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| The Crystal Palace Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus as illustrated in Matthew Digby Wyatt's 1854 Views of the Crystal Palace and Park, Sydenham. These Iguanodon are surely some of the most famous Victorian palaeoart in the world, and probably some of my favourite palaeoartworks of all. |
Welcome to part three of our discussion of the science behind the Crystal Palace prehistoric animal sculptures. As you'll know if you've read the previous entries in this series (
part 1,
part 2), these articles are the result of my working with the
Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs charity to produce artwork and palaeoart notes for their new '
about the statues' web pages. Please check out
part 1 for additional context about the work of the
FOCPD and the need for continued care and maintenance of the Crystal Palace sculptures. Restoration work on the models continues, and you can help by
donating money or
volunteering your time to keep the site maintained.
Having now covered the bulk of the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic animals (
Dicynodon, "
Labyrinthodon", the marine reptiles,
Teleosaurus, pterosaurs, and
Mosasaurus), it's time to focus on what are, for many, the main attraction: the dinosaurs. The four dinosaur statues of the Secondary Island are the largest models of the entire display and their elevation above the surrounding landscape makes them imposing, conspicuous figures even from afar. They are undeniably the most famous and spectacular components of the Crystal Palace menagerie, but also routinely mocked and ridiculed for being so scientifically dated. Such derision is entirely unfair as it ignores how much of dinosaur anatomy they accurately recorded, how cutting edge they were in the 1850s, and how progressive Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was in his approach to their reconstruction. Though far removed from how we imagine dinosaurs today, Hawkins captured the foundation of what makes dinosaurs unique and charismatic in his takes on the Jurassic theropod
Megalosaurus and two Cretaceous, Wealden species:
Iguanodon and
Hylaeosaurus.
As important milestones in early depictions of prehistoric animals, much has been said about the history and science informing the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. It must be said that a lot of the most familiar and popular tales about the sculptures are oversimplified or simply untrue. An example is the framing of the dinosaur sculptures within the context of the Richard Owen vs. Gideon Mantell rivalry, whereby Owen uses the statues to score some final points against Mantell by imposing his vision of Dinosauria on the Victorian public (e.g. Dean 1999; Torrens 2012). In actuality, Mantell was asked to be the consultant for the Crystal Palace prehistoric models before Owen, but he declined the offer on grounds of the models not being educational enough and, probably, his declining health (he died in 1852, before construction of the models was finished). Owen would attempt to re-write these affairs to position himself as first choice as technical advisor to the project, as well as the man who suggested to hire Hawkins (Dawson 2016).
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| Hylaeosaurus better side, as seen in 2018. Its face is all but invisible from public paths around the Geological Court and it's only by visiting the Secondary Island itself that you can get a good look at the whole animal. Note the presence of a nasal boss and enlarged, thickened scales over the neurocranium, recalling certain iguana species. |
Owen’s well-documented disinterest in the Crystal Palace models (Secord 2004; Dawon 2016) is also inconsistent with him bending the models to his unique vision of Dinosauria. Hawkins did not always follow Owen's latest ideas in his Crystal Palace work: in some places the dinosaur models reflect older Owenian theory, and in others they are very Mantellian in form. Owen was unaware of important decisions being made about the appearance of the dinosaurs (Secord 2004) and he recorded several dissenting opinions about their anatomy in his 1854 Crystal Palace guidebook, including objections to the
Iguanodon nose horn and a comment about the
Hylaeosaurus armour being conjecturally restored. History suggests that Owen was not invested enough in the models to be using them in academic politics against Mantell's legacy.
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| The Crystal Palace dinosaurs were far from the first efforts to restore dinosaur form, and they represented significant advances over earlier efforts. John Martin's 1837 The country of the Iguanodon is more typical of early dinosaur art, depicting Iguanodon and Megalosaurus as whale-sized lizards. The Crystal Palace dinosaurs were more realistically sized and included more characteristic anatomy, including strong, upright limbs, and taxon-specific features, such as beaks and osteoderms. Hawkins' reconstructions were definitely 'dinosaurs v. 2.0', not just life-sized versions of art that came before. Image in public domain, borrowed from Wikimedia. | | |
Although a substantial haul of dinosaur bones had been amassed from southern Britain by the 1850s, no dinosaur taxa were well-known at this time (despite Owen’s PR-friendly 1854 statement that all the sculptures were based on species for which “the entire, or nearly entire, skeleton had been exhumed in a fossil state”). Accordingly, the dinosaurs were constructed using Owen's basic dinosaur body plan (i.e. quadrupedal reptiles with mammal-like features, including proportionally large and erect limbs, strong, weight-bearing hips and terrestrial habits) and augmented with features either suggested by fossil material or else consistent with their predicted anatomy and lifestyles (Owen 1854). The results are far from the mark as goes modern interpretations of
Iguanodon,
Megalosaurus or
Hylaeosaurus, but they are reasonable imaginings of dinosaurs given the material known to Hawkins at that time.
