How the discovery of dinosaur fossils caused a revolution

AN intellectual revolution began in 1811 when Mary Anning, a 12-year-old living in Lyme Regis, a harbour town in south-west England, excavated the first fossil of a marine reptile, the Ichthyosaurus. It culminated in 1881 with the opening of the Natural History Museum in London, imperial capital of the world, by Richard Owen. Those seven decades spanned a change in thinking as profound as that triggered by the astronomers of the late Renaissance—and as disturbing to the established church. (In this case, the threatened church was that of England, not Rome.) Fossils sparked a revelation of biblical proportions: God had not created the world in six days a few thousand years before, as so many believed.