« [I]n the early decades of the 1800s, no one had any inkling that there had ever been such creatures as dinosaurs. The word dinosaur would not be coined until 1842. That seems awfully late in the day, especially considering how much we now take dinosaurs for granted. Today every natural history museum in the world boasts an enormous dinosaur skeleton that scrapes the ceiling [...]; every toddler has pajamas with cartoon dinosaurs or a bin stufed with toy dinosaurs.
But a time traveler from 1800 would look at those toys and relics in bewilderment. Shakespeare, who imagined everything, never imagined a world ruled by house-sized beasts and where human beings had never set foot. The world’s most farseeing thinkers had never seen that far. No such possibility had ever crossed the mind of Leonardo da Vinci or Galileo or Isaac Newton or Benjamin Franklin. [...]
Outside of myths and fairy tales, no one had ever dreamed that creatures like three-toed giants had once rambled across the land. No one ever imagined that, for eons and eons, legions of flying, slithering, lumbering creatures had ruled the world, and that human beings had played no role whatsoever in the tale. [...]
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.
[...19th-century scientists] had only a few bones or teeth, and their task was to imagine a body from those scanty hints. It was a bit like trying to solve a maddeningly dificult jigsaw puzzle where a great many pieces had been lost, and pieces from diferent puzzles had been flung together, and no one had ever seen the picture they were trying to assemble. [...]
Today we encounter these puzzles from the past in their complete, solved form, with all the signs of hard work hidden from view. The resolution of the tale is so familiar—dragonlike creatures roamed an ancient world—that it is easy to forget how hard-won those successes were. [...]
The tale begins around 1800 and reaches its climax on New Year’s Eve 1853. Those bookend dates are key. These were early days for science—the word scientist did not exist until 1834—and natural history in particular was an unsettled muddle where nearly every question was up for debate.
The dinosaur discoveries were news flashes in a world unprepared to make sense of them. Suddenly it seemed that the familiar world had been built atop a vanished world, or perhaps a series of vanished worlds, that had been filled with gigantic marauding creatures.
The cozy cottage had become a haunted house. »
— Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World
