Crystal Palace Dinosaurs - History

History

Following the closure of the Great Exhibition in October 1851, the Crystal Palace was bought and moved to Sydenham Hill, South London by the newly formed Crystal Palace Company; the grounds that surrounded it were then extensively renovated and turned into a public park with ornamental gardens, replicas of statues and two new man-made lakes. As part of this renovation Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was commissioned to build the first ever life-sized models of extinct animals. He had originally planned to just re-create extinct mammals before deciding on building dinosaurs as well, which he did with advice from Sir Richard Owen, a celebrated biologist and palaeontologist of the time. Hawkins set up a workshop on site at the park and built the models there.

The models were displayed on three islands acting as a rough time-line, the first island representing roughly the Paleozoic era, a second representing the Mesozoic era, and a third representing the Cenozoic era. All of the mammals on the third island, however, were later moved to other locations on in the park (which in many ways directly led to them falling into ill-repair). The models' realism was aided by the lake at the time being 'tidal' and rising and falling, revealing different amounts of the dinosaurs. To mark the 'launch' of the models Hawkins held a dinner on New Year's Eve 1853 inside the mould of one of the Iguanodon.

Hawkins benefited greatly from the public's reaction to them, which was so strong it led to what could be considered the first case of tie-in merchandising as a set of smaller versions of Hawkins's models were sold for £30 as educational products. But the building of the models was costly (having cost around £13,729) and in 1855 the Crystal Palace Company cut Hawkins's funding, leaving several planned models unmade or half finished and scrapped, despite protest from various sources including newspaper The Observer.

As further and fuller discoveries of the species included in Crystal Palace were made, the reputation of the models declined. By as early as 1895 experts looked on them with scorn and ridicule. The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs by Steve McCarthy and Mick Gilbert quotes American fossil hunter Othniel Charles Marsh who scorns the dinosaurs' 'friends' as doing them a great injustice and speaks angrily of the models. The models and indeed the park fell into ill-repair as the years went by, a process aided by the fire that destroyed the Crystal Palace itself in 1936. The visibility of the models became obscured by overgrown foliage, but a full restoration of the animals was carried out in the 1950s by Victor H.C. Martin, which is when the animals were moved around.

Though general and often ad-hoc maintenance was carried up in the meantime (including the use of plasticine ) the dinosaurs did not undergo a full restoration until 2002; during that time the park had fallen into total disarray and at one point a guided tour of the dinosaurs was the only time the park was open to the public. In 2002 the Institute of Historic Building Conservation totally renovated the models, including properly fixing and re-painting the existing models (in much lighter or at times totally different colors, for instance the Megatheirium was changed from blue to beige during the restoration). The institute also had fiberglass replacements created for the missing pterodactyls and their cliff, cutting away a lot of the foliage and restoring the original recreations of plant life that accompanied the models in the 1850s.