Michael Taylor: Impossible Monsters

Dinosaurs, Darwin and the war between science and religion

We are delighted to support the Bristol Humanists’ Emma Martin Lecture 2025

Book here: https://wegottickets.com/event/671906/

In 1811, a twelve-year-old girl uncovered some strange-looking bones in Britain’s southern shoreline and so sparked a crisis that would engulf science and religion for the next six decades. That little girl Mary Anning, an amateur geologist, shook the establishment. By the end of the 19th century, the literal reading of the bible had been overturned, science had been liberated from religion and the secular age had begun. Impossible Monsters takes us into the lives and minds of the extraordinary men and women whose discovery of the dinosaurs revolutionised our understanding of the world, as well as those who resisted them, and those like Charles Darwin, who took great risks to construct a new account of the earth’s and mankind’s origins. It is the riveting story of a group of people who dared to think impossible things and then showed them to be true.

Dr Michael Taylor is the author of Impossible Monsters, as well as The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2021, chosen as a Daily Telegraph Book of the Year and described as ‘riveting’ (The Times) and ‘compulsively readable’ (Guardian). He was born in 1988 and graduated with a double first in history from the University of Cambridge, where he earned his PhD. He has since been Lecturer in Modern British History at Balliol College, Oxford, and a Visiting Fellow at the British Library’s Eccles Centre for American Studies. He is now a Senior Manager with PwC.

Emma Martin was Bristol’s most important freethinker, humanist, feminist and human rights campaigner. In her short life (1812-1851), she went from committed Christian to outspoken atheist/freethinker, working for the Owenites, speaking to thousands and publishing pamphlets on the role of the church and on women’s rights. Later on she trained as a midwife and campaigned on reproductive rights. She has a blue plaque dedicated to her in Bridewell Street, and annually we celebrate her life with this special talk.