History: Dinosaurs and Website
1. The History of
the Dinosarus
For those of you
who don't already know, the Crystal Palace,
built in 1851 and burned down in 1936, was the Millenium Dome of
the Victorian era (with the slight difference that people
actually took the Crystal Palace seriously); it was a showcase
for everything that the Victorians thought was worth celebrating.
One such thing was paleontology, they being as obsessed with
dinosaurs as we. Consequently, the world's first full-size
dinosaur models were built by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins on the
site, on two artificial islands; a third island contained similar
models of prehistoric mammals. They were sufficiently far from
the Palace to escape the blaze, and are still in fantastic
condition today (thanks to ongoing restoration efforts, the latest in
2002,) even if
they are now more of historical than of scientific interest.
To
learn more about the
Palace, visit
the website of the Crystal
Palace Foundation. To learn more
about the dinosaurs and their history, I'd recommend Martin
Rudwick's Scenes From Deep Time (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992) and Steve McCarthy and Mick
Gilbert's Crystal Palace Dinosaurs
(London: Crystal
Palace Foundation, 1994). The BBC has some wonderful Javascript-enabled
panoramic tours of the park, much better than anything I can produce,
which can be viewed here.
This is a drawing Hawkins did for an 1853 lecture about his
creations, giving you a rough idea of what the first and second
islands looked like in the 1850s. Some of the details were
changed in the final execution, and the pterodactyls in the
middle vanished sometime in the intervening 150 years (although
fibreglass reconstructions
have now been added), but just
about all the dinosaurs shown on this site are in it somewhere.
2. History of this
Site
Although I'd been fascinated by the
dinosaurs ever since I read about
them in a Stephen Jay Gould article, I first got the idea for this
website
in 1999, when I visited Crystal Palace Park and brought along my
camera. A friend of mine, a big dinosaur/Victoriana fan who lives in
Canada and can't get over to Britain, asked if I could scan the
pictures I took and send them to him. Afterwards, I got to thinking
that surely there must be other people around the world, who had heard
of the dinosaurs (or who hadn't, but might like to) and would like to
see what they look like. And from the response I've had over the past
few years, I'd say I was right. So whether you're a longtime Waterhouse
Hawkins junkie, a visitor from one of the paleontology/science history
sites which has linked to me over the years (thanks guys) or just
someone who happened across this place by accident, welcome.
Most of the pictures on this site are from two visits to the park in
1999, in the summer and
the autumn. In 2000, this
site was instrumental in drumming up support for the campaign to
prevent a multiplex from being built on the Crystal Palace site (can
you imagine?!). In 2002, the dinosaurs
underwent
restoration, and the last few pictures are of the finished products,
taken in 2003.
In 2006, I took a look at the site, decided it was kind of, well, nineties-looking. There's only so much you can do with a bunch of pictures, but I decided that, to modern eyes, they'd look much better as a slideshow, with the occasional intelligent link. I've left the older version up for them as wants to see it.
All pictures are copyright Fiona Moore 1999/2003. I don't mind them being used on other sites, but if you do, please credit me, and also drop me a line, care of nydermail atte nyder dotte comme (translating the Elizabethan English), as I'd like to know where the dinosaurs go when they're not here.
--Nyder
