Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party. How An Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended The World

Generations of people grew up with toy dinosaurs and movies like Jurassic Park. But two hundred years ago, the world had no idea about such creatures. In the early 19th century, geology was in its infancy, and paleontology did not exist at all. Everything changed when a teenager in Massachusetts found huge footprints in a rock, and bones as long as a man's height were discovered in England.
Edward Dolnick's book brings to life the eccentric pioneers: the ignorant Mary Anning, who "saw" fossils in the rocks; the eccentric William Buckland, who turned his house into a museum of bones; the ambitious Richard Owen, who invented the word "dinosaur." Their curiosity, ambition, struggle for the truth, and brilliant guesses turned accidental finds into a new science.
This is not just a story about fossilized bones, but a fascinating scientific detective story about the first steps of paleontology and how the discovery of dinosaurs led to a huge breakthrough in biology and Earth sciences, forever changing our understanding of the world.