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 disturbing ‘monsters’ dug from the cliffs of Lyme Regis did not sit well with the literal reading of Genesis

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.