THE CRYSTAL PALACE DINOSAURS ARE still one of the glories of South London. When the Great Exhibition building was moved from Hyde Park to Sydenham and repurposed as a museum, its promoters stocked its gardens with giant Iguanodons and plesiosaurs, bringing prehistory to the public.
For Michael Taylor, these now-quaint monsters were combatants in a “culture war” of science with religion. He argues that public discussion of dinosaurs from the 1820s liberated Britons from their “implacable” belief in the literal truth of the Bible and opened a space in which doubt about the authority of Christianity flourished. If faith had hardly vanished by the end of the century, then it became
