Dinosaurs at the dinner party How an eccentric group of Victorians discovered prehistoric creatures and accidentally upended the world

Oh, the hand-wringing. Oh, the thundering sounds of lofty preconceived notions crashing down to earth. It's hard to imagine today just how momentous, just how paradigm-shifting the discovery of ancient and distinctly non-human creatures was. It was more than 200 years ago that a young boy found some seriously weird footprints; not long after that, people from hither and yon were digging up enormous fossilized bones--bones that, despite increasingly desperate attempts to prove otherwise, were definitely not human. The discovery of dinosaurs (although they weren't called that right away) shook the foundations of science and religion, to name two of many things impacted by the prehistoric existence--and sudden disappearance--of these enormous creatures. Dolnick, whose previous work, The Writing of the Gods (2022), made history come vibrantly alive, does the same thing here; he walks us through the first half of the nineteenth century, telling the story through the people who made it happen, and shows us how the world came to terms with shocking revelations about earth's history. A masterful and enormously entertaining book.

Dinosaurs and the birth of paleontology. Dolnick, former Boston Globe chief science writer and author of The Clockwork Universe and The Forger's Spell, begins his latest exuberant tale in 1802, when "something ominous shrieked in the night" in Massachusetts: A young boy had discovered petrified tracks. At the time, "no one had ever heard of dinosaurs." Soon, others began uncovering fossils, and science called for answers to these mysterious relics. In one of the narrative's first intriguing profiles, the author introduces us to Mary Anning, who was good at finding and selling fossils, massive plesiosaur, in the resort town of Lyme Regis. As Dolnick recounts, England's "God-soaked people," including scientists, had a hard time grappling with the riddles of time, fossils, and Noah's Ark. In 1665, Robert Hooke broke through first, arguing that "fossils were relics of living organisms," but finding them was difficult. In 1796, naturalist Georges Cuvier boldly stated that "extinction was a fact," while Jean-Baptiste Lamarck recognized that "species do change" and Charles Lyell argued that the Earth is very old. A scientist author's 1830 watercolor was the "first depiction of animals in a world before humans." A few years earlier, the eccentric William Buckland, Oxford's first professor of geology, identified the megalosaurus. He also argued that glaciers once covered Earth, and it was "those glaciers, not a flood, that had reshaped the world." Prolific fossil hunter Gideon Mantell, discoverer of the iguanodon, boldly proposed England had a tropical, "remote, sultry past." At the time, scientists were close to stumbling on evolution. Fossil fanatic Thomas Jefferson named his own giant sloth, and America had their giant mammoth, which was exhibited in London. In 1842, anatomist Richard Owen invented a new word to describe the animals--dinosaurs. Darwin was just around the corner. A delightful, engrossing confluence of Victorian science and history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.