Although often mocked for their depiction of now archaic ideas, the models were actually a significant advance over earlier depictions of dinosaurs as whale-sized lizards. It could be argued that the models did not present the most progressive view of dinosaurs available in the early 1850s as they ignored Mantell’s insightful considerations of
Iguanodon proportions and pose (Mantell 1848, 1851, see below) but, even so, each model references ideas about dinosaur anatomy that were, at the time, very modern and cutting-edge. Hawkins’ dinosaur sculptures are an excellent record of that short period in history when the unique and defining aspects of dinosaurs had been recognised, but our fossil data were still too incomplete to reveal their overall forms. They capture, on grandiose scale, an important intellectual milestone in the realisation of what dinosaurs were, and are a monument to the ingenuity of early palaeontologists.
Megalosaurus
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| Megalosaurus as seen in 2013 - more or less as it looks today, but the surrounding vegetation is lower so you can see the full extent of the powerfully muscled hindlimbs. Not visible in this photo is a long crack which runs down the length of the model on the right side of the neck and torso: these sculptures weigh several tonnes apiece, and putting all that weight on four limbs takes its toll. |
Hawkins’
Megalosaurus is specifically meant to represent
M. bucklandi, a species known to him from a jaw bone and teeth, a few vertebrae, pelvic bones and some hindlimb material. It is a fairly faithful representation of Owen’s vision of
Megalosaurus, which we also have documented in his 1854 guidebook (below). This famous illustration, which blends life restoration with skeletal reconstruction, is the only instance of Owen providing us with his vision of a dinosaur to compare with Hawkins. Owen’s drawing - which is also one of the oldest known skeletal diagrams of a dinosaur (see Scott Hartman’s excellent
History of Skeletal Drawings) - does not sugarcoat the volume of material known for
Megalosaurus in the early 1850s and instead (perhaps inadvertently) showing us the huge gulfs of dinosaur anatomy that Hawkins had to restore from just a handful of remains.
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| Owen's skeletal restoration of Megalosaurus bucklandi from his 1854 Crystal Palace guidebook, a significant illustration in the development of skeletal diagrams of fossil animals and the only hint in his guidebook as to what was truly known of the species restored by Hawkins. The Crystal Palace sculpture is pretty faithful to this, but note the lack of the shoulder hump and smaller head. |
Curiously, Owen did not include the full 1854 inventory of
Megalosaurus fossils in his drawing or text, omitting some potentially significant vertebrae from the Wealden that had been referred to this taxon (see below). This suggests that Hawkins’
Megalosaurus was based entirely on Jurassic material that we still regard as
M. bucklandi, and that it narrowly escaped being a chimaera of several theropod taxa. Even in the 1850s
Megalosaurus was becoming a wastebasket of carnivorous dinosaur material that would eventually contain dozens of species. Today
M. bucklandi is regarded as the only species of
Megalosaurus (Benson 2010), and while its exact proportions remain unknown, it is imagined as a large-headed creature with a robust, three-fingered hand, and most likely similar to
Torvosaurus in general form. It was probably 6-7 m long - mid-sized for a theropod dinosaur, but large for one from the Middle Jurassic.
