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Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World
A historical adventure story about the eccentric Victorians who discovered dinosaur bones, leading to a new understanding of human history
In the early 1800s the world was a safe and cozy place. But then a twelve-year-old farm boy in Massachusetts stumbled upon a row of fossilized three-toed footprints the size of dinner plates—the first dinosaur tracks ever found. Soon, in England, Victorians unearthed enormous bones—bones that reached as high as a man’s head.
Outside of myths and fairy tales, no one had imagined that creatures like three-toed giants once lumbered across the land. And if anyone conjured up such a scene, they would never imagine that all those animals could have vanished hundreds of millions years ago. The thought of sudden, arbitrary disappearance from life was unnerving and forced the Victorians to rethink everything they knew about the world. Celebrated storyteller and historian Edward Dolnick leads readers through a compelling true adventure as the paleontologists of the first half of the 19th century puzzled their way through the fossil record to create the story of dinosaurs we know today.
In the early 1800s the world was a safe and cozy place. But then a twelve-year-old farm boy in Massachusetts stumbled upon a row of fossilized three-toed footprints the size of dinner plates—the first dinosaur tracks ever found. Soon, in England, Victorians unearthed enormous bones—bones that reached as high as a man’s head.
Outside of myths and fairy tales, no one had imagined that creatures like three-toed giants once lumbered across the land. And if anyone conjured up such a scene, they would never imagine that all those animals could have vanished hundreds of millions years ago. The thought of sudden, arbitrary disappearance from life was unnerving and forced the Victorians to rethink everything they knew about the world. Celebrated storyteller and historian Edward Dolnick leads readers through a compelling true adventure as the paleontologists of the first half of the 19th century puzzled their way through the fossil record to create the story of dinosaurs we know today.
352 pages, Paperback
First published August 6, 2024
328 people are currently reading
27478 people want to read
About the author
Edward Dolnick
12 books189 followersEdward Dolnick is an American writer, formerly a science writer at the Boston Globe. He has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post, among other publications. His books include Madness on the Couch : Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis (1998) and Down the Great Unknown : John Wesley Powell's 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon (2001).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 376 reviews
October 19, 2024
When I was in the second grade, my mother let me take a summer class where you learned how to draw dinosaurs. I was the only girl in the class, but I didn't care, because DINOSAURS. Every autumn, when the maple leaves fell from our trees, I also thought about whether they would leave an imprint on our slate walkway stones and become fossils one day. I cared much more about the hall of minerals at the natural history museum than I did the famous jewels on display nearby, and I still have more fossils and minerals in my house than jewelry.
So my love of dinosaurs is deeply ingrained. I don't trust people who don't like them.
How delighted I am to come across this book that combines that one favorite subject with another favorite subject (Victorians!). The extra bonus is that it's so well-researched and well-written, and fascinating from beginning to end. I really appreciated how the author provided so much context for that point in history, explaining the religious mindset of the day and how that had an effect on how the emergence of geology/evolution was perceived, as well as the surprising origins of many things very well-known to us today, including the Shell Oil Company. The author traces various key figures who helped form our understanding of dinosaurs, and shows us how lively debates and professional rivalry shaped the course of history. Nowhere is his sympathetic view more clear than his dive into Mary Anning's contributions to paleontology: her astounding discoveries of two complete skeletons were cornerstones in the field, along with her drawings, observations, and the many other fossils she unearthed. But Mary was never fully recognized for her work in her lifetime, as she was taken advantage of or passed over again and again due to her youth and sex; it was, in fact, a hundred years after her untimely death before women were even admitted into the Geological Society of London.
Anyway, if you are at all interested in fossils or dinosaurs or interesting historical figures or the Victorian era, this is such an enjoyable read. And it makes me wish that I, like one of the enthusiasts featured in the book, was able to squander my fortune on fossils!
Audio Notes: The audiobook, read by Cassandra Campbell, is excellent.
So my love of dinosaurs is deeply ingrained. I don't trust people who don't like them.
How delighted I am to come across this book that combines that one favorite subject with another favorite subject (Victorians!). The extra bonus is that it's so well-researched and well-written, and fascinating from beginning to end. I really appreciated how the author provided so much context for that point in history, explaining the religious mindset of the day and how that had an effect on how the emergence of geology/evolution was perceived, as well as the surprising origins of many things very well-known to us today, including the Shell Oil Company. The author traces various key figures who helped form our understanding of dinosaurs, and shows us how lively debates and professional rivalry shaped the course of history. Nowhere is his sympathetic view more clear than his dive into Mary Anning's contributions to paleontology: her astounding discoveries of two complete skeletons were cornerstones in the field, along with her drawings, observations, and the many other fossils she unearthed. But Mary was never fully recognized for her work in her lifetime, as she was taken advantage of or passed over again and again due to her youth and sex; it was, in fact, a hundred years after her untimely death before women were even admitted into the Geological Society of London.
Anyway, if you are at all interested in fossils or dinosaurs or interesting historical figures or the Victorian era, this is such an enjoyable read. And it makes me wish that I, like one of the enthusiasts featured in the book, was able to squander my fortune on fossils!
Audio Notes: The audiobook, read by Cassandra Campbell, is excellent.
August 14, 2024
I thought that this book did a good job of introducing the characters involved at the beginning of the dinosaur craze. Some were quite eccentric. They had to grapple with fitting those huge bones into their strict and literal religious concepts. It resulted in some peculiar theories. Unable to accept the notion that God would create these creatures just to have them become extinct, someone proposed that God just created the old bones for us to find and scattered them about. The book ends when Darwin comes along and shakes everyone’s world.
This book was a little repetitious and not as captivating as I had hoped. I love dinosaurs and have read other books about the early days of paleontology, so this wasn’t entirely new to me. The book has illustrations, end notes and an extensive bibliography.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.
This book was a little repetitious and not as captivating as I had hoped. I love dinosaurs and have read other books about the early days of paleontology, so this wasn’t entirely new to me. The book has illustrations, end notes and an extensive bibliography.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.
July 31, 2024
This historical nonfiction novel follows multiple people in the Victorian era in their pursuit of finding and identifying fossils primarily dinosaurs during a time that most people could never imagine that such creatures were not myth and actually roamed the earth. I found it to be a good general overview of the topic which culminates with a famous dinner thrown on New Year’s Eve 1853 by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, a sculptor commissioned to create life size replicas of newly discovered dinosaurs, also depicted on the cover and used for the title.
The beginning of the book primarily focuses on the fossil collector Mary Anning, known for early findings and identification of ichthyosaur and plesiosaur skeletons, though men were often attributed with these discoveries as well as many of her other accomplishments. I first became intrigued by Anning when I read the historical fiction novel Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier and was pleased to read about this fascinating primarily self-educated woman making fascinating discoveries in a world where only men are recognized. Other notable figures followed and recognized for contributions over the course of the story include William Buckland, Gideon Mantell, Richard Owen and many more.
I found the story of the discovery and realization of dinosaur bones to be an interesting read. This was a lot for the common man to process, but especially for the actual scientists as most educated scientists of the time were also theologians. The mere existence of these creatures, much less the idea of extinction, went against most of their beliefs in the creation of the world. Reconciling their existence along with the other huge discoveries in science and technology at the time made for some intriguing theories.
Recommended for a general overview of the fossil collector craze of Victorian times and the interesting historical theories presented for their existence.
Thank you to Netgalley and Scribner for a copy provided for an honest review.
The beginning of the book primarily focuses on the fossil collector Mary Anning, known for early findings and identification of ichthyosaur and plesiosaur skeletons, though men were often attributed with these discoveries as well as many of her other accomplishments. I first became intrigued by Anning when I read the historical fiction novel Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier and was pleased to read about this fascinating primarily self-educated woman making fascinating discoveries in a world where only men are recognized. Other notable figures followed and recognized for contributions over the course of the story include William Buckland, Gideon Mantell, Richard Owen and many more.
I found the story of the discovery and realization of dinosaur bones to be an interesting read. This was a lot for the common man to process, but especially for the actual scientists as most educated scientists of the time were also theologians. The mere existence of these creatures, much less the idea of extinction, went against most of their beliefs in the creation of the world. Reconciling their existence along with the other huge discoveries in science and technology at the time made for some intriguing theories.
Recommended for a general overview of the fossil collector craze of Victorian times and the interesting historical theories presented for their existence.
Thank you to Netgalley and Scribner for a copy provided for an honest review.
November 5, 2024
The title of this book is so bombastic that it begged to be requested [and will beg to be bought off the shelves in stores] and for someone who 1. knows little [almost nothing and most of it was from Jurassic Park LOL] about dinosaurs in general, 2. loves history [especially ones featuring those crazy Victorians], and 3. loves an excellent bombastic nonfiction book more than most things, it was really a no-brainer for me and I couldn't wait to dive in.
Yeah. Sigh.
Did I learn anything? Yes [though not nearly as much as I wanted NOR not what I thought I was going to learn]. Was the book engaging? Welllll...mostly. There were moments when I was not engaged, close to bored [there seemed to be a lot of repetition and that got old after awhile], and I did find that I thought I had missed something as the chapter/story would abruptly end and then move on to something else in the next chapter [this became really problematic for me and I finally had to stop rewinding the audiobook to see if I missed something and just became resigned to this odd writing trait of the author's. FYI, I am not a fan. At all. ]; it disrupted the flow of the book and left me wondering just what the rest of the story was [spoiler, we never find out].
While this was deeply researched [and I acknowledge the author's work here], and the writing is mostly [for me] engaging [minus the problems I had with it stated it above], it was just not enough for me and I wanted so much more.
If you do not mind repetition and a somewhat chaotic read, and as long as you aren't expecting a deep-dive into the Victorian love of fossils/dinosaurs, then this is the book for you. For me, I am truly disappointed in this book that just never lives up to its truly bombastic title.
