- Title: Extinct Monsters
- Author: H. N. Hutchinson
- Publisher: Chapman & Hall
- Estimated year of printing: 1893
Notes:
New edition, corrected and enlarged, April 1893
Bookstamp: Violet A. Bruci, Abbeyholme, Cheltenham
This isn’t as old as some of my books, but it’s probably one of the most unique. Extinct Monsters is a book about dinosaurs, first published in 1892, and this is a revised edition published in 1893. For context, the word “dinosaur” was only coined a few decades earlier. At that time we knew of exactly three types of dinosaurs, and even by the time this book was published we still had a long way to go — we hadn’t yet discovered many iconic dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus Rex (imagine — a dinosaur book without T-rex!).
In the late 1800’s, dinosaur skeletons were showing up in museums, but dinosaurs hadn’t really entered popular literature yet. This book was one of the earliest attempts to take skeletons and show people what dinosaurs might have actually looked like — it contains 26 interesting plates and 58 other inline illustrations.
Despite being such an early book about dinosaurs, one of the interesting aspects of this book is just how not-inaccurate it is. I was expecting to find dinosaurs described that have since been determined to not be distinct types of dinosaurs, but I have yet to find anything like that. Rather, there are several dinosaurs described here that don’t sound familiar, but that’s because the bone that was found prior to this book being written ended up being the only bone ever found, so it is still considered a distinct type of dinosaur today but not mentioned as much — for example, Atlantasaurus. The book also makes reference to the possibility that birds and dinosaurs are related. We now know that to be true (birds are simply a type of dinosaur), but I didn’t expect that to be even conceived of when this book was published in 1893.
There are some inaccuracies, however. The section on stegosaurus references that idea that it had two brains, which we now know it did not. And in the section about triceratops, it mentions that possibility that they continued to evolve their armored skull until the point that it became too heavy and that resulted in the species going extinct — a misunderstanding both of triceratops and the concept of evolution (which was also fairly new at the time, having been described for the first time in 1859).
The author, Henry Neville Hutchinson, (1856 – 1927) was an Anglican clergyman and, during the 1890s, a leading writer of popular books on geology, paleontology, evolution and anthropology.
Historical context:
When this book was published in 1893, Grover Cleveland was President of the United States and the United Kingdom was in the Victorian era. The first dinosaur scientifically described was Megalosaurus, in 1824. The name Dinosaur was first proposed in 1842. The first complete skeleton was found in 1858, a Hadrosaurus in North America. The first Tyrannosaurus rex was discovered in 1902.