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

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.

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.

ISBN: 9781982199616
Format: Hardback
Pages: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Published: August 06, 2024

"Utterly delightful . . . hugely entertaining." —Air Mail"Dolnick provides a colorful narrative of a world making sense of discoveries that would shatter notions of where humans stood in history and life overall." —Associated Press“An illuminating exploration of the discoveries of dinosaurs and the confused, messy attempts of scientists and laypeople to understand the meaning of these prehistoric behemoths.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette"Lively . . . entertaining . . . worthwhile." —Wall Street Journal “A historical adventure story about the eccentric Victorians who discovered dinosaur bones, leading to a whole new understanding of human history.” —Next Big Idea Club“[Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party] got at three major concepts I feel like we often take for granted . . . life is very, very old, almost incomprehensibly old; extinction is a reality; and evolution is a reality tied to extinction. It’s also cut up and retold in such a way that it’s great for the beach—you can read a chapter or two, jump in the ocean, come back out, pick up where you left off.” —NPR's Science Friday, "Best Science Beach Reads for Summer 2024"“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“Offers a wealth of context . . . These include forays into historical astronomy and philosophy, as well as contemporary science, and their sum creates a lively and engrossing narrative . . . Dolnick is evidently at home in this subject, and he succeeds in creating an engagingly broad story.” —Science"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