The Partridge Creek Monster: a living dinosaur in the Yukon

April 15, 1908. The French magazine Je sais tout published a first-person story by Georges Dupuy, a writer said to have made many explorations in the Polar regions. In July, The Strand Magazine ran it in English under the heading "Stories Strange and True".

Dupuy opened with a promise. "The story which follows is in no sense a romance." It happened, he wrote, precisely as it appeared to his own eyes and to those of his three companions.

Partridge Creek feeds the Stewart River in the Yukon. Banker James Lewis Buttler and miner Tom Leemore were hunting moose near Clear Creek when the moose fled in fright. At a moose-lick, the men found tracks.

Enormous tracks. A belly impression in the slime "more than two feet deep, thirty feet long, and twelve feet wide." Footprints five feet long, with claws more than a foot long. The print of a heavy tail, ten feet long. They followed the trail into a deep rocky gorge.

The party camped above a ravine near Partridge Creek. Nine witnesses in all, including Dupuy, Buttler, Leemore, the missionary Father Pierre Lavagneux and five Indigenous men the story calls "Klayakuk Indians". Then they saw it. A black, gigantic form, at least fifty feet long, its withers at least eighteen feet above the ground. A horn like that of a rhinoceros. A bristled, greyish-black hide. In its jaws, something that seemed to be a caribou.

For a full ten minutes they stood riveted to the spot. Then came a roar, "a hollow, indescribable, frightful sound." The beast wheeled with surprising agility and, moving like a kangaroo, sprang into the ravine. Lavagneux named it "the dinosaurus of the Arctic Circle!" In the French version, it was a Ceratosaurus.

Christmas Eve, 1907. In a letter dated January 1st, 1908, Lavagneux described a second encounter. He and ten of his Indigenous companions watched the beast pass "like a whirlwind over the frozen surface of the river," breaking off enormous blocks of ice with its hind feet. "His fur was covered with hoar-frost, and his little eyes gleamed like fire in the twilight."

Dupuy wrote that for a month they were the laughing-stock of the Golden City, and that the Dawson Daily Nugget called him "A Rival of Poe". The story ends with Buttler and Dupuy leaving for Dawson City to ask the Governor for fifty armed men and mules. No record shows what happened next.

In September 1908 Richard Lydekker wrote that a living carnivorous dinosaur so far north "seems incredible to every scientific mind." Later researchers found no trace of Buttler, Leemore or Lavagneux outside the story, and no Klayakuk people are known. Dupuy had already published Yukon fiction in 1906. Karl Shuker called the tale "assuredly a hoax". Loren Coleman called it "pure #cryptofiction set in Canada".

The monster travelled anyway. Theo Paijmans counted 31 newspaper clippings between 1908 and the 1920s. Some reprints claimed Leemore had photographed the creature, but no photograph was ever produced. A Japanese adaptation from 1908 is cited as one of the earliest uses of kaiju for a modern-day dinosaur. Harold T. Wilkins later suggested some dinosaurs might have adapted to the cold. The debate, and the podcasts, continue.