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Impossible Monsters 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 these heretical discoveries, those who resisted them, as well as the pioneering thinkers, Darwin most famous among them, who took great risks to construct a new account of the earth’s and mankind’s origins. They not only thought impossible things but showed them to be true. In the process they overturned the literal reading of the Bible, liberated science from the authority of religion and ushered in the secular age.
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 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.
Praise for Impossible Monsters:
Truly marvellous … an intellectual thriller.
– Richard Holmes
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
An astonishing book about an extraordinary subject. Michael Taylor tells the story of the collision of science and religion in an age of change with authority, wit and verve. A delight.
– Peter Frankopan