During the English civil war, in hiding and in boredom, the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, set about pinning down the date of creation. A decade down the line, he publicised his research findings with breathtaking self-assurance: the world was a sprightly 6,000 years old. More specifically, God had created it on a Saturday night in October 4004BC. As it was, his hunch was a few zeros off the mark. The Earth was, in fact, formed 4.6bn years ago.
Growing up in Ulster’s Bible belt, the historian Michael Taylor writes, Ussher’s chronology was “a matter of regional pride”. Impossible Monsters may not go down especially well back home, then, because its subject is the twin assault on Ussher’s view that came during the 19th century: Charles Lyell’s uniformitarian geology and Charles Darwin’s evolutionary biology.