Although working from little material, Hawkins did not simply take Owen's dinosaur concept and bolt some sharp teeth into the jaws. Rather, his
Megalosaurus has several hallmarks of predatory species that reflect close observation of living animals. The limbs, for instance, are not pillar-like as in the
Iguanodon but have flexed joints and bulging musculature. This pose recalls the limbs of rhinos - relatively fast, sprightly large animals - more than the columnar-limbs of slower paced giants, like elephants. The body is trim and streamlined, tapering from the muscular shoulders towards the hips, and also lacks an expansive gut. Hawkins would have known that carnivorous animals have smaller, shorter guts than herbivores, and he probably modelled his
Megalosaurus with this in mind. The massive head (some five feet in length, probably based an older Owen estimate (1842, 1854), and not reflecting the revised 2' 6" length published by Owen in 1856) is held in place with deep neck muscles anchoring to an enlarged shoulder skeleton. Hawkins was clearly referening large-headed mammalian herbivores such as bovids and rhinos here, and his transference of their head-supporting apparatus to a predatory reptile shows his resourceful approach to reconstructing these poorly known animals. The result is a creature that looks undeniably powerful and predatory, a mix of bear, buffalo and crocodile. It’s difficult not to imagine the model as eying the adjacent
Iguanodon as a potential meal.
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Megalosaurus bucklandi as we understand it today: a large-ish theropod that roamed Jurassic Britain, posing in ways that loosely homage Charles Knight's work.
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Hawkins'
Megalosaurus is restored with mouth slightly ajar, and it’s clear from both the model and associated Hawkins’ artwork that the teeth are modelled on those of crocodylians - in other words, they would be visible even when the mouth was closed. Today, the subject of
dental exposure in dinosaurs and other fossil forms is a
hot topic among palaeoartists, but we can view Hawkins’ take as being in line with general ideas of dinosaur palaeobiology c. 1850. The situation of dinosaur teeth in sockets was identified early on as being more crocodylian- than lizard-like, and it was not unreasonable for Hawkins to extrapolate this to a full crocodylian-grade jaw. Curiously, his other dinosaur models have lips: perhaps he felt that their more lizard-like teeth warranted more lizard-like facial anatomy?
Having mentioned the shoulder hump, it would be remiss not to outline the interesting history of this structure.
Darren Naish (2010) proposed that the shoulder hump of
Megalosaurus was based on
Altispinax dunkeri, three Wealden theropod vertebrae with tall neural spines known to Owen in the 1850s. Owen (1855, 1856) regarded these as the shoulder vertebrae of
M. bucklandi and remarked that their tall spines must have anchored powerful, head-supporting muscles used to aid
Megalosaurus in pulling apart carcasses. Circumstance suggests that Owen must have given Hawkins advance notice of this but... surprisingly no - other data suggests otherwise. Secord (2004) reports that Owen actually had no idea about the
Megalosaurus shoulder hump until the models were completed and installed, and the absence of either Wealden bones or an obvious shoulder hump in Owen's 1854 illustration confirms that he was not envisaging
Megalosaurus in such a guise in the early 1850s. Secord also reports an ambivalent 1855 newspaper quote from Owen regarding the accuracy of the shoulder hump. When asked if the hump was a genuine feature of
Megalosaurus, Owen replied that "no one could say that the bump was not there”, and he once again did not mention
Altispinax despite the kudos they would have brought to the model and his skills as a consultant. Post-1854 boasting from Hawkins confirms the fact that
Altispinax was not referenced in the Crystal Palace
Megalosaurus, as he used the discovery of these 'shoulder hump' bones as evidence of his sharp skills for anatomical prediction (Secord 2004). It's perhaps significant that Owen presented older
Megalosaurus size
predictions in his 1854 guidebook, possibly indicating that his Crystal
Palace consultancy pre-dated the analysis he presented in his 1855
Megalosaurus monograph, or that he was keeping his later work under wraps.
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| The Witton-Macleans and Hawkins' Megalosaurs,
in 2018. Though small compared to estimates of dinosaur size from the
early 1800s, the Crystal Palace dinosaurs are still big, imposing
artworks. It occurs to me that this might be the first picture of me and
the Disacknowledgement on this blog, which I've been writing since
2012. Well, we don't want to rush things, right? |
The skin texture of Hawkins’
Megalosaurus is also interesting. Rather than obviously scaly, as per his other dinosaurs, the skin has deep fissures and wrinkles that recall elephant skin. The decision to not depict individual scales was actually quite precedent, as the eventual discovery of dinosaur scales would reveal their surprisingly small nature (typically less than a centimetre across). Alas, the thought process behind Hawkins’ decision to use this skin texture is not clear, there being no mention of wrinkled
Megalosaurus skin in Owen’s guidebook or in other literature of the time. A generous interpretation could be of Hawkins having an intuitive sense that dinosaurs might be ‘more than just reptiles’, a fact later vindicated by their skeletal proportions and the discovery of diverse skin types and feathering. More cynically, perhaps he wanted a skin type to distinguish the
Megalosaurus from the other dinosaurs? Or maybe he just ran out of time to complete the model with the detailed scaly finish used on
Iguanodon and
Hylaeosaurus?
