In the early 1920s Sir Arthur Conan Doyle screened footage of living, breathing dinosaurs for a room of distinguished guests and claimed it was real. It was actually the stop-motion work of Willis O'Brien, the special effects genius behind The Lost World and the original 1933 King Kong. This episode traces his unlikely path from leaving home at 11 to work on cattle ranches, through stints as a fur trapper, cowboy, bartender, professional boxer, sports cartoonist, and marble sculptor, to guiding paleontologists near Crater Lake and shooting a 90-second clay dinosaur test at the 1915 San Francisco World's Fair.

We cover the technical leaps that made his creatures believable, including in-camera masking, articulated metal armatures built with the Delgado brothers, and inflatable bladders that made dinosaurs appear to breathe. We also confront  ...