Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party
How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World
by Edward Dolnick
What a delight! While the story of the discovery of dinosaurs and the first fossil hunters may be fairly well known, the author of this book takes a fresh and novel approach to the subject. His focus is not on paleontology itself, or even on the historical events, but on the mindset of the scientists who made these discoveries and the general public who marveled at them. For me, it was an eye-opening experience.
As Edward Dolnick writes, “We would perk up if someone showed up with incontrovertible proof that aliens had traveled from one of those stars and paid us a visit. A video of an alien army or a bit of alien corpse that matched nothing on Earth would be hard to dismiss. For our forebears in the nineteenth century, bones and skeletons from fierce, extinct creatures served as that sort of impossible-to-explain-away evidence”.
The challenge was that “in the early 1800s, science and religion were merged in a way that scarcely exists today, and religion was the dominant partner in that union”. As the mounting scientific evidence became less and less consistent with the teachings of the Bible, it caused a dramatic shift that created our modern secular world.
This is no ordinary history book. The author skillfully jumps around the timeline, diving into different topics and showing people’s approach to them from antiquity to the present day. He does this with such panache and wit that I laughed constantly. Even when he recalls familiar events and personalities, he presents them in a new light, peppering his account with a variety of surprising facts (did you know that Leibniz proudly displayed a unicorn skeleton? Or that Thomas Jefferson was “obsessed” with incognitum, as mastodons were called at the time?)
It is also worth noting that there is another interesting forthcoming book (“Impossible Monsters” by Michael Taylor — review coming soon!) that focuses on similar issues, but since it takes a different approach and covers a longer period, it is complementary rather than redundant.
Thanks to the publisher, Scriber, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.
