Dinosaurs, dogma and the Victorian mind

In March 1860, shortly after The Origin of Species was published, Charles Darwin wrote to Leonard Horner thanking him for some surprising information. ‘How curious about the Bible!’ he exclaimed. Horner had taken aim at the marginal notes that were printed in the standard (and ubiquitous) Authorised, or King James, Version. These began with the date of creation, 4004 BC, as calculated by Archbishop James Ussher in the 17th century. Darwin was astonished. ‘I had fancied that the date was somehow in the Bible,’ he wrote.

The fact that Darwin, who had trained to be clergyman, did not know that Ussher’s dating system was an early modern imposition on the text gives some indication of the hold it had on the British mind in the early 19th century. That hold was first broken by dinosaurs or, more precisely, by the fossils that Mary Anning and her family dug from the soft cliffs around Lyme Regis in the 1810s, which is where Michael Taylor’s eminently readable and well-researched book begins.

Larger than and unlike any known living creatures, these disturbing ‘monsters’ did not sit well with a literal reading of Genesis. They could not have drowned in the Flood because God had preserved all living creatures on the Ark (plus many looked rather like fish). They were also buried very deep. The idea of an ancient world had long been discussed in fashionable European salons. Fossils now seemed to add weight to these speculations.

Taylor traces the story from Anning’s first discoveries, through William Buckland’s establishment of geology as a discipline respectable enough even for stuffy Oxford, and Darwin’s epochal voyage, to the globalisation of palaeontology and the widespread acceptance of evolution within a generation of The Origin’s first publication.