Impossible Monster: How the Discovery of Dinosaurs Changed the World by Michael Taylor

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 - 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.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE POL ROGER DUFF COOPER PRIZE 2025