For generations who grew up with dinosaur toys, Jurassic Park movies, and characters like Barney, a world without dinosaurs and their fossils is hard to imagine—or, more accurately, undiscovered.
It is precisely into this world that Edward Dolnick takes readers in “Dinosaurs at Dinner: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Turned the World Upside Down.”
Dolnick takes readers back to the early 1800s, when the discovery of dinosaur fossils changed science and the world’s understanding of prehistoric life.
As Dolnick describes in the first pages of the book, it was as if people today did not even dream that there was life outside of Earth.
“And then imagine that one night a spaceship materialized a few dozen meters above Fifth Avenue and began a slow and graceful tour of Manhattan,” he writes.
In a brisk writing style, Dolnick offers a sometimes dizzying journey through the discoveries that surprised the world and the key players in those discoveries.
They include fascinating characters like Mary Anning, the 12-year-old who discovered the fossilized skeleton of an ichthyosaur, a prehistoric marine reptile. Years later, she discovered the fossilized skeleton of another prehistoric sea creature, the plesiosaur. Dolnick describes how museums eagerly displayed the fossils Anning found, but left her name unmentioned for years.
He also explores the complicated legacy of Richard Owen, the scientist who coined the term “dinosaur” and was the father of the Natural History Museum in London, but who also had a penchant for antagonizing other scientists.
With these and other profiles, Dolnick delivers a colorful narrative of a world in which discoveries make sense that would shatter ideas about man’s place in history and in life at large.
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