Thank you to NetGalley, Edward Dolnick, and Scribner for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Yeah. Sigh.
Did I learn anything? Yes [though not nearly as much as I wanted NOR not what I thought I was going to learn]. Was the book engaging? Welllll...mostly. There were moments when I was not engaged, close to bored [there seemed to be a lot of repetition and that got old after awhile], and I did find that I thought I had missed something as the chapter/story would abruptly end and then move on to something else in the next chapter [this became really problematic for me and I finally had to stop rewinding the audiobook to see if I missed something and just became resigned to this odd writing trait of the author's. FYI, I am not a fan. At all. ]; it disrupted the flow of the book and left me wondering just what the rest of the story was [spoiler, we never find out].
While this was deeply researched [and I acknowledge the author's work here], and the writing is mostly [for me] engaging [minus the problems I had with it stated it above], it was just not enough for me and I wanted so much more.
If you do not mind repetition and a somewhat chaotic read, and as long as you aren't expecting a deep-dive into the Victorian love of fossils/dinosaurs, then this is the book for you. For me, I am truly disappointed in this book that just never lives up to its truly bombastic title.
Thank you to NetGalley, Edward Dolnick, and Scribner for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
July 13, 2024
A delightful and highly informative blend of history, paleontology, and natural history
I can’t remember the last time I read a book that was such fun to read that also taught me so much! Most people today find fossils fascinating, but Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party explores the early days of fossil discovery and interpretation when the concept was perhaps even more fascinating but also highly contentious.
Although I learned a lot about paleontology and fossil discovery, this is primarily a work of history, and it is not surprising that it has a large cast of “characters”, a term I put in quotes because so many of the people involved were, not surprisingly, rather colorful and controversial, like George Cuvier, Gideon Mantell, William Paley, and Sir Charles Lyell. It was interesting to learn that a number of highly significant early finds were made by a poor, uneducated woman named Mary Anning who lived in Lyme Regis although her gender and social class kept her from being recognized appropriately at the time; she had to sell most of her fossils to support herself and her family. There were interesting personal items about relevant people, like the sad fact that the great naturalist Carl Linnaeus, who is responsible for our modern method of classifying plants and animals, had a stroke in his old age and could no longer remember any of the names he had assigned.
There is extensive exploration of how the fossil discoveries challenged many religious beliefs and the many ways people tried to reconcile them… or simply rejected either the science or the conventional religious teaching of the day. This was especially relevant since many of the scientists were also clergymen.
There was also discussion of other areas of natural science relevant to the main paleontology theme such as the unusual configuration of elephant skulls and the shape of the elements that carry colors in today’s birds, a shape also found in fossils.
The quality of the writing in Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party was as enjoyable as the content. There was a lot of material new to me in the book, and several times I made a Kindle note wondering “how did they know that”; a paragraph or two later Dolnick would tell me! He also has a real knack for expressing his ideas : “discovering is not merely finding something; discovering is finding and understanding that you’ve found something.” I appreciated the touches of humor, such as when he describes how paleontologist Richard Owen’s theories are about to be seriously challenged and says, ”Owen was at center stage, basking in applause….He took a step forward….He didn’t see he was about to topple into the orchestra pit.” There are also many excellent quotes from a wide variety of other sources, even poetry by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Whether your interest is the history or the science or just an enjoyable read, you might want to invite some Dinosaurs to your Dinner Party!
I received an advance review copy of this book from NetGalley and Scribner
I can’t remember the last time I read a book that was such fun to read that also taught me so much! Most people today find fossils fascinating, but Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party explores the early days of fossil discovery and interpretation when the concept was perhaps even more fascinating but also highly contentious.
Although I learned a lot about paleontology and fossil discovery, this is primarily a work of history, and it is not surprising that it has a large cast of “characters”, a term I put in quotes because so many of the people involved were, not surprisingly, rather colorful and controversial, like George Cuvier, Gideon Mantell, William Paley, and Sir Charles Lyell. It was interesting to learn that a number of highly significant early finds were made by a poor, uneducated woman named Mary Anning who lived in Lyme Regis although her gender and social class kept her from being recognized appropriately at the time; she had to sell most of her fossils to support herself and her family. There were interesting personal items about relevant people, like the sad fact that the great naturalist Carl Linnaeus, who is responsible for our modern method of classifying plants and animals, had a stroke in his old age and could no longer remember any of the names he had assigned.
There is extensive exploration of how the fossil discoveries challenged many religious beliefs and the many ways people tried to reconcile them… or simply rejected either the science or the conventional religious teaching of the day. This was especially relevant since many of the scientists were also clergymen.
There was also discussion of other areas of natural science relevant to the main paleontology theme such as the unusual configuration of elephant skulls and the shape of the elements that carry colors in today’s birds, a shape also found in fossils.
The quality of the writing in Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party was as enjoyable as the content. There was a lot of material new to me in the book, and several times I made a Kindle note wondering “how did they know that”; a paragraph or two later Dolnick would tell me! He also has a real knack for expressing his ideas : “discovering is not merely finding something; discovering is finding and understanding that you’ve found something.” I appreciated the touches of humor, such as when he describes how paleontologist Richard Owen’s theories are about to be seriously challenged and says, ”Owen was at center stage, basking in applause….He took a step forward….He didn’t see he was about to topple into the orchestra pit.” There are also many excellent quotes from a wide variety of other sources, even poetry by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Whether your interest is the history or the science or just an enjoyable read, you might want to invite some Dinosaurs to your Dinner Party!
I received an advance review copy of this book from NetGalley and Scribner
July 3, 2024
My favorite dinosaur was stegosaurus. I had a model stegosaurus on the shelf next to my horse models. Our son’s favorite dinosaur was T-Rex. He had a hundred model dinosaurs if he had one. At age seven, he was so well read on dinosaurs that he amazed a friend who had been on digs in Montana and had amassed an impressive fossil collection. We all thought our son would grow up to become a paleontologist.
What kid hasn’t gone through a dinosaur stage? Author Edward Dolnick had a dinosaur collection, and like our son, drew imagined “epics” of dinosaur battles.
Dolnick wondered what people thought when dinosaur fossils were first being discovered. His deep research is evident in this book.
Dolnick first gives readers a firm understanding of Victorian Age society, religion, and science. His writing is entertaining and the concepts easy to grasp. Then he turns to the people who discovered, and interpreted, fossils.
Dolnick begins with Mary Anning, an impoverished girl who scoured the cliffs of Lyme for fossils to sell to tourists. It was dangerous work. Mary became an expert on her finds. Sadly, as a woman with no influence or class rank, she was sidelined.
Natural History was a Victorian fad. They loved to collect everything, including plants, shells, butterflies, and fossils. Any man with a few dollars in his pocket and social rank became a fossil hunter.
Geologist William Buckland discovered Megalosaurus. He also proposed that fossilized animals were killed in the biblical flood until a find made him reject his own theory and he embraced Louis Agassiz’s theory of ice ages. It was glaciers, not floods, that had killed these animals off. Cuvier also thought that catastrophes had killed these animals.
The Victorians contorted scientific discoveries to fit into their Christian worldview. The discovery of dinosaur bones had people scrambling to conform science to faith. They imagined the fossils had been unicorns, Goliaths, and dragons. Fossils were not really old, they just looked it, “like pre-distressed jeans.” Mammoths were not a separate creature, they were just big elephants. Thomas Jefferson, who had a huge collection of fossils, was sure that the wilds of America would reveal that these animals were not extinct, but alive and still living in America. Jefferson believed that creation was a perfect machine and if one cog or link disappeared, it would all fall apart. (We were priviledged to view Jefferson’s personal collection at the Franklin Institute!)
But new discoveries challenged the old paradigm. The “possibility that a species could go extinct was to suggest that God’s creation was flawed,” that God made imperfect creatures, and that perhaps the world was not made for mankind.
These colorful characters and the rivalry between them make for great reading. Buckland was a strange gourmand, trying out every creature at the dinner table. (His guests were not always amused.) Gideon Mantell went into the field and amassed a huge fossil collection, but economics forced him to sell, while Richard Owen, who never put spade to rock to find a single fossil, claimed the spotlight as the foremost dinosaur expert. Dolnick compares Owen to Uriah Heep in appearance, and as “brilliant, backstabbing, charming and manipulative.” It was Owen who came up with the name ‘dinosaur.’
The book closes with a famous dinner in the Crystal Palace where diners sat inside a replica of a dinosaur. Those crazy Victorians.
When Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, he started a revolution in science, proving that species did change and die off. Owen was ‘banished to history’s attic.”
It is an immensely entertaining book while also informative.
I previously read the author’s book The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone.
Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley.
What kid hasn’t gone through a dinosaur stage? Author Edward Dolnick had a dinosaur collection, and like our son, drew imagined “epics” of dinosaur battles.
Dolnick wondered what people thought when dinosaur fossils were first being discovered. His deep research is evident in this book.
Dolnick first gives readers a firm understanding of Victorian Age society, religion, and science. His writing is entertaining and the concepts easy to grasp. Then he turns to the people who discovered, and interpreted, fossils.
Dolnick begins with Mary Anning, an impoverished girl who scoured the cliffs of Lyme for fossils to sell to tourists. It was dangerous work. Mary became an expert on her finds. Sadly, as a woman with no influence or class rank, she was sidelined.
Natural History was a Victorian fad. They loved to collect everything, including plants, shells, butterflies, and fossils. Any man with a few dollars in his pocket and social rank became a fossil hunter.
Geologist William Buckland discovered Megalosaurus. He also proposed that fossilized animals were killed in the biblical flood until a find made him reject his own theory and he embraced Louis Agassiz’s theory of ice ages. It was glaciers, not floods, that had killed these animals off. Cuvier also thought that catastrophes had killed these animals.
