However his novel's distinction lay in its well-researched Victorian science and its inventive contribution to the science-fiction subgenre of time travel—Verne's innovation was the concept of a prehistoric realm still existing in the present-day world.

Journey inspired many later authors, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his novel The Lost World, Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Pellucidar series,[citation needed] and J. R. R. Tolkien in The Hobbit.

When translated into English, the note reads: Go down into the crater of Snaefells Jökull, which Scartaris's shadow caresses just before the calends of July, O daring traveler, and you'll make it to the center of the earth.

On the shoreline, they see the gazelle-like Leptotherium, the cattle-like Merycotherium, the tapir-like Lophiodon, an Anoplotherium (which is described to be a compound of a horse, a rhinoceros, a camel, and a hippopotamus), a mastodon, a Megatherium, and a Protopithecus while a Pterodactylus flies in the sky.

While at sea, they encounter prehistoric fish such as Pterichthyodes (here called "Pterichthys") Dipterus (referred to as "Dipterides") and giant marine reptiles from the Age of the Dinosaurs, namely an Ichthyosaurus and a Plesiosaurus, in which a fight between the monsters almost endangers the raft.

After spending hours descending at breakneck speed, their raft reverses direction and rises inside a volcanic chimney that ultimately spews them into the open air.

The novel's first English edition, translated by an unknown hand and published in 1871 by the London house Griffith & Farran, appeared under the title A Journey to the Centre of the Earth and is now available at Project Gutenberg.

[2] A drastically rewritten version of the story, it adds chapter titles where Verne gives none, meanwhile changing the professor's surname to Hardwigg, Axel's name to Harry, and Gräuben's to Gretchen.