Skull Island was the mysterious island inhabited by strange species and dinosaurs. It is also the home of Kong.

Legacy of the Venture

In 1933 Carl Denham shocked the world when he unveiled King Kong to a stunned crowd at the Alhambra Theatre. The twenty-five-foot-tall ape delivered the scientific community a one-two punch that sent it reeling with the impact of this incredible discovery and subsequent tragic loss. But Kong was just the beginning.

An entire island, bursting with prehistoric wonders, exists. If Kong had shocked the scientific world, Skull Island’s emergence from the shroud of legend into reality shook it to its core. Not since the discovery of the New World had mankind been offered such an opportunity to explore a land trapped in time. Kong’s chest-beating roar at the summit of the Empire State Building heralded the greatest discovery of the century – arguably, the millennium. In the wake of the island's unveiling, universities and private organizations across the planet fumbled to dispatch teams to investigate and catalogue its wonders. The race of the century was on: Rival expeditions fought for exclusivity and justification, each asserting its own legal standing to be first on the island. Only a handful of the two dozen expeditions successfully made landfall, and – of those – half were woefully unprepared for the terrors that awaited them.

Kong’s brief appearance and destruction in Manhattan in 1933 paralleled the discovery and loss of the island. Barely fifteen years after its discovery, Skull Island and all its wondrous secrets were lost to the waves, the island torn to pieces by the same irresistible geologic force that had preserved it for so many eons. In the intervening years between revelation and oblivion

The Crumbling Coast and Village

Forbidding Coast Skull Island’s coast was a savage warfront between land and sea. Heavy oceanic swells buffeted the shattered coast, eating rocks and ruins alike, leaving a jagged shoreline like a jaw of broken teeth.

On the western flank the sea crashed against sheer cliffs and shardlike escarpments. Ancient ruins wound through the cracks in the rock, soulless atriums echoing with the pounding of the waves. Seabirds made their homes here in the myriad cuts and ledges – resident gulls and seasonal migrants. Petrels, gannets, and cormorants dived for fish in the rich, cold waters of the trench that abutted the island.

By the twentieth century the few humans that lived on Skull Island scraped a living on this barren shore, their village perched on a thin sliver of rock, jutting into the sea, beyond the warding great wall.

On the far side of the island a slow sinking brought the sea gradually inland. Where once lowland forests and floodplains stretched, the high tides drowned the land. There were a few beaches in the more sheltered inlets between the rocky headlands. These were the transitory homes of fur seals and sea turtles. Patrolled by huge predators and scavengers, these inlets were every bit as forbidding as the western cliffs to the human inhabitants.

The Shrinking Lowlands

On the eastern side of the mountainous spine that bisects Skull Island, a network of rivers, fed by runoff and springs, weaved through a wide land of gentle country swathed in low scrub and patchy grasslands. These lowland flats and wide grassy valleys were home to the largest of the island’s inhabitants. Towering sauropods and brawny ceratopsians chewed the grasses and mowed the jungle perimeter, keeping it at bay, while giant, predatory Vastatosaurus rexes stalked the herds at a distance. Beneath them all, legions of insects went about their secret lives, mimicking the epic struggles of the dinosaurs.

Over time, as the island shrank and the encroaching sea gobbled up much of this region, the inhabitants were forced into the jungle borders to survive. Surveys showed the overall size of the open lowland habitat had been reduced by nearly eighty percent in less than a few centuries. This concentrated species in ever tighter clusters and intensified the competition in the low forest areas.

The Winding Swamps and Waterways

Water is the lifeblood of any ecosystem, and nowhere was this more evident than on Skull Island. High rainfall for much of the year ensured that a constant flow of water worked its way across, into, and under the land. This constant flow sculpted the landforms, carved deep gullies, and leveled the grasslands. It filled holes to create pools and murky swamps and fed the ravenous jungle that swathed most of the island. It defined and sustained much of the land’s geography and fed all of its inhabitants.

These extensive aquatic systems of streams, rivers, lakes, and swamps were home to many of the island’s unique life-forms. Microscopic, but vital, algae and protozoans bobbed along, drawn by the current. Swarming silver flashes of fish shoals, numbering in the thousands, wound like underwater trains through the boughs of wet-footed forests. Long-necked birds and thin-snouted fisher-reptiles stalked through marshy sinks. In the deep black-brown water of the wide, slow rivers, leviathan killers sinuously slipped unnoticed by the prey they marked.

The Steaming Jungle. A Garden of Titans

The tangled jungles of Skull Island were, without doubt, the most impressive forest complexes on the planet. Gnarled trees the size of skyscrapers erupted in knotted root jumbles from the broken, volcanic earth. Entire ecosystems existed within the great arms of single trees, with unique species coddled among their leaves and vines. Undergrowth, taller and denser than full-sized trees elsewhere in the world, choked the sodden ground hundreds of feet below the light-gobbling canopy. Snakelike vines and strangling creepers crisscrossed, struggling with one another in a slow fight for light and water. Fungi the size of armchairs jutted from sponge-damp wood to vomit clouds of toxic spores into the sodden air, and thick seas of rotting leaves pooled between buttress roots, several feet deep in places and writhing with arm-thick centipedes and luminous slugs.

The jungle sweated in an everlasting twilight. Leafy branches, high above, stole light before it could filter to the floor, rendering a world in muted green during the day. At night cool moonlight was echoed in luminous pools by light-emitting creatures calling insects to their doom. The creatures of the jungle learned to use this darkness to their advantage, concealing themselves in its protective embrace or developing means to pierce the unrelenting gloom.

The Abyssal Chasms and Pits

Due to the island's volcanic nature and composition of brittle, quick setting igneous glasses and easily-weathered granite, ceaseless rainfall has carved numerous deep cracks, pits, and narrow valleys running towards the ocean. Rains from higher elevations settle in low spots and depressions, warmed by geothermal heat to body temperature and higher, which then collect nearly all biological matter that has entered a state of decomposition. The result is dark soup of decay, a rich ground for an entire niche of invertebrate life, the giant scavengers.

With sunlight rarely touching these deep places, a number of arthropods have evolved to feast on the dead.

The Barren Uplands

Rising above the green shag of the jungle, like the spires of some eroding castle, the great spine of Skull Island was the mountainous ridge that ran its crooked length. Flanked by ruin-studded lesser peaks and black crags that broke the choking tree line, the central rise was a row of jagged, bald summits. Harsh elemental forces of wind and rain pruned back the jungle’s insistent efforts to colonize these rocky heights.

This harsh land, which was as much sky as rock, was the domain of only the toughest plants. Low, wind-bludgeoned scrub, cushion-leafed sprigs, and rock-hugging lichen, they were hardy survivors capable of squeezing life out of the stone they clung to.

Into this landscape of grand vistas and buffeting winds, the last of the great apes retreated to make his refuge – a bleak hermitage for the lonely king.

The World of Kong : A Natural History of Skull Island :monke-return:

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

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Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

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