Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: Engaging and entertaining

Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party by Edward Dolnick

Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party (2024), by Edward Dolnick, is an engaging and entertaining look at how the discovery of dinosaur bones in the 1800s and the subsequent explanations of their origins overturned the Victorian view of the world in a host of ways, leading to our more modern conceptions of things such as evolution, time, and our place in the universe.

Dolnick begins in 1802 with a young boy in Massachusetts discovering a set of footprints that would late turn out to be a dinosaur trackway and ends with the famous 1853 New Year’s Eve party held inside a reconstructed dinosaur skeleton. The book often bursts the boundaries of the intervening 50 years though, skipping around in time to centuries earlier and years later, placing those middle years in their larger context. Honestly, this structure meets with mixed success I’d say, sometimes offering up fascinating juxtapositions or adding insightful context while at other times it can feel a bit chaotic and disorienting.

Lots of books obviously have been written about dinosaurs, but what makes this addition stand out is that rather than focus on the paleontology — the digging up of the bones, the piecing them together, the science of their evolution and role in the environment, etc. — Dolnick focuses far more on the change in worldview these early discoveries caused and how disruptive they were. As Dolnick puts it early on:

Every once in a great while, people going about their ordinary lives have looked up and seen something they never imagined. A ship with towering masts and billowing sails materialized on the horizon, for instance, in waters that had never known a vessel bigger than a canoe. Or a stranger turns up in a valley so remote that its inhabitants had thought themselves alone in the world. Of all such first encounters, none ever topped the moment when humans first stumbled on bones, footprints, and other evidence that dinosaurs had once roamed the earth Dolnick actually details several worldviews the discovery of dinosaurs overturned. One was how people “had taken for granted that the world had always looked much as it still did, with the dogs and daffodils and oaks and horses that we all know.” Another was that “no one had ever dreamed that a species could die … The thought of permanent arbitrary disappearance from the ladder of life was as unnerving for our forebears as would be the news, for us, that whole groups of people going about their everyday lives … might suddenly vanish into nothingness.” The idea of deep time combined with all those older ages being inhabited by creatures unobserved by humans also called into question the view that “humankind occupied a special, distinguished niche in the creation … that nature existed to serve human needs.” And obviously, the whole concept of evolution blew up the long-held conception of how the world/life worked and was also seen as blasphemous.

Edward Dolnick

Of course, all of these long-held conceptions weren’t overturned by new concepts just falling out of the sky. And so along the book’s journey we meet a number of those people responsible for shifting everyone else’s views of how the world works. Thus we get wonderfully engaging and detailed looks at Mary Anning, who at 12 (with some help from her younger brother) was the first discoverer of an ichthyosaur and, astonishingly, several years later, also a plesiosaur; Robert Hooke, “a bad-tempered, far-ranging English genius who did pioneering work … in astronomy, mathematics, physics, and half a dozen fields besides”; Gideon Mantell, a handsome, charming country doctor who had been obsessed with fossils since childhood and who discovered, among others, megalosaurus and iguanosaurus; the “brilliant anatomist” George Cuvier; Richard Owen — “brilliant, backstabbing, charming, and manipulative”; and William Buckland, the president of the Geological Society who introduced megalosaurus and who also made it his mission to eat every animal in the world (the list of attempts was long and included hedgehog, crocodile, mole, and bluebottle fly). Dolnick brings all these people to life in entertaining and sometimes moving fashion.

Another strength in the book is the way the women are brought forward. Mary Anning of course played an integral role in the early days of fossil discovery and analysis (though far too rarely given the credit she deserved at the time), but Dolnick also highlights the role other women played, such as Caroline Owen who “from the start was a partner and ally … intelligent, interested in everything, and unflappable…, and a skilled illustrator.”

My only two quibbles with the book were the aforementioned issue with the time-jumping sometimes being a bit disjointed and that the book felt like it ended a bit abruptly. Beyond those minor nitpicks, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party is an enjoyable, informative, and engaging exploration of the early days of dinosaur discoveries and takes a fascinating slant on the topic by focusing on the psychological impact of said discoveries. Strongly recommended.