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Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party

How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

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1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
From the bestselling author of The Clockwork Universe and The Writing of the Gods, an "utterly delightful...hugely entertaining" (Air Mail) book about the eccentric Victorians who discovered dinosaur bones, leading to a whole new understanding of human history.
In the early 1800s the natural world was a safe and cozy place, or so people believed. But then a twelve-year-old farm boy in Massachusetts stumbled on a row of fossilized three-toed footprints the size of dinner plates—the first dinosaur tracks ever found. Soon, in England, scientists unearthed enormous bones that reached as high as a man's head. Outside of myths and fairy tales, no one had even imagined that creatures like three-toed giants had once lumbered across the land—nor dreamed that they could all have vanished, hundreds of millions years ago.

In Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party, celebrated storyteller and historian Edward Dolnick leads us through a compelling true adventure as the paleontologists of the early 19th century puzzled their way through the fossil record to create the story of dinosaurs we know today. The tale begins with Mary Anning, a poor, uneducated woman who had a sixth sense for finding fossils buried deep inside cliffs; moves to William Buckland, an eccentric geologist who filled his home with specimens and famously pieced together a prehistoric scene from the fossil record inside a cave; and then on to the controversial Richard Owen, the era's best-known scientist, and the one who coined the term "dinosaur."

"Exuberant" (Kirkus Reviews), entertaining, erudite, and featuring an unconventional cast of characters, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party tells the story of how the accidental discovery of prehistoric creatures upended humanity's understanding of the world and its own place within it.
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    • Library Journal

      March 1, 2024

      Dolnick, a former chief science writer at The Boston Globe and Edgar Award winner for The Rescue Artist, pens a scientific adventure of how the Victorian world stumbled upon fossilized dinosaur bones and changed human understanding of everything. Prepub Alert.

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      June 1, 2024
      Dinosaurs and the birth of paleontology. Dolnick, former Boston Globe chief science writer and author of The Clockwork Universe and The Forger's Spell, begins his latest exuberant tale in 1802, when "something ominous shrieked in the night" in Massachusetts: A young boy had discovered petrified tracks. At the time, "no one had ever heard of dinosaurs." Soon, others began uncovering fossils, and science called for answers to these mysterious relics. In one of the narrative's first intriguing profiles, the author introduces us to Mary Anning, who was good at finding and selling fossils, massive plesiosaur, in the resort town of Lyme Regis. As Dolnick recounts, England's "God-soaked people," including scientists, had a hard time grappling with the riddles of time, fossils, and Noah's Ark. In 1665, Robert Hooke broke through first, arguing that "fossils were relics of living organisms," but finding them was difficult. In 1796, naturalist Georges Cuvier boldly stated that "extinction was a fact," while Jean-Baptiste Lamarck recognized that "species do change" and Charles Lyell argued that the Earth is very old. A scientist author's 1830 watercolor was the "first depiction of animals in a world before humans." A few years earlier, the eccentric William Buckland, Oxford's first professor of geology, identified the megalosaurus. He also argued that glaciers once covered Earth, and it was "those glaciers, not a flood, that had reshaped the world." Prolific fossil hunter Gideon Mantell, discoverer of the iguanodon, boldly proposed England had a tropical, "remote, sultry past." At the time, scientists were close to stumbling on evolution. Fossil fanatic Thomas Jefferson named his own giant sloth, and America had their giant mammoth, which was exhibited in London. In 1842, anatomist Richard Owen invented a new word to describe the animals--dinosaurs. Darwin was just around the corner. A delightful, engrossing confluence of Victorian science and history.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      June 1, 2024
      Oh, the hand-wringing. Oh, the thundering sounds of lofty preconceived notions crashing down to earth. It's hard to imagine today just how momentous, just how paradigm-shifting the discovery of ancient and distinctly non-human creatures was. It was more than 200 years ago that a young boy found some seriously weird footprints; not long after that, people from hither and yon were digging up enormous fossilized bones--bones that, despite increasingly desperate attempts to prove otherwise, were definitely not human. The discovery of dinosaurs (although they weren't called that right away) shook the foundations of science and religion, to name two of many things impacted by the prehistoric existence--and sudden disappearance--of these enormous creatures. Dolnick, whose previous work, The Writing of the Gods (2022), made history come vibrantly alive, does the same thing here; he walks us through the first half of the nineteenth century, telling the story through the people who made it happen, and shows us how the world came to terms with shocking revelations about earth's history. A masterful and enormously entertaining book.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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