The Victorians contorted scientific discoveries to fit into their Christian worldview. The discovery of dinosaur bones had people scrambling to conform science to faith. They imagined the fossils had been unicorns, Goliaths, and dragons. Fossils were not really old, they just looked it, “like pre-distressed jeans.” Mammoths were not a separate creature, they were just big elephants. Thomas Jefferson, who had a huge collection of fossils, was sure that the wilds of America would reveal that these animals were not extinct, but alive and still living in America. Jefferson believed that creation was a perfect machine and if one cog or link disappeared, it would all fall apart. (We were priviledged to view Jefferson’s personal collection at the Franklin Institute!)
But new discoveries challenged the old paradigm. The “possibility that a species could go extinct was to suggest that God’s creation was flawed,” that God made imperfect creatures, and that perhaps the world was not made for mankind.
These colorful characters and the rivalry between them make for great reading. Buckland was a strange gourmand, trying out every creature at the dinner table. (His guests were not always amused.) Gideon Mantell went into the field and amassed a huge fossil collection, but economics forced him to sell, while Richard Owen, who never put spade to rock to find a single fossil, claimed the spotlight as the foremost dinosaur expert. Dolnick compares Owen to Uriah Heep in appearance, and as “brilliant, backstabbing, charming and manipulative.” It was Owen who came up with the name ‘dinosaur.’
The book closes with a famous dinner in the Crystal Palace where diners sat inside a replica of a dinosaur. Those crazy Victorians.
When Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, he started a revolution in science, proving that species did change and die off. Owen was ‘banished to history’s attic.”
It is an immensely entertaining book while also informative.
I previously read the author’s book The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone.
Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley.
December 29, 2024
Interesting. You feel like you're smack in the middle of the Victorian Age.
This is a book not just for those, who like me at an advanced age, still LOVES dinosaurs. I might have become a paleontologist - seriously - had I not needed a JOB to support me and my husband who was still in college. Seriously, but Biology was my major - and my degree - and I taught science, which was almost as good as digging up dinosaurs as I got to expose thousands of children to what I liked best: science, and dinosaurs.
Enough about me. This book is also great for those who are interested in the Victorians - their beliefs, way of life, their solid stake in progress - and religion! These were people - highly-educated or not - who believed in God, but also loved progress! Trains! A delight, a miracle, a way to move about so quickly. OMG, we can go 40 mph! And electricity. And astronomy. And natural history. They were HUGE natural history buffs. Old and young, girls and boys, men and women, they collected nuts and feathers and eggs and kept notebooks with drawings of birds and ferns and flowers! They were curious and they were fascinated by the world around them - and then 'kerplunk' come these things, these fossils-as if from another world. What the heck are these giant lizards? These long-necked creatures with flippers? How are they possible? How old is the Earth, really? No, you can't be right! The Bible says...
So this is a different kind of 'science read,' in that it explores how people felt, how their thinking radically changed, how something new - and exciting, and almost 'irreligous' popped into their lives. There's really no comparison today. They were not prepared; they did not expect anything remotely like this. From their POV, the world was static, unchanged since the time God created it. All the animals, plants - God put them in their places and there they were. Even highly-educated persons thought this way - with very, very few exceptions.
The author notes that were we contemporary folk to suddenly confront, say, aliens from another planet - they just come down in their ships and said hello or whatever, we would not be as surprised, as startled, and as shocked as the Victorians when it came to fossils and dinosaurs! And that is because: We have been prepared. We talk about the possibility of UFOS, etc. We read about them in science as see them in our entertainment. (Goodness, the government even sets up a study panel to talk about the possibility of UFOS, etc.!) Upset and shocked, yes we'd certainly be. But we wouldn't go around saying, 'Where the heck did these aliens come from? I've never even imagined such a thing!'
This book is also an historical read as it recounts the various discoveries of the first dinosaur fossils, which actually began in the late 1700's, early 1800's. People were finding, or digging up, or pulling out the side of a cliff - fossils! Well, must be remnants from the big flood and Noah, many religious figures claimed. Then came the struggle to fit them all in the ark. Demons and dragon-like creatures which the Devil scattered over the Earth, others suggested. No, that idea quickly fell apart. But when people were forced to rethink, to re-evaluate the Earth, its history, geology and biology, and finally say yes, maybe this is an old, old place, and yes, maybe in previous, very ancient times, other living things walked and swam and flew on the planet, well...
This can be read in so many ways. History. Religion and science - how they clash. (And still are clashing almost 200 years later.) But these issues can also be reconciled. The Victorians, they just had a hell of a time doing so.
Entertaining and enlightening read.
Five stars.
This is a book not just for those, who like me at an advanced age, still LOVES dinosaurs. I might have become a paleontologist - seriously - had I not needed a JOB to support me and my husband who was still in college. Seriously, but Biology was my major - and my degree - and I taught science, which was almost as good as digging up dinosaurs as I got to expose thousands of children to what I liked best: science, and dinosaurs.
Enough about me. This book is also great for those who are interested in the Victorians - their beliefs, way of life, their solid stake in progress - and religion! These were people - highly-educated or not - who believed in God, but also loved progress! Trains! A delight, a miracle, a way to move about so quickly. OMG, we can go 40 mph! And electricity. And astronomy. And natural history. They were HUGE natural history buffs. Old and young, girls and boys, men and women, they collected nuts and feathers and eggs and kept notebooks with drawings of birds and ferns and flowers! They were curious and they were fascinated by the world around them - and then 'kerplunk' come these things, these fossils-as if from another world. What the heck are these giant lizards? These long-necked creatures with flippers? How are they possible? How old is the Earth, really? No, you can't be right! The Bible says...
So this is a different kind of 'science read,' in that it explores how people felt, how their thinking radically changed, how something new - and exciting, and almost 'irreligous' popped into their lives. There's really no comparison today. They were not prepared; they did not expect anything remotely like this. From their POV, the world was static, unchanged since the time God created it. All the animals, plants - God put them in their places and there they were. Even highly-educated persons thought this way - with very, very few exceptions.
The author notes that were we contemporary folk to suddenly confront, say, aliens from another planet - they just come down in their ships and said hello or whatever, we would not be as surprised, as startled, and as shocked as the Victorians when it came to fossils and dinosaurs! And that is because: We have been prepared. We talk about the possibility of UFOS, etc. We read about them in science as see them in our entertainment. (Goodness, the government even sets up a study panel to talk about the possibility of UFOS, etc.!) Upset and shocked, yes we'd certainly be. But we wouldn't go around saying, 'Where the heck did these aliens come from? I've never even imagined such a thing!'
This book is also an historical read as it recounts the various discoveries of the first dinosaur fossils, which actually began in the late 1700's, early 1800's. People were finding, or digging up, or pulling out the side of a cliff - fossils! Well, must be remnants from the big flood and Noah, many religious figures claimed. Then came the struggle to fit them all in the ark. Demons and dragon-like creatures which the Devil scattered over the Earth, others suggested. No, that idea quickly fell apart. But when people were forced to rethink, to re-evaluate the Earth, its history, geology and biology, and finally say yes, maybe this is an old, old place, and yes, maybe in previous, very ancient times, other living things walked and swam and flew on the planet, well...
This can be read in so many ways. History. Religion and science - how they clash. (And still are clashing almost 200 years later.) But these issues can also be reconciled. The Victorians, they just had a hell of a time doing so.
Entertaining and enlightening read.
Five stars.
December 10, 2024
Publisher's excerpt: https://lithub.com/giants-bones-fossi...
Ca. 1763: "What we had here was plainly a pair of enormous testicles from a bygone human giant. Brookes bestowed an imposing Latin name on the fossil, Scrotum humanum."
Off to a great start. A wonderful story of this forced paradigm shift.
A sample: Elizabeth Philpot, a fossil-collector colleague of Mary Anning, devised a technique for reviving fossil squid-ink. The book reproduces Philpot's drawing of an ichtyosaur head, made with fossil ink. Both are 200 million years old!
Prints of this 1830 watercolor, depicting life in ancient Dorset based on fossils found by Mary Anning , were sold as a benefit for her. She was perpetually short of money. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi... Whoa. Wonderful early paleoart!
Well. Sadly, this book ended up as something of a hot mess. Here's the review to read: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
"If you do not mind repetition and a somewhat chaotic read, and as long as you aren't expecting a deep-dive into the Victorian love of fossils/dinosaurs, then this is the book for you." Um. I liked it a bit more than she did. About 2.5 stars worth, and I'm undecided as to rounding up or down. I don't usually give a 2-star if the book has substantial merit . . . But I can't really recommend this book. Rounding down.
So. What I'm going to do is point you to my review of a near-great short bio of Darwin:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
This earned 4.5 stars from me and I've now read it 3 times. Short book, and it summarizes Darwin's entire career, warts and all. A brilliant scientist but a man of his time. High marks!
And I just finished Origin Story; the Trials of Charles Darwin by Howard Markel, which directly addresses the time and place of Dolnick's book. Markel is a far better writer, and better informed on this topic. But it may be more than you want to know. I've definitely been skimming. But a great overview of English science and culture, ca. 1859, when Darwin dropped his bombshell. Good stuff. My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... This was a strong 3-star read for me.
Ca. 1763: "What we had here was plainly a pair of enormous testicles from a bygone human giant. Brookes bestowed an imposing Latin name on the fossil, Scrotum humanum."
Off to a great start. A wonderful story of this forced paradigm shift.
A sample: Elizabeth Philpot, a fossil-collector colleague of Mary Anning, devised a technique for reviving fossil squid-ink. The book reproduces Philpot's drawing of an ichtyosaur head, made with fossil ink. Both are 200 million years old!