Hylaeosaurus
The most overlooked dinosaur of the Crystal Palace trio is
Hylaeosaurus armatus: the first ankylosaur known to science. It’s easy to ignore this species even when visiting the Geological Court in person as, although prominently placed between the
Megalosaurus and
Iguanodon, the sculpture’s face is not visible from the public paths around the Secondary Island. Instead, we can only see the hindquarters and left side. This is great for showing off the armoured back, but undeniably leaves a lesser impression on visitors - especially as it competes for attention with very imposing and charismatic statues either side.
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| Hawkins' take on Hylaeosaurus armatus in 2018, seen as standing on the Secondary Island and not from the path on the Crystal Palace 'mainland'. Note the armoured back (not just the spines, but also the prominent tubercles) and iguana-like face. The head of this model is a fibreglass replica, the original having fallen off and put on display elsewhere in the park. |
I recall an explanation for the peculiar orientation of
Hylaeosaurus being that cranial material was unknown to science at this time, so the model was positioned facing away from the public to obscure its face. I can’t remember where I learned this, but it’s incorrect in any case. Today,
Hylaeosaurus is chiefly represented by a slab containing a portion of skull, several neck and shoulder vertebrae, elements of the pectoral girdle and the large spike-like scutes that covered its skin (Barrett and Maidment 2011). But in the early 1800s
Hylaeosaurus inventories were much broader, also containing referred jaws, teeth, limb bones, and hip and tail elements (Owen 1842). This rendered
Hylaeosaurus c. 1854 comparable to
Megalosaurus in representation, so lack of anatomical reference does not account for Hawkins hiding its face. Modern takes on Owen’s additional
Hylaeosaurus specimens sees his referred jaw belonging to a stegosaur (the only one known from the British Wealden) and the teeth pertaining to a sauropod (Barrett and Maidment 2011). The other elements probably represent indeterminate ankylosaur bones. Accordingly, Hawkins’
Hylaeosaurus is the most chimeric of all the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, mixing elements from not just several related species, but several major dinosaur groups.
Hawkins’ restoration of the
Hylaeosaurus armour was very reasonable given the material he was working with. Two types of osteoderm were recognised for
Hylaeosaurus in the 1830s and 40s: large spikes, and low elliptical structures that sometimes bore tubercles at their summit. Both feature prominently on the dorsal surface of Hawkins' sculpture, covering the braincase, shoulders, back, haunches and tail. The spines are arranged in a single row along the midline and are flanked either side by extensive sheets of smaller, elliptical scutes. Whether
Hylaeosaurus had one or more rows of spiny osteoderms was the subject of discussion among early palaeontologists, and ultimately Hawkins decided to side with Mantell, not Owen, in depicting a single row. Mantell (1833) interpreted the
Hylaeosaurus spikes as being from a spiny midline fringe, akin to those of iguanine lizards, while Owen initially had reservations about them being osteoderms at all. Writing in 1841, Owen stated that he did not disagree with Mantell's idea of them being armour, but he also thought that the 'spines' could be displaced abdominal ribs. By 1854 Owen conceded that Mantell’s identification of the structures as dermal spines was accurate, but he also remarked that Hawkins’ arrangement of the spines was conjectural. A few years later Owen returned to the issue of the spines again, and provided insightful reasoning for the spines being arranged in two parallel rows (Owen 1858). The evolution of Owen’s ideas saw him creeping closer to the reality of ankylosaur life appearance and, today, we know that he was close to the truth: ankylosaurs were indeed covered with multiple rows of scutes, spines and spikes. Alas, this realisation came too late to be incorporated into Hawkins’ models.
