Chapter 1 examines the craze for birds’ plumage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and assesses its severe environmental impact. A product of new manufacturing techniques, changing tastes and expanding commercial networks, the plumage trade was big business. It provided stylish headgear for women in Europe and the USA and drew on a global workforce of hunters, merchants and milliners. It was also, however, a highly controversial industry that attracted searing criticism from conservationists and humanitarians. The chapter traces the rise and fall of the trade in feathers, and explores the ethical and ecological implications of this arresting but destructive fashion. It looks, too, at the organisations that emerged to protect endangered birds and the challenges they faced in changing laws and attitudes.

Chapter 5 focuses on four animal products valued for their scent: musk, civet, ambergris and bear’s grease. Musk was an extremely pungent substance extracted from a ‘pod’ belonging to a species of Himalayan deer. Civet was secreted by the animal of the same name and imported from Indonesia and later Ethiopia (then Abyssinia). Ambergris was ‘the morbid secretion of the spermaceti whale’ and could be found washed up on the shore or floating on the surface of the ocean. Bear’s grease was imported from Russia and widely used as a hair restorative in the early nineteenth century. The chapter examines how all of these products were obtained, processed and used and assesses their changing value and popularity. It emphasises both the ecological and humanitarian concerns associated with the harvesting of animal perfume and the persistent issue of adulteration, which repeatedly brought the authenticity of musk, civet and bear’s grease into question.

Chapter 3 examines one of the most high-profile and widely used animal products of the Victorian era: ivory. Employed to make all manner of consumer goods, ivory was heavily sought after in the nineteenth century and was worked on an industrial scale. In the early nineteenth century, much of the ivory consumed in Europe came from historical stockpiles, gathered over centuries by African societies and purchased – or more often seized – by Arab traders for sale on the international market. By the 1870s and 1880s, however, these stockpiles had been exhausted, and elephants began to be slaughtered in large numbers for their tusks – with devastating consequences for the species. The chapter explores the complex networks that brought ivory from the African savannah to the cutlers of Sheffield and piano-makers of London and considers the severe environmental impact of the ever increasing demand for ivory. It goes on to examine the measures taken to protect the African elephant, which ranged from hunting licences and game reservations to export bans on underweight tusks. The final part of the chapter assesses various schemes to domesticate the African elephant, converting it from a supplier of ivory to a beast of burden.

Chapter 4 focuses on alpaca wool – a novel South American fibre that first entered British markets in the mid-1830s. Already widely used in Peru, alpaca wool first took off in Britain in 1836, after the woollen manufacturer Titus Salt discovered a bag of the fibre while walking through the docks in Liverpool. It was imported in increasing quantities from Peru in the 1840s and 1850s and used for the manufacture of shawls, cloth, ladies’ dresses and umbrellas. Charting the alpaca’s journey from the Andes to the outback, the chapter considers why contemporaries set so much store by the animal and how they went about appropriating it. It assesses how increased access, new technologies and new markets made alpaca wool viable and profitable as a luxury fabric and examines the transcontinental relationships that brought alpaca fibre, and later living alpacas, to Britain and its colonies. The chapter also emphasises the important local and regional dynamics of alpaca naturalisation, and the ways in which alpacas infiltrated wider discussions about identity, free trade and biopiracy. It concludes with a study of the alpaca’s wild relative, the vicuña, hunted to the point of extinction for its coveted fleece.

In 1894, a journalist published an article in The Standard advocating the establishment of a kangaroo farm in England. Over the course of several pages he enumerated the multiple benefits to be gained from acclimatising this antipodean marsupial, whose hide produced ‘excellent leather’ for making boots and gloves, whose thighs ‘taste much like those of the reindeer’, and whose tail made ‘a rich and most delicious soup’. Despite understandable fears to the contrary, the journalist insisted that kangaroos would do well in similar terrain to sheep and were ‘sufficiently hardy animals to withstand even the trying variability of our English winters’. He also claimed that they would require comparatively little looking after, ‘[a]ccommodation in the shape of open shedding’ providing ‘sufficient shelter to keep the animals in health’ and a seasonal supply of ‘hay and other food’ meeting their dietary needs. Although its proponent’s primary concern was profitability, the scheme was potentially timely, as kangaroo numbers were rapidly decreasing in Australia due to overhunting and competition with sheep. Writing just five years earlier, another journalist had reported: ‘Large quantities of kangaroos are killed for the sake of the skin, which has become fashionable as a material for the making of boots, shoes and other articles, and unless this indiscriminate slaughter is stopped the kangaroo will soon have shared the fate of the dodo.’

