Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins - United States

United States

In 1868, he traveled to America to deliver a series of lectures. Working with the scientist Joseph Leidy, Hawkins designed and cast an almost complete skeleton of Hadrosaurus foulkii which was then displayed at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Supported on an iron framework in a lifelike pose, this was the world's first mounted dinosaur skeleton.

Hawkins was later commissioned to produce models for New York City's Central Park museum similar to these he had created in Sydenham. He established a studio on the modern site of the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, and planned to create a Paleozoic Museum. However, the corrupt local politics of William M. "Boss" Tweed intervened, the project was shelved in 1870, and the models that Hawkins had created were said to have been buried in the south part, probably not far from Umpire Rock and the Heckscher ballfields, in Central Park. Hawkins then turned to dinosaur skeleton reconstruction work at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He returned to England in 1874, but almost immediately returned, doing dinosaur reconstructions at Princeton University (then called the College of New Jersey) in Princeton, New Jersey, (where he also created paintings of dinosaurs). These paintings remain in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum. Hawkins also worked at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia. He again returned to Britain in 1878.

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