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Crystal Palace Dinosaurs

The first dinosaurs ever built, life-size, wrong in every detail and protected at the highest historic grade.

Outdoor sculptureFree

Photo by Ian Wright, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Also in Monuments & Ruins and Science & Engineering.

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins made them in 1854 for the park around the rebuilt Crystal Palace, with the anatomist Richard Owen, who had coined the word dinosaur twelve years before, as adviser. Thirty-odd animals stand on islands in the lake, arranged by geological age: ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, an Iguanodon with its thumb spike on its nose, a Megalosaurus on four legs. Almost everything about them has since been shown to be wrong, and they are worth the journey anyway: they are the moment a Victorian public first saw deep time made solid. On New Year's Eve 1853 Hawkins gave a dinner for twenty-one inside the mould of the Iguanodon.

Where
Crystal Palace Park, Thicket Road, SE20 8DT
Nearest station
Crystal Palace · 4 min walk

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