Prints of this 1830 watercolor, depicting life in ancient Dorset based on fossils found by Mary Anning , were sold as a benefit for her. She was perpetually short of money. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi... Whoa. Wonderful early paleoart!
Well. Sadly, this book ended up as something of a hot mess. Here's the review to read: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
"If you do not mind repetition and a somewhat chaotic read, and as long as you aren't expecting a deep-dive into the Victorian love of fossils/dinosaurs, then this is the book for you." Um. I liked it a bit more than she did. About 2.5 stars worth, and I'm undecided as to rounding up or down. I don't usually give a 2-star if the book has substantial merit . . . But I can't really recommend this book. Rounding down.
So. What I'm going to do is point you to my review of a near-great short bio of Darwin:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
This earned 4.5 stars from me and I've now read it 3 times. Short book, and it summarizes Darwin's entire career, warts and all. A brilliant scientist but a man of his time. High marks!
And I just finished Origin Story; the Trials of Charles Darwin by Howard Markel, which directly addresses the time and place of Dolnick's book. Markel is a far better writer, and better informed on this topic. But it may be more than you want to know. I've definitely been skimming. But a great overview of English science and culture, ca. 1859, when Darwin dropped his bombshell. Good stuff. My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... This was a strong 3-star read for me.
October 10, 2024
Honestly, I am really disappointed. It's not that the book is bad - it's quite well written and easy to read. It's that I went into the book expecting a detailed dive into the history of early paleontology, and instead got a series of standalone articles or stories on little anecdotes without a coherent narrative or in depth look at the facts.
The author provides none of the characters the depth of attention they deserve - barring perhaps Mary Anning who is the focus of the first quarter or so of the book. It's also clear that the author isn't familiar with paleontology or biology in a professional context - going so far as to call Lamarck "mostly forgotten" which is laughable.
The only coherent overarching narrative seems to be the effect paleontology had on religiosity and Christianity at the time. Seemingly to make the point that there was a permanent separation of Christianity and science caused by the rise of paleontology. But the author never really commits to that narrative either - switching back to the original intent with every new chapter.
Overall I think it's well written, easy to digest, and provides lots of colorful little details about various characters from history. If you know little to nothing about paleontology or Victorian era science - it's a great and easy introduction to the subject. If you're looking for in depth information and discussion, look elsewhere.
The author provides none of the characters the depth of attention they deserve - barring perhaps Mary Anning who is the focus of the first quarter or so of the book. It's also clear that the author isn't familiar with paleontology or biology in a professional context - going so far as to call Lamarck "mostly forgotten" which is laughable.
The only coherent overarching narrative seems to be the effect paleontology had on religiosity and Christianity at the time. Seemingly to make the point that there was a permanent separation of Christianity and science caused by the rise of paleontology. But the author never really commits to that narrative either - switching back to the original intent with every new chapter.
Overall I think it's well written, easy to digest, and provides lots of colorful little details about various characters from history. If you know little to nothing about paleontology or Victorian era science - it's a great and easy introduction to the subject. If you're looking for in depth information and discussion, look elsewhere.
July 4, 2025
Absolutely brilliantly written, the author pokes jabs at all of these historical figures, yet giving them the credit they earned. Really easy to follow while we walk through the "discovery" of dinosaurs in the Victorian period and their chaotic relationships and lives.
August 15, 2024
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: Dinosaurs, Darwin, and the Battle Between Science and Religion” by Michael Taylor – my review here!) 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, Scribner, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.
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: Dinosaurs, Darwin, and the Battle Between Science and Religion” by Michael Taylor – my review here!) 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, Scribner, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.
September 6, 2024
A blend of history, paleontology, and biography, this book is a fun and lively account of the early discoveries of dinosaur bones in Great Britain. It starts with Mary Anning’s discoveries of Ichthyosaurs and Plesiosaurs, and how she played a major role but got little credit due to gender and class prejudice. It moves to the contributions of a variety of others, including minibiographies that highlight some of the lesser-known people involved. It also touches on Charles Darwin and his ground-breaking theories of evolution.
Though I knew much of the history covered in this book, the author approaches it from a slightly different angle. He looks at the impact on society of the time, how the Victorians tried to reconcile their views of religion (and the prevailing interpretations of the Bible) with these large creatures that obviously existed at some point in the past. There are quite a few humorous passages, especially the convoluted ways they tried to reconcile what “everyone knew” (at the time) with this new evidence.
But the heart of this book is helping the reader understand the culture of the era. Victorians lined up to view exhibits, attend lectures, and learn about our world. The discovery of dinosaurs started a change in thinking, and the author conveys their excitement and awe at new discoveries. I enjoyed the writing style, which is both educational and entertaining. I look forward to reading more of Dolnick’s work.
Though I knew much of the history covered in this book, the author approaches it from a slightly different angle. He looks at the impact on society of the time, how the Victorians tried to reconcile their views of religion (and the prevailing interpretations of the Bible) with these large creatures that obviously existed at some point in the past. There are quite a few humorous passages, especially the convoluted ways they tried to reconcile what “everyone knew” (at the time) with this new evidence.
But the heart of this book is helping the reader understand the culture of the era. Victorians lined up to view exhibits, attend lectures, and learn about our world. The discovery of dinosaurs started a change in thinking, and the author conveys their excitement and awe at new discoveries. I enjoyed the writing style, which is both educational and entertaining. I look forward to reading more of Dolnick’s work.
July 4, 2025
An interesting and very pleasantly written ride through the world of Victorian natural history in the era leading up to On The Origin of Species. In some ways a standard biography of the movement’s leading figures, but elevated by a consistent return to the existential threat posed by their own discoveries. Nothing fundamentally game changing, but this work makes the extraordinarily reluctant shift from a nature beautiful and ordered, a window onto the divine benevolence of a loving creator, to a nature red in tooth and claw, very compelling.
March 2, 2024
At one point in the book, the author uses an analogy of a teenagers bedroom to explain stratigraphy, likening the layers of discarded clothing to that of the Earth's strata, but noting that geologic forces may make the specific progression of time unclear, analogizing that in particular to the resulting chaos created by a happy golden retriever chasing a tennis ball thrown into the room.
This analogy works both as an illustration of the book, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party, but also an analogy for the book. The author writes as thought there was a non-fiction Bulwer-Lytton award, and I am here for it. It is excitable, bombastic, and more florid than an adulterer's apology to his wife. But it feels authentic. The author is that excited about dinosaurs and dinosaur history, and so are you. Yes, you, reading this, trying to be all cool and detached. You know this speaks to your inner teenager, if not your inner Golden. It is infectious.
It is also chaotic. The title of the book refers to the party given by Benjamin Hawkins that took place inside an iguanadon model created for the occasion, as Hawkins was the artist creating what we now know as the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs and this was his shop. The party is described in soaring detail as the conclusion, not climax, of the book. The subtitle of the book "how an eccentric group of Victorians discovered prehistoric creatures and accidentally upended the world," is in contrast to the stated original question of the book in its acknowledgements, which describes it as a history of science of the discovery of dinosaurs, where the book itself is neither, or possibly both. It is interested in the Victorian greats like Anning and Owen, but stops short of a biographic history, and includes a long discussion on earlier scientific research, such as with ancient (usually not dinosaur) bones in France and the United States, but also Mayor's theories on Ancient Greek interpretations of ancient bones (again, usually not dinosaur, and also criticized). For a book about the realization of Deep Time, it is adverse to chronology.
It is a mess, but it works, as each (short) chapter tends to work as a stand-alone document. Frustratingly, for me at any rate, the most interesting parts are those related most clearly with the subtitle, and the question of what as a matter of ideology set the Victorians apart in their relationship with scientific examination, the impulse towards collection, and the bifurcated interest in God and the natural world as either in opposition or in concert. I am suspect about this as an idea, but admittedly that is why it is the most attractive to contemplate. Here that I find the most to criticize about the author's style. I know that as of early 2024, proper citation is become an idée fixe within the commentator class and a culture war issue without. I am absolutely not accusing Dolnick of any misdoing. But the book has a sort of inconsistency in its methodology of citations and quotes where, in these chapters, where I am working on putting together a reading list to dive deeper, that lead to frustration and confusion on my part.
And while Darwin does not show up - he is in again the author's memorable method of description the bomb under the table Hitchcock-style at the titular dinner party - I know that the descriptions of some of these figure's problems with what would be Darwinism are reductive. This is the simplified view of a lot of these ideas, which the author seems to me to acknowledge in the end notes, commonly held but also capable of a lot more elaboration, usually in some degree of rehabilitation. The focus here though is on the fun stuff. So, when I think about the ideal audience for this book, I think about the teenager from the analogy. It is a light treatment of the subject, too scattered to be a useful introduction, but fun, and the sort of thing that ought to provoke further interest and glee.
Thank you to the author, Edward Dolnick, and the publisher, Scribner Books, for making the ARC available to me.
This analogy works both as an illustration of the book, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party, but also an analogy for the book. The author writes as thought there was a non-fiction Bulwer-Lytton award, and I am here for it. It is excitable, bombastic, and more florid than an adulterer's apology to his wife. But it feels authentic. The author is that excited about dinosaurs and dinosaur history, and so are you. Yes, you, reading this, trying to be all cool and detached. You know this speaks to your inner teenager, if not your inner Golden. It is infectious.
