About the Book
Extinct Monsters (1900) is the book that put dinosaurs into the popular imagination — a Fellow of the Geological Society writing plainly for readers who had never opened a scientific paper, illustrated with J. Smit's restorations of animals nobody had ever seen alive.
Rev. H. N. Hutchinson's complaint drives the whole enterprise: astonishing fossil discoveries were being made, and the public had never heard of them. He had watched museum visitors drift 'somewhat aimlessly' past the greatest relics of a former world, and wished someone would explain.
Sixteen chapters run from sea-scorpions to sloths, by way of the great fish-lizards, two chapters of dinosaurs, the flying dragons, and the fossil horse — the era's favourite proof that life changes.