Michael Taylor
Impossible Monsters
In conversation with Adam Rutherford
Finishes at: Friday 25 October 7:15 PM
In 1811, a 12-year-old girl uncovered some extraordinary-looking bones in Britain’s southern shoreline. They belonged to no known creature and were buried beneath 100 feet of rock. It was, quite simply, impossible!
Yet over the next years several more of these impossible monsters were discovered, forcing scientists to rethink the world and creation. This riveting book tells of the dramatic crisis that tore through science and religion once the spectre of the dinosaurs began to roam once more. Shattering the Biblical account of creation, these impossible monsters disrupted the established order, and it took the courage of pioneering thinkers such as Darwin and others to resist the teachings of the church and construct a new account of our origins. These were the men and women who liberated science from the authority of religion and, quite simply, transformed the world.
Michael Taylor, an historian of the 18th and 19th centuries, is currently Lecturer in Modern British History at Balliol College, Oxford.
Sponsored by Basil Powell Shoes
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