Tarzan Creator’s Grandson Dies

In Mark Evanier’s blog, News From Me, he writes that Danton Burroughs, the grandson of Edgar Rice Burroughs and “a major force in keeping that man’s work alive,” died Wednesday evening, April 30, 2008, at his home in Tarzana, California. The suburb, of course, was named for his grandfather’s legendary creation.

Danton Burroughs was 64. He was the son of John Coleman Burroughs, who was himself distinguished in the arts as a photographer and illustrator.

Burroughs had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease, but the immediate cause of death was said to have been a heart attack.

Burroughs was head of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., and represented his grandfather’s literary estate in dealings with movie and TV producers adapting ERB’s works.

For those unaware, Tarzan of the Apes, is, in essence, an early work of cryptofiction. The story of an archetypal feral child raised in the African jungle by rather unusual apes mirrors elements found in a few alleged hominology incidents.

Click on the above image of George Haas, Loren Coleman, and Archie Buckley, San Francisco, 1975, for a larger sized version. The person behind the camera and the fourth member of this gathering was Rene’ Dahinden.

The editor and creator of the historically significant Bigfoot Bulletin, one of the first serious newsletters exchanging Sasquatch and Bigfoot information among researchers around the world, was George Haas. Haas first had been a serious collector and writer of Tarzan memorabilia and ephemera before he discovered an overlapping intrigue between Bigfoot and Tarzan that would become his passion until his death.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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