Giant Alien Robot Caretakers of a Dinosaur Zoo!!

Why isn't this a real thing? Giant Robots are a perfect idea for running a dinosaur zoo! Yes, it seems to have gone awry in Brave and the Bold #39 (December 1961/January 1962), but no system is perfect. I've wanted to go to Jurassic Park for years, but the heck with that now. I want to go to a dinosaur zoo run by giant robots. I want to go NOW!

This story was written by Bob Kanigher and drawn by Ross Andru. Put Kanigher and Andru together on a story involving dinosaurs and it is an inviolable Law of the Universe that it will be entertaining.

"Prisoners of the Dinosaur Zoo" features the original Suicide Squad--Rick Flagg and three other agents recruited by the government to accomplish incredibly dangerous missions. I don't think the squad began using criminals until its modern incarnation began in the 1980s.

Though the Suicide Squad normally gets assisgned to missions, this time  they fall into an adventure accidentally. When their plane is struck by lightning, they are forced to land in a remote area. Here they find the body of giant robot lying next to the skeleton of a dinosaur.

The exploration of a nearby cavern and the discovery of an underground lake add to the mystery when the squad is swallowed by a giant dinosaur.

Inside the dinosaur, though, they don't find an intestinal track. Instead, they find a jungle infested with dinosaurs. A series of encounters with a succession of monsters follow, with the squad using their secret weapons--such as a gun that fires a variety of ammunition--to say alive.

Finally, they run across a giant porthole and realize the dinosaur that swallowed them is actually a huge dinosaur-shaped ship. When they see a T-Rex manhandling a giant robot, Doc (the smart one on the team) immediately deduces that they are on an alien ship that landed millions of years ago with the intention of collecting dinosaurs for a zoo. But the ship failed to blast off again and eventually the dinosaurs got the upper hand on the robots.  It actually seems to be a bit of  a stretch that Doc can get all this from seeing one dinosaur destroying one robot, but he does turn out to be right. So there you go.

The ending of the story is a bit awkward. After the squad escapes from the ship, it finally blasts off with no explanation for how it suddenly became active again after eons floating in an underground lake.

But that's beside the point. The point is with that ship gone, there isn't a single place on Earth where you can visit a dinosaur zoo run by giant alien robots. NOT A SINGLE ONE. This is inexcusable and someone really needs to do something about it.

I'm waiting!

Next week, a swashbuckling mercenary teams up with a circus strongman.