The Crystal Palace
Hylaeosaurus is probably the most lizard-like of the three featured dinosaur species with its low, crouched pose, large feet and entirely scaly, lipped face. Aspects of the skin recall heavyset, tough-skinned iguanines such as the Galapogos genera
Amblyrhynchus or
Conolophus (viz. low tubercles and hornlets around the back of the head, a scaly nasal prominence, polygonal scales on the body and limbs), which accords with Mantell’s (1833) referencing of iguanas as a model for the
Hylaeosaurus spiny fringe. Though sporting some very fine facial features (though lacking the beak of true ankylosaurs),
Hylaeosaurus is Hawkins’ only dinosaur sculpture without visible teeth*. Given that Owen (1842, 1854) had referred teeth to this species, and that virtually all the other non-mammal statues have exposed dentition, this omission is peculiar. Perhaps, if the sculpture was always planned to face away from visitors, Hawkins decided that sculpting an open mouth with individually placed teeth was unnecessary.
*As an aside, it's worth specifying that the Crystal Palace dinosaur models have metal teeth inserted into their mouths, while the other models have teeth molded from concrete. The dinosaur's metal teeth were stolen as souvenirs by Victorian visitors (Secord 2004)!
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| Hylaeosaurus remains a poorly known animal even today, but it probably looked a little like the more familiar Polacanthus, another Wealden species shown in this 2015 illustration. In some repsects the Crystal Palace version is not a million miles off this. |
Hawkins’
Hylaeosaurus is his most authentic dinosaur with respect to our modern understanding, accurately capturing an ankylosaur as a low-slung quadruped with a short neck, long tail and an armoured back. Unlike the Crystal Palace
Megalosaurus and
Iguanodon, which were soon embarrassed by the discovery of remains indicating entirely different body forms, the depiction of
Hylaeosaurus as a heavyset quadruped was vindicated in 1858 with the discovery of
Scelidosaurus harrisonii in Jurassic deposits of the southern UK. This specimen - the first near complete dinosaur skeleton ever found - matched many aspects of the Crystal Palace
Hylaeosaurus as well as Owen’s general ideas about dinosaur form. However, despite describing
Scelidosaurus in detail, Owen (1863) did not capitalise on this opportunity for personal vindication. David Norman (2000) ascribes this to Owen being ever busier from the late 1850s onwards, taking on prominent roles in establishing the British Museum of Natural History (today known as London's Natural History Museum), taking part in numerous debates about evolution and natural selection, as well as maintaining an enviable output of papers, books and monographs. I wonder if Owen’s general disinterest in the Crystal Palace animals has relevance here as well, as might the failure of the wider Crystal Palace Park project. Within just a few years of opening the Crystal Palace Company was struggling to recoup the great expense of their ambitious development and the primary business of Crystal Palace Park had shifted from education and enlightenment to festival, sport and spectacle (Secord 2004). While being involved with Crystal Palace evidently did not harm Owen’s career, perhaps he could not, or dare not, wear his association to the failing project with pride. Hawkins, whom we may also have expected to use
Scelidosaurus to promote his anatomical insights, was by this point busy working on other dinosaur material in the United States. Both men seemed to have moved on surprisingly quickly from what would be, among the public at least, some of their best known and longest-standing work.
Iguanodon
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| Hawkins' Iguanodon: exemplar palaeoart from the Victorian age, seen in 2018. This photo is taken from immediately next to the Hylaeosaurus, allowing us to see the reposed model in anterior aspect: look those excellently modelled shoulders and neck. Remember that these things were constructed using materials typically employed for building houses, not fine sculptures: the detailing is superb. |
Probably the most completely known dinosaur for Hawkins was
Iguanodon, which might explain why this dinosaur was captured in two models rather than just one. The Crystal Palace
Iguanodon are likely the most famous Victorian dinosaur restorations in the world but, today, it’s hard to say exactly what animals they represent. Until relatively recently
Iguanodon was a wastebasket for iguanodont material from the southern UK, a long-standing problem deeply rooted in
Iguanodon taxonomic history. Several distinct taxa have now been identified among the British
"Iguanodon"
material, and much needed taxonomic revisions anchored the name
Iguanodon to
I. bernissartensis, the famous species chiefly known from Belgian skeletons (see Norman 2013 for a review).
I. bernissartensis is known from the UK, but it's relatively rare and geologically younger than most of the "
Iguanodon" material used by Mantell, Owen and Hawkins to conceptualise
Iguanodon in the early 1800s. An upshot of this is that the Crystal Palace
Iguanodon were informed by fossils that we no longer recognise as
Iguanodon today.
