Impossible Monsters

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

'An astonishing book about an extraordinary subject' PETER FRANKOPAN
'As thrilling as it is sweeping' TOM HOLLAND
'This book dazzles in its originality . . . a triumph' SATHNAM SANGHERA

SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE 2025

In 1811, a twelve-year-old girl uncovered some strange-looking bones in Britain's southern shoreline - and so sparked a crisis that would engulf science and religion for the next six decades. By its end, the literal reading of the Bible had been overturned, science had been liberated from religion and the secular age had begun. Impossible Monsters takes us into the lives and minds of the extraordinary men and women whose discovery of the dinosaurs revolutionised our understanding of the world, as well as those who resisted them and those, like Charles Darwin, who took great risks to construct a new account of the earth's and mankind's origins. It is the riveting story of a group of people who dared to think impossible things and then showed them to be true.

'Truly marvellous ... an intellectual thriller' RICHARD HOLMES
'A stunning work ... of surprises and revelations' STEVE BRUSATTE

Michael Taylor is the author of The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery , which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2021, chosen as a Daily Telegraph Book of the Year and described as 'riveting' ( The Times ) and 'compulsively readable' ( Guardian ). He was born in 1988 and graduated with a double first in history from the University of Cambridge, where he earned his PhD. He has since been Lecturer in Modern British History at Balliol College, Oxford, and a Visiting Fellow at the British Library's Eccles Centre for American Studies.