The Crystal Palace dinosaur models were made for a public that wanted to see deeper back in time
The World’s Oldest Dinosaur Sculptures
In 1854, the Crystal Palace, once the glass hall of the Great Exhibition, reopened in south London with something new in its grounds: life-size models of prehistoric animals.
They are still there today in Crystal Palace Park, and they are the world’s oldest dinosaur sculptures.
The Sculptor and The Scientist
The sculptor was Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. The scientist who advised him was Sir Richard Owen, the leading anatomist of the day, who is usually credited with coining the word “dinosaur” in 1842 and who courted controversy throughout his career.
The Crystal Palace Company commissioned the models in 1852 and unveiled them in 1854. They cost £13,729, and the Crystal Palace Company cut Hawkins’s funding in 1855, so several planned animals were never finished.
A dinner inside a dinosaur mould
On New Year’s Eve 1853, before the models were even finished, Hawkins held a dinner inside the Iguanodon mould, with guests and scientists seated around the table. It was a piece of showmanship, and a clever one: it got the newspapers talking about prehistory. It was immortalised in a picture published in the Illustrated London News, 7 January 1854, p. 22.
A walk through time
The models were arranged on three islands in a lake, in rough order of age: the oldest on one island, then the age of reptiles, then the age of mammals.
A limestone cliff beside them showed the rock layers where the fossils were found. As the water rose and fell, it hid or revealed parts of the animals.
A visitor could literally walk from one era into the next. The idea that rocks record the long history of life was laid out in a public park for ordinary people to see.
Getting it wrong, usefully
The animals reflect what scientists knew then, not what we know now.
Only three of the fifteen animals in the park were actually dinosaurs.
Hawkins gave the Iguanodon a horn on its nose, which we now know was a thumb spike. He made the Megalosaurus walk on four legs like a huge lizard. The ichthyosaurs lie on the shore, and the dicynodonts wear shells for which there is no evidence.
They were not mistakes in the sense of carelessness; they were the best interpretation of the bones available at the time, and several later finds superseded them.
Why they belong in the story of Victorian Natural History
The models do three things for a history of Victorian natural history.
They show how fast science reached a large public: families could stroll round them and see the new science of fossils made solid.
They show how closely entertainment and science sat together in the 1850s, with a dinner, a lake and a ticket office.
They also show the same impulse that put a bird under glass in the parlour: a desire to take a vast, distant, unseen thing and bring it close enough to look at.
Still standing
The park’s dinosaurs were Grade II listed in 1973 and upgraded to Grade I in 2007. They blew up the rock cliff in the 1960s. In 2001, they rebuilt it with 130 limestone blocks from Derbyshire, and fibreglass copies replaced missing sculptures. You can still visit them in the park today.
Read more: The Great Exhibition, 1851 · Taxidermy at the Great Exhibition, 1851 · Hermann Ploucquet’s sensational tableaux · Darwin, Wallace and Buffon.
This article is part of the Victorian Natural History Mania section. Explore more research here →
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