The World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island

It was an uncharted island somewhere off the coast of Sumatra, it was a land whispered about by merchants and sailors. It was a place so unbelievable that no one dared believe in its existence. Except one man, the extraordinary showman Carl Denham. Many will, of course, remember his show on Broadway and its tragic ending. But New York is not where the story ended, it is where it began.

In 1935 a joint expedition of several prominent universities and organizations called Project Legacy was launched. Its stated mission goal was to create the first of several field guides to Skull Island, a land filled with creatures existing outside of their own time, where dinosaurs roamed, evolved, and still lived. Only a year later it was discovered that the island was doomed; the geological forces that had formed the island were now tearing it apart. There were only seven more abbreviated expeditions to the island before its destruction and the start of World War II.

The journals, sketches, and detailed notes of the scientists who braved Skull Island would have continued to gather dust on shelves across the planet were it not for the work of the authors of this book. Here for the first time is their work, collected in a comprehensive edition of the natural history of this lost island. Here is The World of Kong.

Skull Island has long been sinking into the ocean due to its being located on the Indo-Australian and Eurasian tectonic plates, surrounded by magnetic anomalies and violent sea storms. It was formerly part of a larger landmass called Gondwanaland, but the plates that created the island by rolling over one another caused constant stress and fracturing of the rock, making it highly unstable and creating volcanic activity. Molten rock was pushed to the surface from the plate boundary, while chunks of the land fell into the trench that marked the plate boundary. The forces that had created Skull Island were slowly destroying it. When Skull Island fell away from Gondwanaland, its indigenous species went with it and were saved from mass extinction, but the dwindling land and resources over the years made the ecosystem incredibly and increasingly competitive.

At some point in its history, people theorized to be from Southeast Asia came to the island, likely with the ancestors of the Kong and built great cities all over its surface. However, at least 1,000 years before the 20th century, they disappeared, leaving only their wall and their cities behind, which were slowly retaken by nature.

On the west side of the island, the geographical turmoil of Skull Island created a jagged shoreline of rocks and sunken ruins, while on the east side, the slower sinking of the lowlands formed massive floodplains and a few hidden beaches on some inlets. These eastern lowlands, in the shadow of the mountains were home to a network of waterways, as well as the largest of Skull Island's inhabitants. Mighty herbivores kept the jungle from overtaking the grasslands by constantly eating its invading scrub. As the island shrank, the grasslands shrank with it until they were 80 percent depleted in the span of a few centuries. This intensified competition for the native grassland species. The high levels of rainfall each year supplied a constant healthy flow of water across and under the island, shaping the landforms as it went. The massive jungles, with enormous twisted trees hosted entire ecosystems in their branches hundreds of feet above the dark, damp scrub and armchair-sized toxic sporing fungi of the floor. The dense environment favored extreme specialization in its organisms and it was at times hard to tell where one species ended and the next began. Nature was at war with itself in the never-ending battle for survival that the jungle created. It is theorized that the jungle humidity allowed for many Cretaceous species to survive extinction. The canopy's high above winds and poor access to water forced species to cling on with any means necessary. In the southern parts of the island, erosion and earthquakes created a series of deep chasms in the island's surface. The cracks exposed underground springs, and received rotting matter from the surface to create a river of sludge that made itself home to horrors that made the world above seem normal by comparison. High above, in the mountainous ridge that ran the length of Skull Island. Surrounded by lesser peaks boasting a plethora of ruins, the harsh wind and rain prevented the jungle from spreading up their rocky faces. Only the toughest plants and the animals hearty enough to eat them, and their predators in turn, could survive. The bleak and lonely mountains served as a hermitage for the lonely king.

Some years after the first expedition and the death of the last Kong in 1933 on New York, Skull island became the main focus of different groups from universities to private organizations to investigate and catalog what inhabits on it, thus creating an exploration race with different expedition groups going across the unexplored regions, but due to the chaotic conditions of the surroundings and the aggressive behavior of most of the native fauna and human inhabitants, many of these expeditions ended disastrously, with lots of casualties in just a year. Thanks to proper organization and funding through three parties, the Legacy project was founded in 1935, being a 3-month expedition to document the island and its inhabitants. Despite some setbacks and incidents, this one was successful in comparison to the previous ones, made evidence of not only the enormous diversity that exists in this island but also exposing the fact that with only one exploration would not be sufficient to be able to collect everything that could exist there. This led to the project becoming a long-term mission, and not only with the aim of cataloging species but also of establishing a permanent base. Unfortunately all of this fell apart in subsequent years, starting during the second expedition in 1936 due to an earthquake of great magnitude that ended up sinking a part of the island, killing 5 members of the team in the process. Thanks to a group geologists it was discovered that the island was doomed to crumble and sink into the sea in few decades. 15 years after its discovery and 7 legacy expeditions (being the last one around 1946), Skull Island sank down in the water, disappearing forever taking with it all its native flora, fauna and people as well anything of invaluable knowledge.