The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘The dinosaurs died in Noah’s Flood’
This fascinating book examines how the Victorian Church panicked in the face of palaeontology
496pp, Bodley Head, T £19.99 (0808 196 6794), RRP£25, ebook £10.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
Flying dragons, behemoths, fish-lizards, gryphons, and bats with scaly armour had long been the favourites of romance and heraldry. In the 19th century, however, the bones of “animals that no longer existed” began to be uncovered in caves and canyons, canals and mines – fossilised feathers in Bavaria, the bones of two-legged dinosaurs in New Jersey, shoulder blades of “gigantic proportions” in Chipping Norton. Out of the lake at Blenheim Palace came massive lizards, “their jaws like crocodiles, their tails as long and as large as the steeple of the church at Kidlington”, as the theologian and palaeontologist William Buckland wrote.
Bones were prised painstakingly from their surroundings, plaster casts taken, and these “apparent monstrosities of external form” were carted off (for big money) to museums and laboratories. Which is when the trouble started – for “the majesty of heaven” was now under threat.
If historians of the Bible had worked out that the cosmos was created on October 23 4004 BC, and in the evening, too, then how could it be possible for dinosaurs to have been around 66 million years earlier? The “great chain of being”, as ordained by Genesis, suddenly looked like nonsense. Worse still, the New Testament – in the words of George Eliot, translating the theologian David Strauss – was declared full of “false facts and impossible consequences, which no eyewitness could have related”.
Hence, Michael Taylor’s subject in Impossible Monsters: the clash of religion and science, tradition and innovation. Though the populace of Palermo were not happy to be told by a zoologist that the bones of their patron saint “in fact belonged to a goat”, for much of the 19th century the Church had the upper hand. Publishers, authors, lecturers were indicted for coming out with anything that was “blasphemously, impiously and profanely” devised with the intention of “vilifying and ridiculing” the Bible.
Taylor recounts at length the victims of suppression and censorship, such as George Jacob Holyoake, who was convicted of blasphemy after stating at a lecture in Cheltenham, “I wish not to hear the name of God.” Many people feared that they would be risking their livelihoods if they were made the “subject of judicial inquiry”. This explains why Darwin, who had worked out the principles of evolution in the late 1830s, didn’t dare
publish On the Origin of Species until 1859.
Taylor quotes Victorian vicars and suchlike who bent over backwards to explain away new discoveries. There were no dinosaurs aboard Noah’s Ark because they were “too large… and so they were all drowned”. Nearer the mark was the person who said dinosaurs belonged to a “series of creatures which the Almighty has successively extinguished and successively renewed”.
And as geologists were making plain, the planet had never been stable. Eruptions, earthquakes, climate change: this explained why the remains of oceanic creatures and shells were found on mountaintops, as sea levels rose and fell, continents merged and split. (Though the theologians had to have the last word. If the bones of tigers and elephants were found in a Yorkshire cave, it’s because Noah’s
Flood “swept these animals from their natural habitats”.)
But as Darwin and Huxley and others, such as Alfred Wallace, were now ready to show, natural habitats were not immutable. “Animals changed in response… to external circumstances” as they coped with “the struggle for existence”, argued Wallace. No wonder, by 1862, the Archbishop of Canterbury declared that “no graver matter since the Reformation… could be imagined”. Particularly horrible was the notion that (in Darwin’s words) “humankind had risen from the extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla”.
Underneath priestly rage, metaphysical complexity, and the rest of the ethical conundrums, lay worries about class and money. As Taylor says, “if nothing but evolution separated humankind from brute animals, what was there naturally to separate the ruling classes from the masses?” What if the poor didn’t want to remain in their place – and this was, of course, the era of the Chartists, the emergence of trade unions.
Taylor has chanced upon a vast subject: religion withering away as science advances. He handles his sources well and doesn’t lose sight of his arguments. I enjoyed this book as much as I did Disney’s One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing, made in 1975, starring Peter Ustinov and the skeleton of a brontosaurus.
Palermo was unhappy to learn that its patron saint’s bones ‘belonged to a goat’