It is also chaotic. The title of the book refers to the party given by Benjamin Hawkins that took place inside an iguanadon model created for the occasion, as Hawkins was the artist creating what we now know as the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs and this was his shop. The party is described in soaring detail as the conclusion, not climax, of the book. The subtitle of the book "how an eccentric group of Victorians discovered prehistoric creatures and accidentally upended the world," is in contrast to the stated original question of the book in its acknowledgements, which describes it as a history of science of the discovery of dinosaurs, where the book itself is neither, or possibly both. It is interested in the Victorian greats like Anning and Owen, but stops short of a biographic history, and includes a long discussion on earlier scientific research, such as with ancient (usually not dinosaur) bones in France and the United States, but also Mayor's theories on Ancient Greek interpretations of ancient bones (again, usually not dinosaur, and also criticized). For a book about the realization of Deep Time, it is adverse to chronology.
It is a mess, but it works, as each (short) chapter tends to work as a stand-alone document. Frustratingly, for me at any rate, the most interesting parts are those related most clearly with the subtitle, and the question of what as a matter of ideology set the Victorians apart in their relationship with scientific examination, the impulse towards collection, and the bifurcated interest in God and the natural world as either in opposition or in concert. I am suspect about this as an idea, but admittedly that is why it is the most attractive to contemplate. Here that I find the most to criticize about the author's style. I know that as of early 2024, proper citation is become an idée fixe within the commentator class and a culture war issue without. I am absolutely not accusing Dolnick of any misdoing. But the book has a sort of inconsistency in its methodology of citations and quotes where, in these chapters, where I am working on putting together a reading list to dive deeper, that lead to frustration and confusion on my part.
And while Darwin does not show up - he is in again the author's memorable method of description the bomb under the table Hitchcock-style at the titular dinner party - I know that the descriptions of some of these figure's problems with what would be Darwinism are reductive. This is the simplified view of a lot of these ideas, which the author seems to me to acknowledge in the end notes, commonly held but also capable of a lot more elaboration, usually in some degree of rehabilitation. The focus here though is on the fun stuff. So, when I think about the ideal audience for this book, I think about the teenager from the analogy. It is a light treatment of the subject, too scattered to be a useful introduction, but fun, and the sort of thing that ought to provoke further interest and glee.
Thank you to the author, Edward Dolnick, and the publisher, Scribner Books, for making the ARC available to me.
June 24, 2025
This was medium good! I wish it had been more citation heavy (in-text, the back matter is extensive and a great list of resources and tidbits) and I wish the writing had been a little bit more... I'm not sure actually, just more, but it was an easy, enjoyable enough read and did make me think much more about how unbelievably strange it must have been to be alive when the idea of dinosaurs was brand new, which was pretty much what I was looking for.
February 15, 2025
This is a popular-level history of the discovery of dinosaurs in Victorian England. In the nineteenth century, multiple large and unusual fossilized bones were uncovered. This was puzzling because at the time it was believed that God had created a world ideal for mankind and therefore the notion of an extinct species didn’t make sense, but these bones did not seem to belong to any known animals. Dolnick here tells the story of how the concept of dinosaurs gradually developed. He shows how scientists tried to reconcile the fossil findings with their understanding of the world at the time, and explains why the very concept of dinosaurs was so disruptive to the prevailing worldview.
It’s easy for modern readers who learned about dinosaurs as children to scoff at the difficulties people of that era had conceptualizing a bygone prehistoric world filled with extinct giant “terrible lizards,” but Dolnick tries to help us understand why this was so troublesome for them. Although he sometimes can’t help himself and lets his true feelings show, which is that those silly stupid Victorians naively believed that the world was created by God and that God cared for humans, until Darwin finally stepped up and set them straight: everything is due to random chance acting through natural selection, therefore the very idea of a Designer is unnecessary and antiquated.
Despite this pervasive materialist bias and the occasional condescending tone, there is still some good history here, with a fascinating cast of characters and some memorable stories. And it’s also interesting to read about how these discoveries had such a significant scientific and philosophical impact.
It’s easy for modern readers who learned about dinosaurs as children to scoff at the difficulties people of that era had conceptualizing a bygone prehistoric world filled with extinct giant “terrible lizards,” but Dolnick tries to help us understand why this was so troublesome for them. Although he sometimes can’t help himself and lets his true feelings show, which is that those silly stupid Victorians naively believed that the world was created by God and that God cared for humans, until Darwin finally stepped up and set them straight: everything is due to random chance acting through natural selection, therefore the very idea of a Designer is unnecessary and antiquated.
Despite this pervasive materialist bias and the occasional condescending tone, there is still some good history here, with a fascinating cast of characters and some memorable stories. And it’s also interesting to read about how these discoveries had such a significant scientific and philosophical impact.
September 30, 2024
Really enjoyed this look into the advent of fossils, geology and dinosaurs. The author did a great job of bringing history to life! The subtitle - “How an eccentric group of Victorians discovered prehistoric creatures and accidentally upended the world” - actually fit the book, which is surprisingly rare among non-fiction titles.
My favorite part was the chapter on connecting Greek myths with fossils the ancients might have found (ex: the skull of a prehistoric elephant looks a lot like a Cyclops). Also loved learning that one of the first major fossils finders was a woman.
There was a ton of commentary on the role of the Bible in society at the time and in the lives of the scientists themselves. I thought the author did a great job of exploring and referring to the Biblical worldview without deriding it or making it seem like a silly thing to believe.
My favorite part was the chapter on connecting Greek myths with fossils the ancients might have found (ex: the skull of a prehistoric elephant looks a lot like a Cyclops). Also loved learning that one of the first major fossils finders was a woman.
There was a ton of commentary on the role of the Bible in society at the time and in the lives of the scientists themselves. I thought the author did a great job of exploring and referring to the Biblical worldview without deriding it or making it seem like a silly thing to believe.
July 30, 2025
This was a fun listen while it was happening, but I honestly couldn't tell you one thing I learned while reading it. I retained nothing. Do not know if book's fault or mine, but same result either way.
[3.5 stars]
[3.5 stars]
October 1, 2024
"Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party" by Edward Dolnick is as utterly entertaining as any best-selling novel. The entire time I read "Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party" I told everyone around me to read it. The knowledge of dinosaurs has obviously, never not been part of my life. But I had never thought about the initial discovery or urge to understand the discovery of giant bones before. The fact it wasn't until the 1800s that people began to imagine all the options about what these bones, footprints, and fossils were from is wild to me. That history is still so close to us, and it's funny to think about the fanciful ideas people thought of to explain these fossils. Many of the historical figures you meet in this book you learn about the highs and lows of their careers in a new science in its infancy. Also, women are awesome and I'm glad Mary Anning and the others are finally getting their credit and acknowledgment for their part in the discovery of dinosaurs.
January 2, 2025
You'd think a book with the word "dinosaurs" in the title would be mostly about dinosaurs. But no, this was a drunken stagger (thank you, Charles Darwin for this phrase) through evolution. Thoroughly pretentious and overly written.
October 10, 2024
Super easy read filled with fun and interesting facts/anecdotes about people who realized the Earth's history was much more extensive than they had thought.
January 17, 2025
I’ve become a real dinosaur fan, and this was a good read, especially the parts dealing with the often eccentric discoverers of the 19th century.
February 9, 2025
Absolutely delightful! Short chapters and a little repetitive on places, but engaging enough to overcome all that.
March 19, 2025
Needed to talk a lot more about dinosaurs, really only mentions the discovery of three of them.
August 25, 2024
Very rarely do I laugh out loud when I'm reading, particularly if what I'm reading is non-fiction. NEVER have I trailed after family members at home, trying to read certain passages to them out loud. I mean, that's just not me. Can I say this BOOK made me do it?
For the Victorians, "God had fashioned the world, and he was a perfect designer whose works were eternal, not an artist who ran out of inspiration and flung his misfires into a wastebasket."
The very first person to discover our fossil history was a woman, Mary Anning. Her family was so impoverished they had to eke out a miserable living scraping ancient ammonites from the cliffs of Lime Regis in England. She found the first whole skeletons of three species: the ichthyosaur, plesiosaur and pterosaur. The first two had been denizens of the sea, while the pterosaur shaded the sky with its 8-foot, leathered wingspan. Being poor, uneducated (albeit self-educated, later) and worse, female, she was relegated to history's dustbin until very recently. When Anning's pleiosaur was presented to the Royal Geographic Society, "'They were as alien to his audience as if they had hailed from another planet,' writes the paleontologist Christopher McGowan, and the spectators sat entranced. Anning was not among them; the Geological Society would be closed to women for almost another century, until 1919. At the time of the talk, only two plesiosaurs had ever been found.
Mary Anning had found both of them. [The scientist presenting her find], Conybeare, never mentioned her name." When the Natural History Museum received them as gifts, only the donors were named. Today, Mary has her own room in the museum; it's quiet, very small, and rarely visited. Time marches on, women's history moves glacially.
The Victorians had been deeply interested in--and fiercely celebrated--the smallest versions of Nature, those they could completely control: seaweed (Why??) was highly popular in their collections, and dried flower petals, for example. These collections didn't disturb their Christian equilibrium. But fossils--?! "Could we—we who were, after all, the point of creation—suddenly vanish, too, popping out of existence like soap bubbles? Wait—what?!"
Fossils "...[H]ad not been captured in an instant, like mice in a mousetrap. Instead, they had been entombed in slow motion, after their deaths, as if ever-so-tiny gravediggers had been at work for millennia, heaping grains of sand and teaspoons of clay and mud atop a corpse. It fell to the geologists to make sense of these discoveries. This was not a mission they had intended. Their goal was to learn about the structure of the earth, not to find relics of ancient life. They set out to study rocks and, in effect, tripped over cadavers."
When I was a child--eons past, now--I found abundant pictures of stegosauraus battling T. rex. I was astonished to learn here that "...stegosaurus had come and gone before the first appearance of T. rex. But that bare fact skips past the real surprise: the span of time from stegosaurus to T. rex was longer than from T. rex to the iPhone." !!! Now it was MY turn to whaa__?!!! "And so our rise seems less a matter of a hard climb to the top and more akin to the story of a mailroom clerk who suddenly finds himself CEO because nearly everyone else was killed in an earthquake."
