Dinosaurs and other extinct creatures in adventure booklets from the golden age of Spanish comics

Adventure comics were one of the most popular forms of escapism for young people during the harsh period following the Spanish Civil War, until they were replaced by television in the 1960s. The heroes of these comic booklets faced all sorts of threats and monsters, often including dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and other animals from the past which proved ideal for personifying all the horrors that readers had to deal with on a daily basis, so they were destroyed in the cruellest way possible. As these were extinct and largely unknown creatures, the scriptwriters and artists had to use a considerable amount of imagination to fill in their many gaps. A sample of about five hundred pages of Spanish comic booklets featuring different reptiles of the past is analysed here to examine which species were favoured by readers, their role in these comics, and the general palaeontological ignorance that they often revealed. These results are also compared with similar studies of different geographical and temporal scope in order to assess similarities and differences.