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Start giftingDinosaurs at the Dinner Party
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“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. ”
— Rachel • Dog-Eared Books
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.
Edward Dolnick is the author of Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party, The Writing of the Gods, The Clockwork Universe, The Forger’s Spell, and the Edgar Award–winning The Rescue Artist, among other books. A former chief science writer at The Boston Globe, he has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. He lives with his wife near Washington, DC.