"Not every culture has believed that humans are the be-all and end-all of creation. Certainly India and China have not. Even Western societies harbored dissenters. Followers of the Greek philosopher Epicurus mocked Christian believers as childishly self-centered: “Christians are like a council of frogs in a pond, croaking at the top of their lungs, "‘For our sake was the world created.’ ” Sadly, those folks are still hellbent on it, what with that huge ark in wherever it is (Google says Williamstown, Kentucky, Trip Advisor snarkily calls it the"Overpriced Christian Tourist Trap.") Then, too, they persist in the belief that Earth is barely 6,000 years old and are trying SO HARD to make the biblical tales make sense. "Since before Copernicus, in fact, because many famous passages in the Bible required literalists to tie themselves in knots. They had devised ingenious theories to explain how it was, for instance, that God had declared, 'Let there be light!' on the first day but had waited until the fourth day to create the sun and the stars." "...[I]f you were a more conventional Christian, extinction did not make sense, because it implied that God did his best but occasionally had to issue recalls of faulty products."
There was a disturbing, and disturbed, English scientist named Buckland, who kept a huge menagerie of wild creatures in his home and ate anything, not limited to devouring Louis XIV's dessicated heart and licking bat urine, which he recognized, so it wasn't even his first lick! He attempted to reinforce the notion of god's distinct preference for White supremacists, "'About nine-tenths of the coal of the world have been thrown by the Creator into the hands of the Anglo-Saxon race.' Then, as if to underline his point, God had made an additional gift to his favorites. This second gift was not coal but gold. It had turned up 'almost simultaneously' in two places, the United States and Australia. Could anyone fail to notice that both countries were English speaking?'" Of course, he didn't know that most of the world's oil would be under Arab sands, or that the continent with the most precious resources was, in fact--Africa. Still, Whites would steal most of that, anyway, so that shift in balance proved illusional. Later in life, Buckland would go quite utterly mad, spending his last years in an insane asylum among shrieking madmen.
In 1725 when huge fossils were first discovered in America, White geologists immediately claimed they belonged to a race of human giants. It took slaves from Africa to say no, you White boneheads, those were obviously elephant bones (mastodons)! The author also notes here that it was a slave named Onesimus who clued in Cotton Mather, American Congregational minister and science/history author, to smallpox vaccination, which was already a regular practice in West Africa. This work is chock-full of marvelous facts.
Thanks to the French Revolution (at least for upending strictures of class), Georges Cuvier, one of the first self-educated scientists who came from abject poverty, realized that whole species must have vanished due to some horrific catastrophes. Unfortunately, he tried to squeeze that idea to fit the biblical flood. It didn't work, though, as there were many different layers in fossil finds, rather than one layer as from a worldwide flood, and many layers weren't even horizontal! Cuvier argued for extinction but denied evolution. His other half, a rival named Lamark, argued for evolution but denied extinction. What fun!
Devastating Christian ideology, "...horrifyingly, bewilderingly, came a new possibility—God might be unconcerned. Tennyson [England's then most popular poet, who died in 1892] pondered, once again, the record of death and mayhem etched in the cliffs. He grew more disheartened still. For one steeped in the scientific literature of the day, like Tennyson, the images of prehistoric beasts in mortal combat were hard to shake. Nature was neither benevolent nor happy but soaked in blood. In a phrase destined to become one of the century’s most famous, Tennyson wrote of “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” The Victorians were being brutally wrenched from a rural lifestyle centuries old into the industrial age, and now from the very earth beneath them came another, even more violent upheaval; it had taken only 50 years from Wordsworth's "My heart leaps up when I behold/A rainbow in the sky" to Tennyson's unleashed anguish.
Author Dolnick takes wicked delight in lambasting the Victorians who kept trying to reinforce god the creator. There was Philip Gosse, a fundamentalist Christian, who invented a story that God made no mistakes but had carefully staged his scenery. "'Fossils only looked as if they were relics of
former lives. That was an illusion. In truth, fossils were “skeletons of animals that never really existed.' God had seeded the world with ready-made fossils, and careless thinkers had jumped to the conclusion that the world was old. Fossils were new artifacts made to look old, like pre-distressed jeans, and geologists had misunderstood what they were seeing." This is why Adam had a navel, although he was not born of woman, and why trees in Eden had rings, although they were made full-grown. (Gosse didn't address another apparent contradiction: there must've been other folk after Eden besides Adam and Eve, or the new, grotesquely inbred species wouldn't have survived; they did already know about not marrying cousins, after all.) Gosse called his treatise Omphalos, meaning "navel," after Adam's very own abdominal divot. He expected accolades that never came. "The findings of geology had grown too substantial to dismiss. Gosse’s pratfall brought him no allies...He had missed the boat. He had, in fact, dressed up in topcoat and tails, waved farewell to a crowd on the pier, stepped forward from the gangway, and then, to his own astonishment, found himself plummeting into the harbor depths."
Dolnick happily repeats this image of scientists failing and falling, one by one. Another example was made of Richard Owen, English biologist, comparative anatomist and paleontologist. "In meticulous detail, he compared the bones in a whale’s flipper, a mole’s paw, and a bat’s wing. Each “hand” had the same five fingers; each finger had the same three joints. That was surely not coincidence." Owen had come across the Fibonacci sequence and declared it God. "...[F]or the moment, all was well. Owen was at center stage, in effect, basking in applause, conspicuous in the spotlight, turning this way and that to acknowledge his admirers. He took a step forward and bent into an especially deep bow. He didn’t yet see that he was about to topple into the orchestra pit." These were passages I carried at my breast as I hounded my kin so I could read them aloud.
And then--Darwin. "As soon as Darwin stepped into the open, the cozy assumptions that they had long endorsed—that the world was orderly and presided over by a benevolent deity who had a special fondness for humankind—were blasted into rubble." A shy, quiet man who disliked the spotlight, he really didn't want to publish his work; he knew the maelstrom that would follow, as had France's Sun King, Louis XIV, who famously said while dying in one of his many cavernous beds of solid gold (he also had a solid gold duck blind with ample room for visitors, food & drink), "Aprés moi, le deluge!" ("After me, the flood!" What followed was the French Revolution, by a populace starved to pay for his excesses.)
"The history of life, Darwin showed, was less a noble progression than a drunken stagger. Darwin detonated his bombshell, On the Origin of Species, in 1859. The basic idea was simple. There are not enough seats at the table. Every living organism has no choice but to join in a high-stakes game of musical chairs. With so many competitors, even the smallest advantage—ever so slightly sharper elbows, a smidgen quicker reflexes—might prove crucial. And since the game goes on forever, round after round, any advantage that is inherited might ratchet up, and in time the descendants of the first competitors might come to look vastly different from their ancestors."
Crucially, the system ran by itself, guided by the few simple rules of musical chairs (“Everyone must play,” “The music never stops,” and so on). No one was in charge. In particular, God wasn’t in charge, or even in the picture. Critics howled, as Darwin had known they would. In 1844, years before he went public with the Origin, he had written a letter to a friend that hinted at his theory of evolution. “It is,” he wrote, “like confessing a murder.”
It's a conundrum many still face today, just as the highest Victorian minds failed to grasp it: how can there be design without a designer? Ya gotta feel for evangelicals who still don't get it.
Along the way, this book is everywhere limned with interesting facts. Did you know the sea is so salty that, if all of it was extracted and laid across all the land, it would be 500 feet thick?? (My daughter has sailed the sea and told me how much saltier it is at depths of 3,000+ feet, while at the shore where we paddle about, it is much less so. When years back I wrote on FB about rising seas in climate change, I was mansplained by a bunch of bearded dudes emphatically saying NO; by their facial hair, it was a coordinated attack. They'd all done a science project in 7th grade, they wrote, to measure whether melting ice added more to water. It doesn't, but the point of that effort was to show that water expands about 9% when frozen, and goes back to normal when thawed. The test for rising seas requires adding several teaspoons of salt to the glass of ice water. Eureka! BIG DIFFERENCE. Try both with your kids, they'll love it.)
There's the story of the Irish Giant Charles Byrne, 7'7" tall, who paid to be buried at sea to avoid being a museum display--along with a photo of him in the Hunterian Museum as Queen Elizabeth gazes with disinterest upon his skeleton. (I knew about this because I'd read that the museum decided to remove him from public display in 2023, since he'd fought so vehemently against it. Would that all museums would relinquish their human displays! Lookin' at YOU, Harvard.) Byrne had died at 22 of a pituitary tumor, which was also the cause of his height; he had been on public display for 225 years.
I also learned that how I was taught to define mammals is now really quite outdated. "A definition that focused exclusively on hair and milk would miss some mammals and gather in other animals that don’t belong. Some mammals are hairless or nearly hairless, like whales and dolphins. (Hair does rule an animal INTO the mammal club. [emphasis mine] No non-mammals have hair.) And some non-mammals, like spiders, feed their young on milk." Eew, the 'itsy bitsy spiders' of my childhood actually milk their moms?? Jeez louise. I learned there are 350,000 species of beetles. (Well, our dog loves leaping after June bugs, so ok. I guess.)
I learned that the Bible describes Leviathan as far more than your average whale: "Leviathan is 'crooked serpent' and 'the dragon that is in the sea,' we read in Isaiah, and in Job we hear of his 'scales' and 'terrible' teeth and learn that 'a flame goeth out of his mouth' and 'out of his nostrils goeth smoke.'" Quite fanciful, that, but not nearly as bizarre as the absolutely hallucinogenic Book of Revelation, on which MAGA evangelicals rely most! (This really should make the rest of us stand up and take note.)
