Dinosaur Island was a mass of land from Earth’s Mesozoic Era that, due to a glitch in the timesteam, temporarily existed in the Pacific Ocean in the recent past. Oddly, although it appeared to be a single mass, the island was actually divided into three zones, one for each of the three different periods (Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous) that make up the Mesozoic Era, and each zone was inhabited by plants and animals from those periods. While in the present, the island existed within a time pocket that manifested as an invisible barrier surrounding the island.[1]
As time began to straighten itself out, each segment of the island was pulled back to the point in time and space from which it had originated, with the oldest zone being the first to disappear back into the past. Once the last of the land had vanished from the present, everything from the island that had been taken through the barrier into the present era vanished as well. In total, beings from the present who had become trapped on the island were there for no more than six days before the island had totally vanished.
History
Due to an unexplained time disruption, land from the three periods of the Mesozoic Era appeared in the present day as an island in the Pacific Ocean. The island was first encountered by a United States Air Force military transport plane that was carrying members of the 82nd Airborne Division from the West Coast to Guam. When their plane ran into heavy weather, the pilots tried to climb over the storm but in doing so the plane was attacked by something big (a pterodactyl) that caused it to lose power and drop like a stone. When the plane hit a break in the storm, the troops took the opportunity to parachute out and aimed for the island they could now see below. Although the flight crew were unable to make it out of the plane before it went down, all of the soldiers landed safely on the island except for one who died of a broken neck when he landed in trees. While trying to recover his body, the soldiers had their first encounter with dinosaurs. The commanding officer, Lieutenant Glazier, had some of his men set up a camp while he led a small scouting party to recon the area.
Six hours later, the Time Sled carrying the five members of the Fantastic Four crashed on the island. The team had been returning from an alternate Earth and had just entered their timeline when they encountered a Time Storm that threatened to rip their vehicle to pieces. In order to survive, they had flown into a break in the storm and made timefall on the island. The team barely had time to realize that Ms. Marvel (Sharon Ventura) had been knocked unconscious and was reverting back to her human form when they were found by the soldiers. As a precaution, the FF attempted to disarm the soldiers but found that they had lost their powers. Since Ben Grimm was then in his human form and Reed Richards was powerless, the troops were initially very skeptical that they were the FF. However, when a Spinosaurus attacked and bit the head off one of the soldiers before Ben killed it with the miniature rocket launcher he had brought in his briefcase, the lieutenant felt he owed them so he explained how he and his men had arrived on the island. At the lieutenant's insistence, the five civilians accompanied the scouting party as they continued their reconnaissance by climbing to the top of a mostly-dormant volcano to confirm that they were on an island. Since traveling through the jungle at night would have been certain death, the group set up camp atop some cliffs and the soldiers took turns keeping watch with their machine gun through the night.
The following morning, the camp was charged by a Triceratops that was running blind. Reed diverted it back into the jungle but then the pack of Deinonychus that had caused the Triceratops to stampede attacked the humans. During the battle, Ben donned his Thing Exoskeleton, driving the predators away and finally convincing the soldiers of who they were. The group then attempted to return to the wreckage of the time sled but, after hours of traveling through the jungle, they discovered that a large section of the island had disappeared, taking both the time sled and the rest of Glazier's men with it. Reed theorized that, as time was trying to straighten itself out, the island, being a slice of time out of joint, was being pulled back into the past where it belonged.[2]
As the group faced the fact that they were trapped on a island from the past that was gradually being pulled back into its own era, Sharon pointed out that the flora on the island was from the three periods of the Mesozoic Era and that the island seemed to be zoned, with the plants in their current location being from the Jurassic Period while those on the other side of the island were mostly Cretaceous and those on the now-vanished part of the island had been Triassic. Realizing that this indicated that the older parts of the island were disappearing first, the group headed to the further side of the island where they found a cove and began building a large raft to get them all off the island. Reed suspected that the absence of any signs of air travel meant that the entire island was trapped in some sort of isolated time pocket but agreed that the raft could be their best hope.
After two days, the group ran out of the creepers they were using to lash the logs together so the FF went on a collecting run to near their first camp site to gather some more. While there, they had an encounter with a Tyrannosaurus Rex and, after Sharon managed to successfully trick it into going over a cliff, the FF witnessed the middle part of the island begin to disappear and barely got back over the Jurassic-Cretaceous border in time.
With time running out, the FF and the soldiers managed to complete the raft in two days. As the volcano began to erupt and the wind began to rise, a possible sign that the remainder of the island was being summoned back to its correct location in the past, the group launched the raft. However, as they used oars to move the raft out into the ocean, they ran into a solid invisible barrier that stopped them. Reed theorized that it was the true perimeter of the time disruption in which they had been trapped and that they would have to break through it and into their own time before the island vanished or they would be trapped in the past forever. Unfortunately, Ben's Thing suit wasn't strong enough for him to punch through the barrier and an attack by a Kronosaurus threatened to destroy the raft. Although concentrated rifle fire caused the plesiosaur's head to explode, his body was still on course to ram the raft, but at the last moment a hole opened in the barrier, allowing the raft to pass through it and into the present time. As the group watched the last of the island vanish, they were taken by surprise when their raft, having been made from logs and creepers from the island, also vanished, dropping them into the middle of the ocean and leaving them to face a long swim home.
Fortunately, the FF then discovered that they had regained their powers and Sue Storm used her invisible force field to create a new raft for them while Johnny Storm transformed into the Human Torch and flew off to bring help by making contact with a ship or an airplane. At the same time, Sharon reverted to her She-Thing form.
Later, in the Hall of Chronometry within the TVA Null-Time Zone, Mobius M. Mobius reported that the Fantastic Four had been remanded to the custody of their local timeline, the regional temporal disruptions had been repaired and all powers had been restored at the local level. One of the Chronomonitors reminded Mobius that, if his department had been paying attention, none of these events would ever have happened.[1]Residents
Notes
- This island was never actually called "Dinosaur Island" in the two issues in which it appeared. The closest thing to a name that it did receive was when the cover of Fantastic Four #346 referred to it as "the island that time forgot."
- Although it was never specifically stated within the story, it seems likely that the same "glitch in the time stream" that caused the island to appear in the present also caused the Time Storm that disrupted the FF's journey home.
- The wreckage of the Time Sled and the rest of Lt. Glazier's men were presumably all transported back to the Triassic Period when the part of the island they were on returned to its proper time. Given that the lifeforms on that section had survived the trip forward in time, it seems likely that those troops would also have survived their voyage back through time but their ultimate fate has never been revealed.
Trivia
- DC Comics has had their own Dinosaur Island, site of the War that Time Forgot, since 1960.