Impossible Monsters

How the Discovery of Dinosaurs Changed the World

By: Michael Taylor

Narrated by: James MacCallum

Brought to you by Penguin.

Impossible Monsters is the captivating story of the discovery of the dinosaurs and how it upended our understanding of the origins of the world.

In 1811, a twelve-year-old girl uncovered some strange-looking bones in Britain’s southern shoreline. They belonged to no known creature and were buried beneath a hundred feet of rock. How this was possible was unclear, but over the next two decades, as several more of these ‘impossible monsters’ emerged from the soil, the leading scientists of the day were forced to confront one profoundly disturbing implication: as a historical account of creation, the Bible was wildly wrong.

This is the dramatic story of the crisis that engulfed science and religion when we discovered the dinosaurs. It takes us into the lives and minds of the extraordinary men and women who made and grappled with these heretical discoveries, those who resisted them as well as those pioneering thinkers, Darwin most famous among them, who took great risks to construct a new account of the earth’s and mankind’s origins. It took seventy years for them to win their case: that the earth was millions of years old and that man, like every other living being, was an accident of evolution. Doing so had plunged Britain into a crisis of faith, liberated science from the authority of religion and ushered in the secular age.

Impossible Monsters is the riveting story of a group of people who not only thought impossible things but showed them to be true. In the process they revolutionised the way mankind thinks about itself, and so they changed the world.

‘Truly marvellous ... an intellectual thriller’ RICHARD HOLMES

‘The most talented young historian around ... A triumph’ SATHNAM SANGHERA

‘An astonishing book about an extraordinary subject' PETER FRANKOPAN

©2024 Michael Taylor (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

One of the most interesting stories in the world . . . brilliant . . . told with brio and humour, but not without a sense of the pathos of Doubt . . . I relished every word (A. N. Wilson)

Excellent . . . Everything that popular scholarly history should be . . . written with clarity, zest, and wit (Piers Brendon)

Impossible Monsters captivatingly outlines how the unearthing of strange bones toppled traditional understanding of the origins of the world . . . rather miraculous (Roger Lewis)

Marvellous . . . Impossible Monsters is a work of remarkable range. Taylor . . . belongs to that rare class of writers who can effortlessly encompass both scientific arcana and intellectual currents. It is also to his credit that he every so often takes us away from the high tables to show us what ordinary people made of these huge strides in thinking (Pratinav Anil)

Eminently readable and well-researched . . . He writes well, knows his subject and has a fine eye for detail

Such an attractive book . . . a sympathetic, charming, beautifully written guide through a pivotal part of history (John van Whye)

In writing Impossible Monsters, the task of Michael Taylor . . . was to tell a much-told tale better than it had been told before. He has succeeded splendidly . . . Mr Taylor also conveys a sense of just how risky it was to believe in and promulgate the new ideas tied to the rocks and tropical forests where people hunted for specimens

Skilfully blends an impressive array of sources into a highly readable, almost novelistic narrative. In particular, it features many women who played crucial roles but are too often invisible . . . Including gripping tales as well as serious commentary, Impossible Monsters chips out a fascinating slice through the strata of Victorian society

The emotional impact on the Victorians . . . was profound . . . Taylor recounts not just the interventions of palaeontologists and geologists but also those stricken by events as their faith evaporated . . . he marshals his cast expertly and shows lucidly why it mattered so much

This book confirms what I've suspected for a while, that Michael Taylor is the most talented young historian around. This book dazzles in its originality and there is something you want to commit to memory on every page. A triumph (SATHNAM SANGERA, author of Empireworld)