A former chief science writer at The Boston Globe, he has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications.
Dolnick applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World, and reported the following:
Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party is about one of history’s strangest-ever encounters: around 1800, scientists in England found themselves staring in bewilderment at giant bones they had just dug up, trying to figure out who they could possibly have belonged to. At the time, nearly everyone believed that the only animals that had ever lived were the ones from Noah’s Ark — lions and tigers and bears and the rest of the familiar cast.Learn more about the book and author at Edward Dolnick's website.
Until that moment, no one had ever dreamed that lizards ten times bigger than elephants had once lumbered across the landscape. So the fun of the book is that, not terribly long ago, the smartest scientists in the world found themselves baffled by a riddle that a six-year-old today could happily explain.
Page 99 works pretty well to give a flavor of the book. We’re with a handsome, melancholy scientist named Gideon Mantell who was plagued throughout his life by calamitous bad luck. But when we see him on page 99, things are looking bright. He’s just found a large, strange-looking tooth that had been encased in solid rock and buried hundreds of feet underground.
That meant it was old, so old that it had to have come from an animal that lived before the first mammals. But this tooth seemed to have all the telltale signs that marked it as “mammal.” How could that be? What kind of ancient, bizarre animal could this tooth have come from?
Mantell had a theory, but everyone else thought his idea was preposterous.
The Page 69 Test: The Forger's Spell.
The Page 99 Test: The Clockwork Universe.
The Page 99 Test: The Rush.
The Page 99 Test: The Seeds of Life.
--Marshal Zeringue
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