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.

'Daring, learned and humane... A revelatory restoration of wonder' Stephen Greenblatt. We no longer think, like the ancient Chinese did, that the world was hatched from an egg, or, like the Maori, that it came from the tearing-apart of a love embrace. The Greeks told of a tempestuous Hera and a cunning Zeus, but we now use genes and natural selection to explain fear and desire, and physics to demystify the workings of the universe. Science is an astounding achievement, but are we really any wiser than the ancients? Has science revealed the secrets of fate and immortality? Has it provided protection from jealousy or love? There are those who believe that science has replaced faith, but must it also be a death knell for mythology? Evolutions brings to life the latest scientific thinking on the birth of the universe and the solar system, the journey from a single cell all the way to our human minds. Reawakening our sense of wonder and terror at the world around us and within us, Oren Harman uses modern science to create new and original mythologies. Here are the Earth and the Moon presenting a cosmological view of motherhood, a panicking Mitochondrion introducing sex and death to the world, the loneliness of consciousness emerging from the memory of an octopus, and the birth of language in evolution summoning humankind's struggle with truth. Science may not solve our existential puzzles, but like the age-old legends, its magical discoveries can help us continue the never-ending search.