Save the Grade 1 listed dinosaurs!
No, really, Historic England is literally saving the dinosaurs and putting them on the at risk register: Crystal Palace's lifesize dinosaurs added to heritage at risk register: Historic England concerned that 166-year-old statues are cracking and losing toes. The dinosaur and extinct animal sculptures were created by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, one of the finest natural history artists of the Victorian era. Given that the term dinosaur had only been coined 10 years previously, it is not difficult to imagine the excitement and wonder they caused.
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The sculptures are perhaps the world’s first example of outdoor “edu-tainment” and represented the cutting edge of scientific knowledge at the time.
Of course that means they got things wrong. The Crystal Palace iguanodons, for example, walk on all fours when the real things would have walked on their hind legs. They have nose horns, when in reality the creatures had horns on their hands. In south London they are being stalked by a ferocious megalosaurus, which could never have happened as they existed in different eras. The megalosaurus is also wrongly depicted as quadrupedal rather than bipedal.
Historic England's page Famous Crystal Palace Dinosaurs Declared ‘At Risk’ has particularly lovely pictures of the things in situ, and also, bless, name-checks Mary Anning, as there are sculptures of the marine reptiles whose fossils she found. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3045948.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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