Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party

當英國維多利亞時期意外發現恐龍的化石，一根骨頭居然超過一個男人的身高，震驚了當時的西方社會！

化石的出現，改變了人類對歷史進程的想法，在神話與童話之外，沒有人能想像有這樣龐然巨大、擁有三隻腳指和像龍一般翅膀的生物曾經存在於地球，進一步讓當時的科學家與考古學者思考，這些誕生於幾百萬年以前的生物是怎麼出現的？又是如何殞落？

從19世紀的瑪莉‧安寧(Mary Anning)開始，一個完全自學、貧困卻擁有驚人生物學語考古知識的女子，居住於英國萊姆里傑斯的海岸，時常於海灘上撿拾化石，她也是第一個挖掘出完整蛇頸龍化石的人，到古怪神學家、也是考古生物學、地理學家的威廉‧柏克蘭(William Buckland)，以及毀譽參半、正式替遠古巨大生物命名為「恐龍」的科學家里查‧歐文，科學作家愛德華‧多尼克以幽默和充滿娛樂性的筆調書寫這段曲折又豐富的歷史，揭開人類對自身和世界的認識與對自然環境的關係變化。

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.