Chapter 6 shifts the focus from animals exploited for clothing and scent to exotic pets – living fashion accessories. The chapter charts the growing trade in monkeys, parrots, tortoises and other foreign species and explores the practicalities and emotional dynamics of keeping exotic species. It highlights the significant ecological implications of the exotic animal trade and the uncertain legal status of exotic pets, which were not formally protected from abuse until 1900.

In 1899, a Mrs A. C. Tracy wrote to The Animals’ Friend requesting advice on ‘Humane Dress’. As she explained, ‘Last winter I had, on two or three very cold days, to wear sealskin and bear alike; this year I want to avoid that, but being very far from strong, I shall be made to wear them, unless some neck wrap is in place equally warm.’ While several fur substitutes were already on the market, Mrs Tracy was yet to be convinced by the ones she had tried, rejecting ostrich feather boas, which were ruined by the ‘damp and fogs’, along with ‘woollen “clouds”, scarves, or any ugly or unfashionable article’. Indeed, she had ‘a stiff neck now from want of a warm necklet, and several ladies whom I have persuaded to give up furs have asked me what to do’.

This summarises Fallon’s contributions to the study of the cultural history of dinosaurs, literature and science, the popularisation of science, and transatlantic literary culture. It notes areas of potential future value for scholars interested in the importance and meaning of the dinosaur both in transatlantic culture and globally, including overlooked historical figures, before considering dinosaurs today and how they continue to be reimagined in both specialist palaeontology and popular culture. Fallon (1) summarises a drastic 2017 revision of the dinosaur family tree in Nature in which Victorian terms are simultaneously overridden and revived; (2) notes that Too Big to Walk, a 2018 book by independent researcher Brian Ford, presents a modern attempt to use dinosaurs to contradict the authority of elite science; (3) highlights the popularity of the Jurassic World film franchise, which in its first two films ignores the largely Chinese research that has drastically changed scientists’ conceptions of dinosaurs since the 1993 original Jurassic Park; and (4) looks at the Smithsonian Museum’s Hall of Fossils, which recruits dinosaurs into a narrative about climate change.

This introduction sketches a cultural history of dinosaur palaeontology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, indicating how the book addresses the lack of literary work on the understanding of dinosaurs in this period. While dinosaurs were a British area of science in the first half of the nineteenth century, American palaeontologists took clear pre-eminence in this field from the 1870s. American research transformed dinosaurs from giant lizards into a far stranger and more heterogenous group. Fallon argues that literary scholars have not yet grappled with this cultural shift in perceptions of the dinosaurs, an omission made all the more striking by the fact that it was during the decades around 1900 that ‘dinosaur’ first became a household word. Built into this word were important ideas about imperialism, progress, romance, and the practice of science. Fallon explains how exploring this subject provides wider insights into the relationships between literature and science and between popular and specialist science writers, in addition to its value as a case study on the transatlantic nature of literary media at the end of the nineteenth century.

Chapter 4 shows dinosaurs’ link to concerns about secularisation and specialisation contributed to Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous romance The Lost World. It argues that the text can be understood in relation to Conan Doyle’s romantic approach to scientific knowledge, especially his strident anti-materialism and aversion to technical jargon. Examining archival material from New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, including the original manuscript, Fallon weaves the content of The Lost World together in surprising ways with Conan Doyle’s palaeontological forays, cryptozoological sightings, and interest in psychical research, showing that noting the differences between the US and UK serialised and book versions provides a more precise understanding of Conan Doyle’s intended romantic effects. In particular, Fallon emphasises the illustrations by Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, Patrick Forbes. Alongside the text, these subtle and meticulously planned images make clear the author’s desire to convince readers that the world is full of unexplained wonders. As such, the British book edition in which Forbes’s images appear was, for Conan Doyle, the correct way to experience The Lost World.

Chapter 2 explores a range of fictional and non-fictional writing on dinosaurs. The first half shows how different writers, including Henry Neville Hutchinson, Grant Allen, and geoscientist Henry Woodward, invoked the comic monsters of Lewis Carroll to develop a new, ‘grotesque’ register for describing dinosaurs. This language naturalised an emergent understanding of dinosaurs, especially American dinosaurs like Triceratops, as having gone extinct owing to the evolution of uselessly monstrous characteristics. These ideas were appealingly absurd to general audiences, who could contrast the progressive traits and intelligence of mammals like themselves with the doomed grotesqueness of the dinosaurs. The chapter’s second half examines this new way of talking about dinosaurs, providing close readings of humourist Eugene Field’s poem ‘Extinct Monsters’ (1893), Edward Cuming’s Wonders in Monsterland (1901), and Emily Bray’s Old Time and the Boy (1921). In addition to depicting dinosaurs through Carrollian nonsense conventions, all three of these texts were direct responses to the works of Hutchinson, demonstrating his long-term importance for the popularisation of dinosaurs.