In 1811, a twelve-year-old girl uncovered some strange-looking bones in Britain’s southern shoreline. They belonged to no known creature and were buried beneath a hundred feet of rock. How this was possible was unclear, but over the next two decades, as several more of these ‘impossible monsters’ emerged from the soil, the leading scientists of the day were forced to confront one profoundly disturbing implication: as a historical account of creation, the Bible was wildly wrong.

This is the dramatic story of the crisis that engulfed science and religion when we discovered the dinosaurs. It takes us into the lives and minds of the extraordinary men and women who made and grappled with these heretical discoveries, those who resisted them as well as those pioneering thinkers, Darwin most famous among them, who took great risks to construct a new account of the earth’s and mankind’s origins. It took seventy years for them to win their case: that the earth was millions of years old and that man, like every other living being, was an accident of evolution. Doing so had plunged Britain into a crisis of faith, liberated science from the authority of religion and ushered in the secular age.

Impossible Monsters is the riveting story of a group of people who not only thought impossible things but showed them to be true. In the process they revolutionised the way mankind thinks about itself, and so they changed the world.