The Brothers Martin

Two things happened in London in the eighteen-thirties that Jennings sets a few pages apart, and neither is the passage I went looking for. Waterhouse Hawkins built a model iguanodon out of brick, iron hooping, and confident extrapolation from a handful of fossil bones, and then hosted twenty-one geologists to a New Year's Eve dinner inside its unfinished torso — Owen presiding from within the skull, toasting Mantell "in whose bowels they had just dined." A few pages on, the painter John Martin is commissioned to imagine "the country of the Iguanodon," a landscape no living person had ever seen reconstructed from evidence no one could verify by eye. And buried in a footnote: John Martin's brother William, also a pamphle