Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

by Edward Dolnick Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

Overview

From the bestselling author of The Clockwork Universe and The Writing of the Gods, a historical adventure story about the eccentric Victorians who discovered dinosaur bones, leading to a whole 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 on 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. No one had ever seen such things. Outside of myths and fairy tales, no one had even imagined that creatures like three-toed giants had once lumbered across the land. And if anyone had somehow conjured up such a scene, they would never have imagined 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.

Now, in Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party, celebrated storyteller and historian Edward Dolnick leads us 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. The tale begins with Mary Anning, a poor, uneducated woman who had a sixth sense for finding fossils buried deep inside cliffs; and moves to a brilliant, eccentric geologist named William Buckland, a kind of Doctor Doolittle on a mission to eat his way through the entire animal kingdom; and then on to Richard Owen, the most respected and the most despised scientist of his generation.

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 their place in it, and how a group of paleontologists worked to bring it back into focus again.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

A masterful and enormously entertaining book. . . . [Makes] history come vibrantly alive." —Booklist

“[An] exuberant tale . . . intriguing . . . a delightful, engrossing confluence of Victorian science and history.” —Kirkus Reviews

"With wit, warmth, and humor, Edward Dolnick immerses us in one of the most exhilarating times in the history of science: when a motley crew of professors, naturalists, preachers, and bone hunters discovered the existence of dinosaurs. Written like an adventure novel but fashioned with historical rigor, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party is a gripping story of how we came to understand that the Earth was old and once populated by ancient beasts." —Steve Brusatte, professor and paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh and New York Times bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

"What a brilliant read. Dolnick elegantly sketches out the long-ago lives of the fossil hunters and Deep Time detectives whose labors will fuel scientific inquiry and the human imagination for as long as humanity manages to last. Dolnick's enthusiasm and respect for his evocative subject shows on every page. He leaves readers both marveling at the known history of life on Earth and perhaps pondering their own place within it. I admired every bit of this book." —Paige Williams, New Yorker staff writer and author of The Dinosaur Artist

“As Edward Dolnick reminds us in this treat of a book, the legacy of the dinosaurs is more than the bones exhumed from the rock. Dinosaurs and many other creatures in the fossil menagerie forced us to fundamentally rethink ourselves and our role in life's ever-unfolding story.” —Riley Black, author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs and When the Earth Was Green

"Dolnick tells the tale of the first discoveries of dinosaurs and other extinct monsters, and the founding of the new science of geology, with enthusiasm and clarity. He shows how early peoples struggled to understand fossils, and then the shocking understanding 200 years ago that the Earth had once been populated by creatures unlike anything now living." —Michael J. Benton, author of Dinosaurs Rediscovered and Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology, University of Bristol

Kirkus Reviews

2024-05-04
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940160443720
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	08/06/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged