. But before he had even begun this project, one of these legendary creatures unexpectedly arrived in his own garden! But – almost in the words of Al Jolson – you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!ĭoctor Dolittle’s Garden (1927), the seventh book in the series, records how, after many years of very indifferent results, the good Doctor had suddenly achieved a totally unexpected breakthrough in his longstanding studies of insect language - as a result of which he had then planned to investigate certain ancient traditions recalled by local hawk moths concerning a race of giant moths as big as houses. So far in this trilogy of ShukerNature articles on cryptids encountered by the famous if fictitious animal linguist-explorer Doctor Dolittle, created by Hugh Lofting during the early years of the 20th Century, the good Doctor has encountered such remarkable beasts as a two-headed descendant of the unicorn, a colossal cousin of the Loch Ness monster, a titanic turtle surviving from the age of Noah’s Ark, and a supposed dragon of decidedly dinosaurian persuasion. He is the author of such seminal works as Mystery Cats of the World (1989), The Lost Ark: New and Rediscovered Animals of the 20th Century (1993 greatly expanded in 2012 as The Encyclopaedia of New and Rediscovered Animals), Dragons: A Natural History (1995), In Search of Prehistoric Survivors (1995), The Unexplained (1996), From Flying Toads To Snakes With Wings (1997), Mysteries of Planet Earth (1999), The Hidden Powers of Animals (2001), The Beasts That Hide From Man (2003), Extraordinary Animals Revisited (2007), Dr Shuker's Casebook (2008), Karl Shuker's Alien Zoo: From the Pages of Fortean Times (2010), Cats of Magic, Mythology, and Mystery (2012), Mirabilis: A Carnival of Cryptozoology and Unnatural History (2013), Dragons in Zoology, Cryptozoology, and Culture (2013), The Menagerie of Marvels (2014), A Manif estation of Monsters (2015), Here's Nessie! (2016), and what is widely considered to be his cryptozoological magnum opus, Still In Search Of Prehistoric Survivors (2016) - plus, very excitingly, his first two long-awaited, much-requested ShukerNature blog books (2019, 2020). Zoologist, media consultant, and science writer, Dr Karl Shuker is also one of the best known cryptozoologists in the world.
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