Finally, I learned that "Ninety-nine percent of all the animal species that ever lived—not individuals but species—leave no trace whatever." It makes the imminent extinction of mankind in climate chaos another mere blip. "Out, out, brief candle!" likely wrote Edward de Vere, known universally as Shakespeare--we even get facts in the near past wrong. You can Google all the very famous folk in history scientists now think never existed at all--including Jesus.
One of the most riveting books I've ever read, with pictures at the end and many footnotes for the avid reader. Can I go 7 stars?? If you now consider you need not read it at all, because this review has been almost as long, I salute you--and also apologize. Next up: Dolnick's The Rescue Artist, his Edgar-winning true story of the theft and rescue of Edward Munch's The Scream.
For the Victorians, "God had fashioned the world, and he was a perfect designer whose works were eternal, not an artist who ran out of inspiration and flung his misfires into a wastebasket."
The very first person to discover our fossil history was a woman, Mary Anning. Her family was so impoverished they had to eke out a miserable living scraping ancient ammonites from the cliffs of Lime Regis in England. She found the first whole skeletons of three species: the ichthyosaur, plesiosaur and pterosaur. The first two had been denizens of the sea, while the pterosaur shaded the sky with its 8-foot, leathered wingspan. Being poor, uneducated (albeit self-educated, later) and worse, female, she was relegated to history's dustbin until very recently. When Anning's pleiosaur was presented to the Royal Geographic Society, "'They were as alien to his audience as if they had hailed from another planet,' writes the paleontologist Christopher McGowan, and the spectators sat entranced. Anning was not among them; the Geological Society would be closed to women for almost another century, until 1919. At the time of the talk, only two plesiosaurs had ever been found.
Mary Anning had found both of them. [The scientist presenting her find], Conybeare, never mentioned her name." When the Natural History Museum received them as gifts, only the donors were named. Today, Mary has her own room in the museum; it's quiet, very small, and rarely visited. Time marches on, women's history moves glacially.
The Victorians had been deeply interested in--and fiercely celebrated--the smallest versions of Nature, those they could completely control: seaweed (Why??) was highly popular in their collections, and dried flower petals, for example. These collections didn't disturb their Christian equilibrium. But fossils--?! "Could we—we who were, after all, the point of creation—suddenly vanish, too, popping out of existence like soap bubbles? Wait—what?!"
Fossils "...[H]ad not been captured in an instant, like mice in a mousetrap. Instead, they had been entombed in slow motion, after their deaths, as if ever-so-tiny gravediggers had been at work for millennia, heaping grains of sand and teaspoons of clay and mud atop a corpse. It fell to the geologists to make sense of these discoveries. This was not a mission they had intended. Their goal was to learn about the structure of the earth, not to find relics of ancient life. They set out to study rocks and, in effect, tripped over cadavers."
When I was a child--eons past, now--I found abundant pictures of stegosauraus battling T. rex. I was astonished to learn here that "...stegosaurus had come and gone before the first appearance of T. rex. But that bare fact skips past the real surprise: the span of time from stegosaurus to T. rex was longer than from T. rex to the iPhone." !!! Now it was MY turn to whaa__?!!! "And so our rise seems less a matter of a hard climb to the top and more akin to the story of a mailroom clerk who suddenly finds himself CEO because nearly everyone else was killed in an earthquake."
"Not every culture has believed that humans are the be-all and end-all of creation. Certainly India and China have not. Even Western societies harbored dissenters. Followers of the Greek philosopher Epicurus mocked Christian believers as childishly self-centered: “Christians are like a council of frogs in a pond, croaking at the top of their lungs, "‘For our sake was the world created.’ ” Sadly, those folks are still hellbent on it, what with that huge ark in wherever it is (Google says Williamstown, Kentucky, Trip Advisor snarkily calls it the"Overpriced Christian Tourist Trap.") Then, too, they persist in the belief that Earth is barely 6,000 years old and are trying SO HARD to make the biblical tales make sense. "Since before Copernicus, in fact, because many famous passages in the Bible required literalists to tie themselves in knots. They had devised ingenious theories to explain how it was, for instance, that God had declared, 'Let there be light!' on the first day but had waited until the fourth day to create the sun and the stars." "...[I]f you were a more conventional Christian, extinction did not make sense, because it implied that God did his best but occasionally had to issue recalls of faulty products."
There was a disturbing, and disturbed, English scientist named Buckland, who kept a huge menagerie of wild creatures in his home and ate anything, not limited to devouring Louis XIV's dessicated heart and licking bat urine, which he recognized, so it wasn't even his first lick! He attempted to reinforce the notion of god's distinct preference for White supremacists, "'About nine-tenths of the coal of the world have been thrown by the Creator into the hands of the Anglo-Saxon race.' Then, as if to underline his point, God had made an additional gift to his favorites. This second gift was not coal but gold. It had turned up 'almost simultaneously' in two places, the United States and Australia. Could anyone fail to notice that both countries were English speaking?'" Of course, he didn't know that most of the world's oil would be under Arab sands, or that the continent with the most precious resources was, in fact--Africa. Still, Whites would steal most of that, anyway, so that shift in balance proved illusional. Later in life, Buckland would go quite utterly mad, spending his last years in an insane asylum among shrieking madmen.
In 1725 when huge fossils were first discovered in America, White geologists immediately claimed they belonged to a race of human giants. It took slaves from Africa to say no, you White boneheads, those were obviously elephant bones (mastodons)! The author also notes here that it was a slave named Onesimus who clued in Cotton Mather, American Congregational minister and science/history author, to smallpox vaccination, which was already a regular practice in West Africa. This work is chock-full of marvelous facts.
Thanks to the French Revolution (at least for upending strictures of class), Georges Cuvier, one of the first self-educated scientists who came from abject poverty, realized that whole species must have vanished due to some horrific catastrophes. Unfortunately, he tried to squeeze that idea to fit the biblical flood. It didn't work, though, as there were many different layers in fossil finds, rather than one layer as from a worldwide flood, and many layers weren't even horizontal! Cuvier argued for extinction but denied evolution. His other half, a rival named Lamark, argued for evolution but denied extinction. What fun!
Devastating Christian ideology, "...horrifyingly, bewilderingly, came a new possibility—God might be unconcerned. Tennyson [England's then most popular poet, who died in 1892] pondered, once again, the record of death and mayhem etched in the cliffs. He grew more disheartened still. For one steeped in the scientific literature of the day, like Tennyson, the images of prehistoric beasts in mortal combat were hard to shake. Nature was neither benevolent nor happy but soaked in blood. In a phrase destined to become one of the century’s most famous, Tennyson wrote of “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” The Victorians were being brutally wrenched from a rural lifestyle centuries old into the industrial age, and now from the very earth beneath them came another, even more violent upheaval; it had taken only 50 years from Wordsworth's "My heart leaps up when I behold/A rainbow in the sky" to Tennyson's unleashed anguish.
Author Dolnick takes wicked delight in lambasting the Victorians who kept trying to reinforce god the creator. There was Philip Gosse, a fundamentalist Christian, who invented a story that God made no mistakes but had carefully staged his scenery. "'Fossils only looked as if they were relics of
former lives. That was an illusion. In truth, fossils were “skeletons of animals that never really existed.' God had seeded the world with ready-made fossils, and careless thinkers had jumped to the conclusion that the world was old. Fossils were new artifacts made to look old, like pre-distressed jeans, and geologists had misunderstood what they were seeing." This is why Adam had a navel, although he was not born of woman, and why trees in Eden had rings, although they were made full-grown. (Gosse didn't address another apparent contradiction: there must've been other folk after Eden besides Adam and Eve, or the new, grotesquely inbred species wouldn't have survived; they did already know about not marrying cousins, after all.) Gosse called his treatise Omphalos, meaning "navel," after Adam's very own abdominal divot. He expected accolades that never came. "The findings of geology had grown too substantial to dismiss. Gosse’s pratfall brought him no allies...He had missed the boat. He had, in fact, dressed up in topcoat and tails, waved farewell to a crowd on the pier, stepped forward from the gangway, and then, to his own astonishment, found himself plummeting into the harbor depths."
Dolnick happily repeats this image of scientists failing and falling, one by one. Another example was made of Richard Owen, English biologist, comparative anatomist and paleontologist. "In meticulous detail, he compared the bones in a whale’s flipper, a mole’s paw, and a bat’s wing. Each “hand” had the same five fingers; each finger had the same three joints. That was surely not coincidence." Owen had come across the Fibonacci sequence and declared it God. "...[F]or the moment, all was well. Owen was at center stage, in effect, basking in applause, conspicuous in the spotlight, turning this way and that to acknowledge his admirers. He took a step forward and bent into an especially deep bow. He didn’t yet see that he was about to topple into the orchestra pit." These were passages I carried at my breast as I hounded my kin so I could read them aloud.
And then--Darwin. "As soon as Darwin stepped into the open, the cozy assumptions that they had long endorsed—that the world was orderly and presided over by a benevolent deity who had a special fondness for humankind—were blasted into rubble." A shy, quiet man who disliked the spotlight, he really didn't want to publish his work; he knew the maelstrom that would follow, as had France's Sun King, Louis XIV, who famously said while dying in one of his many cavernous beds of solid gold (he also had a solid gold duck blind with ample room for visitors, food & drink), "Aprés moi, le deluge!" ("After me, the flood!" What followed was the French Revolution, by a populace starved to pay for his excesses.)