We do not have a definitive list of specimens examined for the
Iguanodon models, but Owen (1854) and Hawkins (1854) allude to three important reference specimens. Firstly, Owen (1854) specifically identifies the models as being "
I. mantelli", one of two names applied to the original set of
Iguanodon teeth described by Mantell in the 1820s. These teeth are no longer considered diagnostic for any species, but are a close match for those from the Valanginian iguanodont
Barilium dawsoni (Norman 2011). Many anatomical and proportional details were taken from a second specimen, the famous “
Mantel-piece”, which is today regarded as
Mantellisaurus atherfieldensis (though not incontrovertibly - see Norman 2013). Thirdly, Hawkins (1854) notes that a large iguanodont specimen (below) from Horsham was used to establish the size of the models. This specimen has been all but forgotten in modern literature despite earning the local nickname of the “Great Horsham
Iguanodon” and being referenced as an exceptionally large specimen by Owen (1855). Details of the Horsham specimen suggest it is almost certainly another specimen of
Barilium, being sourced from the Hastings Beds (deposits yet to yield true
Iguanodon fossils, but definitely containing
Barilium) and having a scapula bearing characteristic features of this taxon (Norman 2011). Note that none of these specimens contain a thumb spike - the source of the famous nose horn - so this must have stemmed from yet more reference material. Hawkins might have based the nose horns on the large thumb spikes published by Mantell in 1827 and, if so, they represent another iguanodont species for our list,
Hypselospinus fittoni (Norman 2015). That gives us at least two, and possibly three, iguanodont species represented in the Crystal Palace "
Iguanodon" sculptures, not one of which is actually
Iguanodon as we define it today. We cannot rule out Hawkins examining some true
Iguanodon material in his research for the models, but if he did, they were not significant enough to warrant mention in any known literature.
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| Rib (left) and portion of dorsal scapula (right) of the "Great Horsham Iguanodon", as seen on display in Horsham Museum and Art Gallery in 2019. There's more material to this specimen, including a toe bone, not on show here. This largely forgotten specimen which was pivotal in establishing a realistic size estimate for Iguanodon (Owen 1855). Notice how flared the scapular termination is: this is characteristic of material referred to Barilium dawsoni, and quite different from the scapula of Iguanodon (Norman 2011). |
Hawkins’
Iguanodon are basically Owenian in form, but he conflicted with Owen by giving his restorations a Mantellian nose horn. Owen (1854, 1855) was strongly opposed to
Iguanodon having such a structure, devoting several monograph pages to dismantling this identification and correctly identifying it as a spike-like claw in 1855. Owen’s observations on the ‘nose horn’ were entirely sound, but Hawkins, presumably like Mantell, was probably inspired by the presence of nose horns in many iguana species. Iguanas may have informed the models in other regards as well, including the large tympanic membranes (their conspicuous ‘ears’), dewlaps, midline body and tail spines, and details of their scalation. The edentulous beak and blunt claws are deviations from iguanas and were correctly restored for
Iguanodon, these presumably being based on lower jaws and digit bones recovered during the early 1800s. Here, Hawkins was more accurate than Mantell, who’s final conceptualisation of
Iguanodon included prehensile lips and a protruding tongue (Mantell 1851). The grasping hand of the reposed
Iguanodon could be a Mantellian nod however, reflecting his proposal that
Iguanodon used its forelimbs to grasp vegetation (Mantell 1849, 1851; Dawson 2016). If so, it's noteworthy that Hawkins did not follow Mantell's observation that the forelimbs were relatively slender, instead sticking to the convention of
Iguanodon being a columar-limbed quadruped. Hawkins’ construction of
Iguanodon at just over 10 m long was very ‘modern’ for the time, contrasting to earlier calculations of its length where scant bones were interpreted as belonging to creatures many tens of metres long (Mantell 1851; Owen 1854, 1855).
