Book Review: The Dragon Seekers

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Aug 2, 2002

I always enjoy reading new books about paleontology and paleontologists. I especially enjoy learning more about how people were able to take disparate pieces of information, and somehow manage to connect them together into something that was never conceived of before. Dr. Christopher McGowan's new book The Dragon Seekers: How an Extraordinary Circle of Fossilists Discovered the Dinosaurs and Paved the Way for Darwin is a great book for anyone who would like to learn more about the Regency and Victorian Era paleontologists who recognized the dinosaurs and other extinct animals, and gave us our modern science of paleontology.

In the Preface, McGowan explains his impetus for writing The Dragon Seekers beginning as a plan to write a serious biography about Mary Anning. "But why restrict a book to a single fossilist? What about her paleontological contemporaries, and all those stories of the incredible Age of Reptiles they were unearthing? Several in-depth biographies have been written about some of the key players, but nobody had attempted to bring them all together. This made no sense to me because they all lived at the same time, they all knew each other, and they also interacted intellectually and sometimes socially...This was a story that had to be told."

In Chapter 1 "In the Beginning," McGowan asks, "Why did it take so long for paleontology-and even longer for evolutionary studies-to come of age in this age of discovery?" He mentions some of the scientific discoveries which had been made in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries by John Dalton, Isaac Newton, and Edward Jenner. McGowan introduces the paleontologists whose lives he delves into, and discusses the religious and intellectual climate that existed leading up to and during the 18th century.

In Chapter 2 "Dragons by the Sea," McGowan introduces us to the fossil-bearing cliffs of Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast, and to Mary Anning. Born in 1799 to a cabinet maker, Anning was already hunting for fossils professionally when her father died in 1810. Anning's mother and brother were also professional fossil collectors, but Mary was apparently the most gifted at discovering fossils to sell. (For more information, be sure to read my article, "Mary Anning.")

In Chapter 3 "The Scriptures and the Rocks," McGowan introduces us to the Reverend William Buckland. Buckland was an Anglican priest and a professor of Geology at Oxford. He discovered and named the first dinosaur, Megalosaurus, and was the first person to recognize fossilized dung (coprolites). Buckland spent much of his career in efforts to reconcile the geological and paleontological discoveries of his time with the writings of the Bible, and developed anti-evolutionary theories. (For more information, be sure to read my article "William Buckland.")

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