This summarises Fallon’s contributions to the study of the cultural history of dinosaurs, literature and science, the popularisation of science, and transatlantic literary culture. It notes areas of potential future value for scholars interested in the importance and meaning of the dinosaur both in transatlantic culture and globally, including overlooked historical figures, before considering dinosaurs today and how they continue to be reimagined in both specialist palaeontology and popular culture. Fallon (1) summarises a drastic 2017 revision of the dinosaur family tree in Nature in which Victorian terms are simultaneously overridden and revived; (2) notes that Too Big to Walk, a 2018 book by independent researcher Brian Ford, presents a modern attempt to use dinosaurs to contradict the authority of elite science; (3) highlights the popularity of the Jurassic World film franchise, which in its first two films ignores the largely Chinese research that has drastically changed scientists’ conceptions of dinosaurs since the 1993 original Jurassic Park; and (4) looks at the Smithsonian Museum’s Hall of Fossils, which recruits dinosaurs into a narrative about climate change.

This introduction sketches a cultural history of dinosaur palaeontology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, indicating how the book addresses the lack of literary work on the understanding of dinosaurs in this period. While dinosaurs were a British area of science in the first half of the nineteenth century, American palaeontologists took clear pre-eminence in this field from the 1870s. American research transformed dinosaurs from giant lizards into a far stranger and more heterogenous group. Fallon argues that literary scholars have not yet grappled with this cultural shift in perceptions of the dinosaurs, an omission made all the more striking by the fact that it was during the decades around 1900 that ‘dinosaur’ first became a household word. Built into this word were important ideas about imperialism, progress, romance, and the practice of science. Fallon explains how exploring this subject provides wider insights into the relationships between literature and science and between popular and specialist science writers, in addition to its value as a case study on the transatlantic nature of literary media at the end of the nineteenth century.

Chapter 4 shows dinosaurs’ link to concerns about secularisation and specialisation contributed to Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous romance The Lost World. It argues that the text can be understood in relation to Conan Doyle’s romantic approach to scientific knowledge, especially his strident anti-materialism and aversion to technical jargon. Examining archival material from New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, including the original manuscript, Fallon weaves the content of The Lost World together in surprising ways with Conan Doyle’s palaeontological forays, cryptozoological sightings, and interest in psychical research, showing that noting the differences between the US and UK serialised and book versions provides a more precise understanding of Conan Doyle’s intended romantic effects. In particular, Fallon emphasises the illustrations by Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, Patrick Forbes. Alongside the text, these subtle and meticulously planned images make clear the author’s desire to convince readers that the world is full of unexplained wonders. As such, the British book edition in which Forbes’s images appear was, for Conan Doyle, the correct way to experience The Lost World.

Chapter 2 explores a range of fictional and non-fictional writing on dinosaurs. The first half shows how different writers, including Henry Neville Hutchinson, Grant Allen, and geoscientist Henry Woodward, invoked the comic monsters of Lewis Carroll to develop a new, ‘grotesque’ register for describing dinosaurs. This language naturalised an emergent understanding of dinosaurs, especially American dinosaurs like Triceratops, as having gone extinct owing to the evolution of uselessly monstrous characteristics. These ideas were appealingly absurd to general audiences, who could contrast the progressive traits and intelligence of mammals like themselves with the doomed grotesqueness of the dinosaurs. The chapter’s second half examines this new way of talking about dinosaurs, providing close readings of humourist Eugene Field’s poem ‘Extinct Monsters’ (1893), Edward Cuming’s Wonders in Monsterland (1901), and Emily Bray’s Old Time and the Boy (1921). In addition to depicting dinosaurs through Carrollian nonsense conventions, all three of these texts were direct responses to the works of Hutchinson, demonstrating his long-term importance for the popularisation of dinosaurs.

Chapter 3 examines how transatlantic fiction about dinosaurs shaped notions of national potency at a key moment in US and British history. The first half focuses on two American interstellar romances whose violent protagonists vanquish dinosaurs on evolutionarily backward planets. J. J. Astor’s A Journey in Other Worlds (1894) has them conquering Jupiter’s dinosaurs before heading to a Christianised Saturn and learning about the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ race’s spiritual evolution, while in Gustavus Pope’s Journey to Venus (1895) they subdue prehistoric Venus in an unruly pastiche of palaeontological writing. The chapter’s second half provides alternative perspectives from British authors whose narratives, all published in 1899, allude to the ongoing search for giant dinosaurs in the American West as a way of reflecting on nation, empire, and masculinity. Henry Hering’s short story ‘Silas P. Cornu’s Divining-Rod’ ridicules the avarice of the US tycoons who fuelled the dinosaur ‘rush’, while C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s The Lost Continent and Frank Savile’s Beyond the Great South Wall have encounters with giant brontosaurs reinvigorating men’s imperialistic masculinity in over-civilised societies.

Chapter one provides a case study of Henry Neville Hutchinson, a frequently overlooked figure who was not only the most important early populariser of American dinosaurs but also a proponent of using imaginative literature to widen the mass public’s access to science. An unbeneficed British clergyman without a formal scientific position, Hutchinson aired his views both in popular journalism and in books on palaeontology like Extinct Monsters (1892). His writings often contradicted the views of palaeontological authorities. This chapter argues that palaeontologists who read Hutchinson’s democratising works with concern responded by fashioning clearer distinctions between true science and work that was popularisation or romance. In 1894 British palaeontologist Harry Seeley described Hutchinson’s writing as ‘literature rather than science’. As Fallon demonstrates, Seeley’s response also undermined Hutchinson’s popularisation of the previously obscure word ‘dinosaur’, which Seeley believed to be a misleading term wrongly emphasised by American researchers. Subsequently, Fallon shows how Hutchinson’s controversial attempt to publish a paper on the American dinosaur Diplodocus for the specialist Geological Magazine led him to criticise the secularity and complex style of conventional scientific articles. Hutchinson’s career exemplifies the concerns of this book.