Dragon Seekers

Set during the Industrial Revolution, this narrative history follows a close-knit group of fossil hunters who worked to reconstruct a lost prehistoric world from broken bones and partial remains of creatures no one had ever recorded. Christopher McGowan returns readers to an era when geology and paleontology were still taking shape, and when their field was as unsettled and full of possibility as genetic engineering is now. The men and women who pioneered these sciences came from varied social backgrounds and had widely different reasons for hunting fossils, and many of them were eccentric. Their task was to convince a public taught to read Genesis literally that the ground beneath their feet had once been a strange and frightening place. Tracing their work, the book shows how these figures reshaped humanity's understanding of the Earth and the life that once lived on it.