"The history of life, Darwin showed, was less a noble progression than a drunken stagger. Darwin detonated his bombshell, On the Origin of Species, in 1859. The basic idea was simple. There are not enough seats at the table. Every living organism has no choice but to join in a high-stakes game of musical chairs. With so many competitors, even the smallest advantage—ever so slightly sharper elbows, a smidgen quicker reflexes—might prove crucial. And since the game goes on forever, round after round, any advantage that is inherited might ratchet up, and in time the descendants of the first competitors might come to look vastly different from their ancestors."
Crucially, the system ran by itself, guided by the few simple rules of musical chairs (“Everyone must play,” “The music never stops,” and so on). No one was in charge. In particular, God wasn’t in charge, or even in the picture. Critics howled, as Darwin had known they would. In 1844, years before he went public with the Origin, he had written a letter to a friend that hinted at his theory of evolution. “It is,” he wrote, “like confessing a murder.”
It's a conundrum many still face today, just as the highest Victorian minds failed to grasp it: how can there be design without a designer? Ya gotta feel for evangelicals who still don't get it.
Along the way, this book is everywhere limned with interesting facts. Did you know the sea is so salty that, if all of it was extracted and laid across all the land, it would be 500 feet thick?? (My daughter has sailed the sea and told me how much saltier it is at depths of 3,000+ feet, while at the shore where we paddle about, it is much less so. When years back I wrote on FB about rising seas in climate change, I was mansplained by a bunch of bearded dudes emphatically saying NO; by their facial hair, it was a coordinated attack. They'd all done a science project in 7th grade, they wrote, to measure whether melting ice added more to water. It doesn't, but the point of that effort was to show that water expands about 9% when frozen, and goes back to normal when thawed. The test for rising seas requires adding several teaspoons of salt to the glass of ice water. Eureka! BIG DIFFERENCE. Try both with your kids, they'll love it.)
There's the story of the Irish Giant Charles Byrne, 7'7" tall, who paid to be buried at sea to avoid being a museum display--along with a photo of him in the Hunterian Museum as Queen Elizabeth gazes with disinterest upon his skeleton. (I knew about this because I'd read that the museum decided to remove him from public display in 2023, since he'd fought so vehemently against it. Would that all museums would relinquish their human displays! Lookin' at YOU, Harvard.) Byrne had died at 22 of a pituitary tumor, which was also the cause of his height; he had been on public display for 225 years.
I also learned that how I was taught to define mammals is now really quite outdated. "A definition that focused exclusively on hair and milk would miss some mammals and gather in other animals that don’t belong. Some mammals are hairless or nearly hairless, like whales and dolphins. (Hair does rule an animal INTO the mammal club. [emphasis mine] No non-mammals have hair.) And some non-mammals, like spiders, feed their young on milk." Eew, the 'itsy bitsy spiders' of my childhood actually milk their moms?? Jeez louise. I learned there are 350,000 species of beetles. (Well, our dog loves leaping after June bugs, so ok. I guess.)
I learned that the Bible describes Leviathan as far more than your average whale: "Leviathan is 'crooked serpent' and 'the dragon that is in the sea,' we read in Isaiah, and in Job we hear of his 'scales' and 'terrible' teeth and learn that 'a flame goeth out of his mouth' and 'out of his nostrils goeth smoke.'" Quite fanciful, that, but not nearly as bizarre as the absolutely hallucinogenic Book of Revelation, on which MAGA evangelicals rely most! (This really should make the rest of us stand up and take note.)
Finally, I learned that "Ninety-nine percent of all the animal species that ever lived—not individuals but species—leave no trace whatever." It makes the imminent extinction of mankind in climate chaos another mere blip. "Out, out, brief candle!" likely wrote Edward de Vere, known universally as Shakespeare--we even get facts in the near past wrong. You can Google all the very famous folk in history scientists now think never existed at all--including Jesus.
One of the most riveting books I've ever read, with pictures at the end and many footnotes for the avid reader. Can I go 7 stars?? If you now consider you need not read it at all, because this review has been almost as long, I salute you--and also apologize. Next up: Dolnick's The Rescue Artist, his Edgar-winning true story of the theft and rescue of Edward Munch's The Scream.
February 27, 2025
Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World is a fascinating tale.
This quote hints at how the evolving field of paleontology was an undiscovered mystery (until it wasn't):
Edward Dolnick's referencing a dinner party in his book's title felt like a red herring until the last chapters, but no quibbles. Far from dwelling on Victorian dinner parties, the well-researched book builds the case for how all the fossils, bones, and ammonites being discovered began to upend the Victorian’s sense of their place in history, time, and (eventually) evolution.
Based on the title and the book's marketing blurbs, my expectations slanted toward historical fiction, but this was a well-researched nonfiction narrative. Dolnick deftly weaves various 19th-century threads (people, discoveries, politics, and rivalries) into an engaging narrative. Everyone from Queen Victoria, William Buckland, Charles Dickens, Thomas Jefferson, Richard Owens, Benjamin Franklin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and (of course) Charles Darwin makes an appearance.
One highlight: Dolnick sheds light and makes a forceful case for bestowing well-earned credit to the lesser-known Mary Anning for her skill and volume in finding ammonites, fossils, and bones.
This title feels timely and relevant in an American age when White Christianist political beliefs are attempting to undermine science, scientific facts, and intellectual accomplishments. Recommended read, ESPECIALLY for anyone in the current administration (in 2025)!
This quote hints at how the evolving field of paleontology was an undiscovered mystery (until it wasn't):
“many puzzle pieces had been picked up, admired for their handsome appearance, and then put to one side because no one recognized that they had any special significance. (A clue is not a clue until someone sees a mystery.)”
Edward Dolnick's referencing a dinner party in his book's title felt like a red herring until the last chapters, but no quibbles. Far from dwelling on Victorian dinner parties, the well-researched book builds the case for how all the fossils, bones, and ammonites being discovered began to upend the Victorian’s sense of their place in history, time, and (eventually) evolution.
Based on the title and the book's marketing blurbs, my expectations slanted toward historical fiction, but this was a well-researched nonfiction narrative. Dolnick deftly weaves various 19th-century threads (people, discoveries, politics, and rivalries) into an engaging narrative. Everyone from Queen Victoria, William Buckland, Charles Dickens, Thomas Jefferson, Richard Owens, Benjamin Franklin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and (of course) Charles Darwin makes an appearance.
One highlight: Dolnick sheds light and makes a forceful case for bestowing well-earned credit to the lesser-known Mary Anning for her skill and volume in finding ammonites, fossils, and bones.
This title feels timely and relevant in an American age when White Christianist political beliefs are attempting to undermine science, scientific facts, and intellectual accomplishments. Recommended read, ESPECIALLY for anyone in the current administration (in 2025)!
February 8, 2025
3 stars because it is a decent book
2 stars personally due to the lack of dinos
I really wanted to like this book more. I was promised a book about dinosaurs and let’s be honest, there were not enough dinosaurs at the dinner party. To me this book was more about the religious aspect and how fossils disrupted people’s beliefs. Which of course. I can’t imagine what it would be like if dinosaurs were discovered today for the very first time. It would be wild! But the religious theme carried on and on and was very repetitive. We get some insight on the key players of the time and while learned a lot of interesting things about them, the dinosaur content was still very lacking. So if you are looking to learn about the dinosaurs themselves, this is not it.
2 stars personally due to the lack of dinos
I really wanted to like this book more. I was promised a book about dinosaurs and let’s be honest, there were not enough dinosaurs at the dinner party. To me this book was more about the religious aspect and how fossils disrupted people’s beliefs. Which of course. I can’t imagine what it would be like if dinosaurs were discovered today for the very first time. It would be wild! But the religious theme carried on and on and was very repetitive. We get some insight on the key players of the time and while learned a lot of interesting things about them, the dinosaur content was still very lacking. So if you are looking to learn about the dinosaurs themselves, this is not it.
April 29, 2025
Un ensayo de lo más interesante que, entremezclando historia, ciencia y un estilo narrativo cautivador, nos presenta cómo se enfrentó la humanidad al descubriemiento más feroz (aunque paulatino) de la historia de la ciencia. Este libro nos muestra la realidad de la época: una sociedad sumida en las entrañas de la religión como única fuente de conocimineto, cuyo Dios construía y destruía a su antojo siguiendo un plan divino inescrutable y desconocido al ojo ajeno. Y, en consecuencia, expone qué personajes fueron clave en la descentralización del hombre en la historia de la Tierra, cómo y cuándo se aceptó el pasado que precedía a la especie humana y, además, qué tretas y obstáculos tuvieron que sortear un grupo de locos, formado por geólogos y científicos, que lideraron esta aventura con tal de que el mundo creyera su versión de la historia.
September 5, 2024
This amusing history of the early days of English paleontology begins with Mary Anning and ends with the formal dinner inside Waterhouse's Iguanodon sculpture for the Crystal Palace. Some of this material is probably better told in other books but it's nicely put together here so that the collaborations, controversies, and feuds among the players are easy to follow. The author has a sharp eye for strange quotes and odd details in the interwoven stories. His focus is as much on the disruption of the fundamental concepts of science and religion as it is on the newborn field of study.
March 17, 2025
Interesting and informative, although less about dinosaurs and more about the lives of a specific paleontologists and the Victorian culture awakening between science and faith. Good information although repetitive at times.
What I loved most about this book was getting all the crazy anecdotes of the 1800s leading scientists. Like William Buckland eating Louis XIV's mummified heart. Or John Hunter conspiring to steal a man's skeleton to put it in a museum (and succeeding). And Mary Anning's dog Tray, who faithfully joined her on her fossil discoveries.
What I loved most about this book was getting all the crazy anecdotes of the 1800s leading scientists. Like William Buckland eating Louis XIV's mummified heart. Or John Hunter conspiring to steal a man's skeleton to put it in a museum (and succeeding). And Mary Anning's dog Tray, who faithfully joined her on her fossil discoveries.
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