The Silurians

Name:

The Silurians

Main Aliases:

Earth Reptile
Psionosauropoda-morphae
Homo reptilia
Eocene
Lizard Men
Reptilia sapiens

Biological Type:

Reptilian humanoid

Affiliated With:

Sea Devils, the Alliance, Myrka

Place of origin:

Earth

Notable individuals:

Madame Vastra
Okdel L’da
Morka
Bokka K’to
Tulok
Icthar
Alaya
Restac
Malohkeh
Eldane

First Seen In:

Doctor Who and the Silurians

Doctor Who

Season 7

Doctor Who and the Silurians

Season 21

Warriors of the Deep

Series 5

The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood
The Pandorica Opens

Series 6

A Good Man Goes to War
The God Complex
The Wedding of River Song

Series 7

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship
The Great Detective (minisode)
Vastra Investigates (minisode)
The Battle of Demon’s Run: Two Days Later (minisode)
The Snowmen
The Crimson Horror
The Name of the Doctor

Series 8

Deep Breath

Series 9

Face the Raven

TARDIS Index Files

Who Are The Silurians?

Monster Files

Monster File: Silurians

Audio

Doctor Who Monthly

Bloodtide
The Silurian Candidate

The Paternoster Gang

Heritage 1

A Photograph to Remember

Heritage 3

Truth and Bone

UNIT

The Coup

UNIT: The New Series

Assembled

Call to Arms
Retrieval
united

Video game

Doctor Who

Console

Destiny of the Doctors
Evacuation Earth
The Eternity Clock

Browser

The Mazes of Time

Monster Invasion

Dalek Supremacy

Novels

Target novelisations

Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters
The Mind of Evil
Warriors of the Deep

Virgin New Adventures

Blood Heat
No Future
Happy Endings
Eternity Weeps

Virgin Missing Adventures

The Scales of Injustice

BBC Past Doctor Adventures

Spiral Scratch
The Wheel of Ice

Quick Reads

The Silurian Gift

Dr. Men

Dr. Eleventh
Dr. Eighth

Short Stories

Short Trips

Cold War

The Brilliant Book

The Little Planet

Twelve Angels Weeping

The Red-Eyed League

Comics

Doctor Who Magazine

Twilight of the Silurians
Party Animals
City of Devils
Final Genesis
Time & Time Again
Happy Deathday
The Highgate Horror

Doctor Who Adventures

Faster Than Light
Dawn of Time!

IDW Publishing

Doctor Who (2012)

As Time Goes By

Titan Comics

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor

Backup

Summer Wholiday
Take a Bow (Tie)
No Win, No Fez
Time Spill on Aisle 5

Doctor Who: The Twelfth Doctor

Year One

Terrorformer
Gangland

Year Three

Beneath the Waves

Backup

Surfshock

Mini-series and one-shots

Supremacy of the Cybermen

click on images to enlarge

The Silurians are a race of reptile-like humanoids.

The first Silurians were introduced are depicted as prehistoric and scientifically advanced sentient humanoids who predate the dawn of man, in their backstory, the Silurians went into self-induced hibernation to survive what they had predicted to be a large geological upheaval that was caused by the Earth capturing the Moon. The Silurians introduced in the 1970 story are with broad, three-eyed land-dwellers.

CREATION

Peter Bryant and Derrick Sherwin, who had the ideas of the Quatermass serials, decided that for the season’s seventh series The Doctor should be restricted to contemporary Earth and working alongside the UNIT organisation, who featured prominently in the recent serial The Invasion. Barry Letts and Terrence Dicks, inheriting this new vision for the series, also wanted their stories for the seventh season to have a serious, deeper subtext. They had approached Malcolm Hulke, co-writerof the Patrick Troughton serials The Faceless Ones and The War Games, to write a serial for this new season.

Hulke had seen limitations with this earthbound format – he believed there would be two types of stories, one featuring mad scientists and the other alien invasions. Terrence Dicks claims credit for thinking of the idea of creatures that had been there all along, howeverother sources give Hulke creditedit for deliberately thinking his way outside of his earlier preconceptions.

While planning stories for Doctor Who’s ninth season, Terrence Dicks and Barry Letts had decided to revive the Silurian concept, this time with the twist of these new Silurians originating in the sea. Originally dubbed “Sea Silurians”, they were rechristened “Sea Devils” for dramatic effect as the scripts were ed

When they first encountered the Silurians in The Silurians, 1972, they were awoken by the energy of a  nearby nuclear research station. They tried to reclaim Earth by creating a deadly virus and, then try to use a disperser to destroy the Van Allen Belt. Both times The Doctor scuppers their plans. The Doctor tries to come up with a peaceful solution so that they can live alongside human beings, but Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart has other plans and destroys the Silurians in their caves.

They reappeared in, “The Warriors of the Deep, ” the Silurians appeared alongside their aquatic cousins the Sea Devils. The reptiles now call themselves Silurians and, ditto with the Sea Devils. Both the Silurians and Sea Devils are different in appearance to  how they looked previously and, the Silurians now wear breastplates. They were have another weapon a Mykra, a giant electrified sea beast, which The Doctor destroys by using ultra violet heat. Again the Silurians try to reclaim the earth by causing a global war, but are stopped when The Doctor reluctantly suggests to the scientific and military team to kill the reptile warriors, by using hexachromite gas which is lethal to marine life.

Though this is scientifically incorrect, as there were many letters at the time, from scientists, stating that was impossible for any reptilain life form to exist in this period.

The Silurians had returned in 2010 with Matt Smith in the episodes Hungry Earth and, a new character called Madame Vastra who was in these two episodes helped The Doctor in A Good Man Goes To War. Madame Vastra is now a recurring character for The Doctor.

MINOR APPEARANCES:

In “The Pandorica Opens”, some Silurians appear in 102 AD alongside many alien enemies of the Doctor (including alien Daleks, Sontarans, Nestenes and other species) to imprison The Doctor in the mythical”Pandorica” in order, as they see it, to save the universe from him.

Silurians have been mentioned in the 2011 Torchwood: Miracle Day episode “The Blood Line“, Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) briefly muses that the Blessing (an ancient phenomenon beneath the Earth’s surface) could be out of “Silurian mythology”.

A Silurian doctor was named Malohkeh (played by Richard Hope) is seen attending to Winston Churchill (Ian McNeice) in “The Wedding of River Song” in an aborted timeline.

Hope plays another Silurian in “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” (2012), has been seen briefly on a computer screen.

The titular spaceship is a Silurian Ark that was searching for a new planet with a cargo of dinosaurs, the Silurian colony on board having been ejected from the ship by Solomon (David Bradley) prior to the episode. The ship is shown to have reached a planet named Siluria with its dinosaurs at the episode’s conclusion.

In “The Time of the Doctor”, was a Silurian Ark is seen among the ships who were around Trenzalore.

RELATED LINKS

Back to Alien Cultures page

Warriors of the Deep DVD

Vastra page

top of page