It should be observed how lifelike and detailed Hawkins
Iguanodon are. More than any other reptile sculpture in the Geological Court, Hawkins
Iguanodon give the impression of capturing real animals. Most of the other reptiles are posed fairly functionally: they lie or stand in ways that allow us to see their form clearly. But Hawkins’
Iguanodon have a touch more dynamism. The reposed individual looks relaxed with its subtly spreading belly and cycad-pawing hand, while the animal above and behind it looks vigiliant and alert. Their composition implies real behaviours and personalities in these anatomically fictional, but entirely believable restorations. Coupled with their enormous size, these aspects make them (for me, at any rate) the most spectacular models of the entire display.
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| What does the inside of a Crystal Palace dinosaur look like, you ask? The standing models have holes in the bottom (presumably for drainage and maintenance access) which allow you to see inside, and they look like this. Here, we're seeing the interior view of the standing Iguanodon sculpture, with light shining through the open mouth. I'm not sure how much of this is original and how much represents conservation work, but it's evident that the bulk of the models are Victorian bricks, motar, concrete, and supporting metal struts. These old-school materials are one reason that the models are so fragile, why they need dedicated upkeep, and why we shouldn't be climbing and sitting on them (for shame, people in that photo!). |
Just over a decade after the Crystal Palace dinosaurs were installed, discoveries of another ornithopod,
Hadrosaurus, in New Jersey, USA began to erode the credibility of not only Hawkins’
Iguanodon but the entire Crystal Palace prehistoric project.
Hadrosaurus showed dinosaur anatomy as very different to what was being imagined in Victorian Britain. Suddenly, the Crystal Palace dinosaurs looked, at best, like naive and over-eager attempts to interpret fossil bones or, at worst, like products of arrogant Victorians assuming they could command the anatomy of long dead species from nothing like complete skeletal material. Perhaps the truth is somewhere between. Later, fossil discoveries in Belgium in 1878 would essentially give us our modern take on
Iguanodon anatomy and, in doing so, took away any lingering scientific credibility from Hawkins’ portrayals. A suite of
Iguanodon skeletons recovered from a Bernissart coal mine revealed an animal with powerful hindlimbs; relatively slender, shorter forelimbs equipped with large thumb spikes; a beaked, horse-like head; and a long, deep tail. Initially restored as a kangaroo-like biped,
Iguanodon would eventually be realised as we know it today: a horizontally-backed animal that could alternate between bipedal and quadrupedal gaits.
Iguanodon is the only Crystal Palace dinosaur species now known from complete skeletons, making it a most poignant indicator of how far palaeontological science has moved from the era of Hawkins and Owen.
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| Iguanodon bernissartensis as we picture it today, some still standing, some still lying down. |
We've got one more stop on our tour of the Crystal Palace sculptures: the mammals. These often overlooked parts of the Geological Court contain some of the most interesting and, to some extent, tragic portions of the Crystal Palace palaeoart project. Come back soon for the conclusion to our look at these Victorian palaeoartworks, and don't forget to check out the
Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, who're actively striving to get these fine artworks the recognition and conservation they deserve.
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References
- Barrett, P. M. & Maidment, S. C. R. (2011). Armoured dinosaurs. In Batten, D. J. (ed.) English Wealden Fossils. The Palaeontological Association (London), pp. 391-406.
- Benson, R. B. (2010). A description of Megalosaurus bucklandii (Dinosauria: Theropoda) from the Bathonian of the UK and the relationships of Middle Jurassic theropods. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 158(4), 882-935.
- Dawson, G. (2016). Show me the bone: Reconstructing prehistoric monsters in nineteenth-century Britain and America. University of Chicago Press.
- Dean, D. R. (1999). Gideon Mantell and the discovery of dinosaurs. Cambridge University Press.
- Hawkins, B. W. (1854). On Visual Education As Applied to Geology, Illustrated By Diagrams and Models of the Geological Restorations at the Crystal Palace. Journal of the Society of Arts2 (78): 443-449.
- Mantell, G. (1833). Memoir on the Hylaeosaurus, a newly discovered fossil reptile from the strata of Tilgate Forest. Geology of the South East of England.
- Mantell, G. A. (1848). XIII. On the structure of the jaws and teeth of the Iguanodon. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, (138), 183-202.
- Mantell, G. A. (1851). Petrifactions and Their Teachings: Or, A Hand-book to the Gallery of Organic Remains of the British Museum (Vol. 6). HG Bohn.
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