The Social Dinosaur

Since first they emerged into the Victorian limelight, dinosaurs have fascinated generations of artists, scientists, and general readers. This book approaches their history from a literary-critical perspective, arguing that the enormous and enduring popularity of Mesozoic fauna offers a fresh way to understand the relationship between the arts and sciences. We tend to treat those two as opposites -- but dinosaurs, Will Tattersdill argues, cannot exist without an entanglement of both evidence and imagination. Tracing these entanglements across scientific works, literary texts, artworks, and museum displays of all kinds from the nineteenth century to the present day, this book suggests that the history of dinosaurs is one in which the boundaries between categories of knowledge, genre, and species are constantly being renegotiated.