Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party Quotes

“Only one story—the story of the dinosaurs themselves—had a happy ending. Happy in comparison, at any rate. Dinosaurs will be famous forever, first of all, and, what is more important, they were granted an enviable finale. Dinosaurs reigned unchallenged for an unimaginable one hundred million years. Then, in a cataclysm that reverberated around the globe, with no warning, no foreboding, no lingering, they vanished.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“So in theory someone might have shouted “Dinosaur!” many centuries before the 1800s. But that’s unlikely, because discovering is not merely finding something; discovering is finding and understanding that you’ve found something.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“Mary Anning, sister of the above, Who died March the 9th, 1847, Aged 47 years.” The grave perches at the edge of the sea, nestled near the cliffs that Anning knew so well. Visitors leave flowers and seashells, and, sometimes, a toy dinosaur or two.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“In 2010, the Royal Society, the world’s best-known scientific organization, put together a list of the ten most influential women in the history of British science. Anning turns up there, along with such notables as Rosalind Franklin, of DNA fame.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“Darwin detonated his bombshell, On the Origin of Species, in 1859. The basic idea was simple. There are not enough seats at the table.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“The bottom line is stark. Ninety-nine percent of all the animal species that ever lived—not individuals but species—leave no trace whatever. The biologist Jerry Coyne once observed that paleontology is one of the few fields—theology is another—“ in which the students far outnumber the objects of study.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“By the early 1850s, scientists were in an exultant mood. Geologists and paleontologists could point to half a century of accomplishment. Starting from nowhere—the word geology did not even exist until 1795, and paleontology not until 1833—scientists had racked up triumph after triumph. They had discovered reams of fossils, they had resurrected creatures beyond counting, they had flung open the gates of time, they had fought down their own religious doubts and dispatched their fundamentalist rivals. The time had come to celebrate.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“many puzzle pieces had been picked up, admired for their handsome appearance, and then put to one side because no one recognized that they had any special significance. (A clue is not a clue until someone sees a mystery.)”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“The upshot is that the huge majority of fossils—99 percent of all the fossils ever found—come from sea creatures like sharks and shellfish. But the other 1 percent includes many of the creatures we care about the most. Dinosaurs were the most conspicuous one-percenters. They lived on land, which means that we’ve lost nearly all evidence that they ever lived at all. Out of every eighty million Tyrannosaurus rexes, scientists calculate, only one was ever fossilized. (The total number of T. rexes in museums around the world is around three dozen.)”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“The shift from God as mathematician to God as artist opened a door. Science grew more inviting.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“A clue is not a clue until someone sees a mystery.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“That was in 1743. Almost exactly two centuries later, in 1942, an eminent American paleontologist grudgingly acknowledged Catesby’s account. “It appears that Negro slaves made the first technical identification of an American fossil vertebrate,” wrote George Gaylord Simpson, “a lowly beginning for a pursuit that was to be graced by some of the most eminent men in American and scientific history.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“the study of nature took off. “If there had been any hint, at that stage, that it could lead to irreligious or anti-religious views,” Barber writes, “nobody would have dreamed of taking it up.” Instead, both professional scientists and eager amateurs spent their lives in the happy belief that they were building a cathedral, never knowing that in fact they were erecting a tomb that would encase all that they held most dear.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“putting religion and science into one basket was risky, though no one at the time seemed to see the danger. Lynn Barber, a historian and the great authority on Victorian attitudes toward nature, spelled it out. “The Victorians saw nothing glorious in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake,” she wrote in a groundbreaking book called The Heyday of Natural History. “It was only religion, in the shape of natural theology, that made the study of natural history worthwhile.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“Buckland’s first thought was that he had found proof of the truth of the Bible story of Noah and the flood. For a great many thinkers of this era, not just Buckland, the flood was the go-to explanation for many of the world’s strange features. When travelers found fossilized seashells high atop mountains or when skeletons from elephant-like mammoths turned up in places where elephants did not belong, like Siberia, no one was much puzzled: it was the flood that had done it.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“A modern-day historian of science rattles off questions that the Victorians found newly urgent. “If, as the Bible claimed, this planet had been made as a habitation for humanity,” asks Jim Endersby, “why had its creator taken so long to get the tenants in? And if God was such a great designer, why was almost everything he’d designed now extinct?”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“The unlikely beast would later be hailed as the first dinosaur ever identified, though in 1824 the notion of “dinosaur” was still more than a decade off. Dickens nonchalantly placed a megalosaurus into the opening scene of Bleak House, in 1852. “London,” he began. “… Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful [i.e., astonishing] to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“Anning would continue on for another two decades, racking up more coups along the way. In 1828, for instance, she found the first flying reptile ever discovered in Britain,”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“Museums happily put Anning’s fossils on display, for instance, and they made a point of citing the name of the donor responsible for those handsome gifts. Mary Anning’s name went unrecorded.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“there was an irony built into Anning’s fossil hunting. “Her faith let her do this dangerous work—and it was dangerous work,” the historian Thomas Goodhue observes. “She survived several very close calls with death. She did this work because of her faith, and the things that she found upset the faith of millions of people, across the nation and around the world.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“This was, at the time, a bold and controversial claim. In the eyes of biblical literalists, any mention of extinction was a rebuke of the divine plan, a slap in the Creator’s face.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“There were, in fact, two problems with fossils. First, they were made of the wrong thing—rock rather than bone or shell or wood. (The dinosaur “bones” in museums around the world are rock, not bone.) Second, they showed up in the wrong places—fossilized fish turned up inside solid rock; fossilized seashells turned up atop mountain peaks.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“The dinosaur discoveries came out of nowhere, like the asteroid, and the public in the nineteenth century was scarcely better prepared than the dinosaurs had been. It was not just that such things as monstrous skeletons were contrary to experience. The shock was that they were contrary to reason. Such things could not be, because they had no place in a world that was, everyone knew, under divine supervision. Why would God have indulged in such follies?”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“It was a cosmic fluke that did in the dinosaurs, not a dead-end design.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“And dinosaurs had an unfathomably long run; they reigned for over one hundred million years. (Some scientists believe the true figure is closer to one hundred eighty-six million years.) Modern humans have been around for perhaps a hundred thousand years. If humans manage to survive ten times as long as we have so far, we will have made it 1 percent as long as the dinosaurs did.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“Nineteenth-century scientists found themselves in the predicament of the mayor of Amity in Jaws. As the decades passed and the evidence piled up—as it grew ever harder to deny that time stretched back into an endless past, and that countless species had vanished from Earth, and that humans were latecomers to the story—”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“For the first generations to confront the reality of dinosaurs, much of the fascination with the towering creatures had the same tangled roots that it does for six-year-olds today. These were the ideal sort of monsters—big, scary, and, best of all, dead.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“For religious believers—and the nineteenth century was a devout age—everything to do with dinosaurs and the depths of time spurred anxiety and confusion. It seemed nearly impossible to reconcile these new notions with biblical teachings. How to make sense of eons of time when Genesis fit all of creation into a mere six days?”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“To this day, we have not sorted out how to think of dinosaurs. Time drains many discoveries and inventions of their wonder. Who today marvels at a lightbulb? But as the success of the Jurassic Park franchise demonstrates, dinosaurs retain their power to frighten and to fascinate.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“the Geological Society would be closed to women for almost another century, until 1919. At the time of the talk, only two plesiosaurs had ever been found. Mary Anning had found both of them. Conybeare never mentioned her name.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World