A Gun for Dinosaur
1956 novelette by L. Sprague de Camp
"A Gun for Dinosaur" is a classic time travel science fiction story by American writer L. Sprague de Camp as part of his Rivers of Time series. It tells the story of four men who travel into the past to hunt dinosaurs.
It was first published in the magazine Galaxy Science Fiction for March, 1956, and first appeared in book form in the anthology The World That Couldn't Be and 8 Other SF Novelets (Doubleday, 1959). The story went on to appear in numerous anthologies and collections.
Plot summary
The story takes the form of a first-person narrative by the protagonist, time-traveling hunter Reginald Rivers, told to Mr. Seligman, a prospective client of his time safari business. Seligman's contributions to the conversation are omitted and must be inferred from those of Rivers. Rivers informs the client that he is not big enough to hunt the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous period and illustrates his point with an extended anecdote from a previous expedition, which forms the main portion of the tale.
On the occasion in question, Rivers and his partner, Chandra Aiyar “The Raja”, conduct two other clients to the past. One of them, Courtney James (based on Jack Parsons), is a vain, arrogant and spoiled playboy; the other, August Holtzinger, is a small, timid man recently come into wealth (time safaris are not cheap).
“A Gun for Dinosaur” enters the record as 1956 novelette by L. Sprague de Camp. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dinosaur, novelette and Sprague can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4657216. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1956 and 1959.
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This entry incorporates text from “A Gun for Dinosaur” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.