NEW YORK, NY.- “I wasn’t any more obsessed with dinosaurs than most adults,” Edward Dolnick said. But the accomplished science writer became intrigued by the story of the initial discovery of dinosaur bones in England — and how Victorian society coped.

In “Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party,” published by Scribner last month, he introduces us to Mary Anning, a young woman who discovered Jurassic-era marine fossil beds, and the scientists and theologians who debated the mind-blowing implications. “The lure for me was this question of: What was it like to see what no one had ever seen? What was it like to try to grapple with an idea that hadn’t occurred to anybody?”

In a wide-ranging talk with The New York Times, Dolnick talked about Victorian morality, the appeal of the unknown and human smugness. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What interested you about this subject?

A: Today, we take dinosaurs for granted; it’s just a thing for the kids to outgrow. Once upon a time, and not that long ago, they were brand-new. What was it like to recognize that you’d lived in the tiny cloistered world and missed this giant picture? The smartest people of the age were knocking their heads against the wall trying to solve a riddle of which a 6-year-old today would say, Oh, come on, that one’s easy.

Q: Do you feel like we live in a time now with fewer remaining mysteries or riddles?

A: Part of the fun is that until this discovery, the Victorians were presumably just as happy and just as complacent as we are. Each generation thinks that they’re at the top of some escalator of progress and that our poor forebears blundered around in the dark.

But the catch is we don’t know what will look silly when people look back at us. What will the 6-year-olds of the future say?

Q: Your title, I presume, refers at least in part to a famous 1853 New Year’s Eve dinner at London’s Crystal Palace, in which eminent gentlemen ate within an Iguanodon skeleton.

A: What could be a clearer profession of triumph? You might as well be like those photos of the great white hunter who put their foot on the fallen beast and posed for the camera. Today, moguls shoot rockets up in space to show what big men they are. In those days, you would subsidize a dinosaur expedition, and whoever found the biggest bone was the biggest tycoon of them all.

But more important, the title refers to the notion that early on, the Victorians did think they had things figured out — that life was lovely, with birds tweeting and deer leaping, and then the notion of finding these giant bones and having no idea what they were, all of a sudden makes for a crashing of that cozy dinner party. Instead of toasting one another and patting each other on the back, suddenly they’re questioning everything.

Q: It’s a fascinating cast of humans, too.

A: It was good fortune that the characters are as strange as the animals themselves.

As to why this is a British story, it isn’t that England had more dinosaurs than anybody else, it is that they were first to find them, essentially because the Industrial Revolution takes off there. So, there’s the most digging of railroads and canals, and in the course of that, you find bones.

Of course, people had found enormous bones before, when they had dug wells or plowed fields. But part of what comes along in the 1800s is this notion that we need a serious explanation of where they come from. It’s not enough to say that once dragons darkened the skies, which had been enough for a long while.

Q: Another impressive fact is that they were able to assemble the skeletons. There have been myriad corrections since, but even so, it seems a feat of paleontology.

A: It really was. They were simultaneously missing a lot of the picture — in the sense that they were surprised that the world was so old — and terribly able as well to start with one piece of a puzzle and then come pretty close to solving it all.

I think it’s only because we have it on such good authority that today we all nod our heads and say, Oh, of course, billions of years. Oh, of course, 10 tons. But what these Victorians were asked to believe was actually quite crazy — quite a formidable shift in view.

Q: How did these discoveries jibe with conventional Victorian conceptions of Christianity?

A: Well, it was really a surprise because the notion was that things have been carefully thought out by God. He’s done meticulous work. Every dot on every butterfly’s wing is just so, and you could see evidence all around — look how lovely birds are. Look how swift the leopard is. And so these new discoveries that didn’t fit at all with that picture called for real rethinking.

The Victorians were serious about their science. But on the other hand, they were serious about their religious belief. Things were done for a purpose. They were done by an all-knowing, all-benevolent creator. How could you fit those two ideas together? That was a genuine and difficult dilemma.

Why is there death and disease? Why do big, scary animals eat little, timid ones? Why do species go extinct? That was a lot harder to reconcile.

Q: You describe a world in which people are very acquisitive — where there was this respect for science, but someone might also want to pick up a bone for his personal cabinet of curiosities. How regulated was very early paleontology?

A: This was grab what you can. Mary Anning, one of the heroes of the book, is desperately trying to scratch out a living by selling finds to collectors. And there’s no regulation about who can find, who can sell, who can display — except that the finders, especially if they’re uneducated and female, tend to be overlooked.

The collector who bought a fossil from her and donated it to the museum had his name in big letters, but in her day, her name wasn’t mentioned at all.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.