The Discovery of Dinosaur Bones
Opinion by Yoy Luadha, Amazon Services Contractor
It’s always been fascinating to observe humankind's move from superstition to science. This obviously didn't happen all at once (and to some degree is still happening, 20% of Americans still take the Bible literally). Can a tipping point be identified? A moment where humans saw the truth and there was no going back? Copernicus' discovery that the Earth orbited the sun. The Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution? Isaac Newton's laws of motion? Or maybe much later, with the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species?
A piece in The Atlantic Magazine reviews new books which make the case that the single most important turning point was... the discovery of dinosaur bones. That's right—this one moment in 1811 upended conventional wisdom more than anything and did it almost overnight.
Prehistoric Fossils
The discovery of prehistoric fossils, largely in Britain, challenged long-held theological and scientific assumptions about nature and humankind's place in it: that the Bible was to be taken literally; that the world had been made a mere 6,000 years before; that a divine being wrought man in its own image; that humans were the pinnacle of all Creation. As Michael Taylor writes in Impossible Monsters, "Few if any transformations in intellectual history have been more profound." (See the reference to this book below.)
It's hard for us to grasp from our perch in 2025, but the idea that there had been species that were not around anymore really must have been an earthquake, a civilization defining moment—suddenly Noah's ark looks a lot more like a metaphorical story and less like a history lesson.
According to Taylor, the discoveries of fossils and ancient bones of heretofore unknown creatures marks the place "where new knowledge of the Earth and its prehistoric inhabitants collided seriously and persistently with the fundamental Christian belief in the accuracy of the Bible." Suddenly Genesis was perhaps not a factual account of how the world began. Fossils suggested that the world might actually be far older-by millions and millions of years-than anyone had imagined. Monsters reveals the central role of dinosaurs and their discovery in toppling traditional religious authority, and in changing perceptions about the Bible as scholars began to identify internal inconsistencies in the scriptures.
Bishop Ussher
James Ussher, the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of Ireland in the 17th century, famously spent years working out the exact time and date of creation: 6:00 pm, October 22, 4004 BC. As absurd as it sounds, he didn't pull that date out of the air—he devoted his career to reading the Bible closely to make this calculation and knew to a certainty that the world was only 6,000 years old.
Here's some irony:
When Darwin died in 1882, he was buried at Westminster Abbey, not far from Bishop James Ussher. That Darwin was interred at the Abbey too seemed to indicate that there was truly no going back. The world was no longer explained by "bishops", but perhaps, more so than ever before, by science.
By the way, the dinosaur bones are real.
03/23/25