They drove across washes and around canyons and past red-ribbed buttes that reared like primeval monsters.
Unglamorous but fearsome are great white sharks, hulking primeval monsters that remind you that it takes all kinds to make an ocean.
In one of the book's first chapters, Grossman describes a firestorm unleashed by the Luftwaffe bombing of fuel tanks: "The life that had reigned hundreds of millions of years before, the terrible life of the primeval monsters, had broken out of its deep tombs; howling and roaring, stamping its huge feet, it was devouring everything round about.
The world is usually seen as coming into being through violence, either between squabbling deities or between the gods and a primeval chaos monster, whose slain body forms the stuff of the world.
It may seem like your worst nightmare: a primeval underwater monster swimming straight toward you, its huge, ugly mouth wide open.
But for him, he said, leviathan had multiple meanings: first, it was a primeval, untamed sea-monster; it was the sprawling power of the state.
Back from the dead on BBC America is the time-traveling scary-monster series "Primeval" (9 p.m. on Saturday), which was canceled after its third season but rescued when the British channel ITV found partners to share the costs of production.
Only a monster rising from the primeval loch might have an insight into how humans have changed – or a media theorist taking the long view.
Tim Haines, ITV drama creative director and Beowulf executive producer, co-created the last ITV teatime drama, Primeval, which ran from 2007-11 and featured ancient monsters breaking through into modern life.
It rose up out of the sea, a fearsome roaring monster unlike anything humans had ever seen, horrible, primeval, unstoppable, towering, breathing radioactive fire and leaving total destruction in its wake.
