The Stony Fauna of the Crystal Palace

Ever since Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' dinosaur sculptures were unveiled at the Crystal Palace in 1854, they've inspired artists and photographers. This was the premiere of the great fallen saurians in the public consciousness. I never get tired of reading about them, and I figured I'd share some of my favorite Crystal Palace images I've come across.

The Crystal Palace itself was a temporary structure originally erected at Hyde Park in London for the Great Exhibition of 1851. I'm really into the evolving print arts of the Victorian era, and when laying the groundwork for a book cover I was working on recently, I found the following wallpaper design created for the exhibition, shared at Flickr by National Archives UK. you can tell that it's a wallpaper design by the way the very tippy-top of the gateway pops up at the bottom of the image.


Mary Linley - the Flickr account of Dulwich OnView, I believe - has also shared a series of old Crystal Palace imagery which was exhibited at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London in 2004. Here's a lithograph by Joseph Nash depicting the exhibition's opening with Queen Victoria presiding.


After the exhibition was over, the palace was moved and rebuilt at Sydenham Hill in south London, and this was when the dinosaurs were created. This lithograph, credited only to "Baxter," wisely uses a happy Victorian couple to show the scale of Hawkins' creations. You can see the mythology of dinosaurs beginning to form here.

This painting by James Harding gives a good idea of how the grounds were laid out once the palace was moved.


The dinosaurs thankfully still stand, having survived the obsolescence of their forms and years of neglect. they were restored in 2002, and anyone who sets foot in the park with a camera inevitably finds it pointed in their direction. I'm glad they've made it this far and haven't been destroyed and replaced by more modern versions (not that anyone would spend the money to do that). They're a valuable memento of the earliest days of dinosaur paleontology, the product of a world just being changed by industrial technology and about to be changed for good by the theory of evolution. Hawkins' Megalosaurus, photographed here by Pete Reed, seems to gloat in satisfaction for having survived the erosive powers of weather and public opinion for so long.


I'll wrap this up with my favorite photos of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, these shots by Christopher Hope-Fitch. They were taken in the early morning as the sun came up, unable to break completely through the chilly mist, evoking the primordial world that was the sculptures' inspiration.






For more on Hawkins' Iguanodons, check out my recent Vintage Dinosaur Art post on the subject.

A Little Book for Little Boys

The first World's Fair was 1851's Great Exhibition in London, housed in a grand structure known as the Crystal Palace. After the exhibition's original run was over, the palace moved to its current location in Sydenham and became home to Waterhouse Hawkins' sculptures of prehistoric beasts, including famously inaccurate statues of Iguanodon and Megalosaurus (I'm smitten with these sculptures, and have written about them here a few times).


Queen Victoria opens the Great Exhibition, shared by World Expo Blog via Flickr.

Idly perusing the halls of Google Books recently, I came across a unique perspective on the exhibition's promise. It comes from a time before the dinosaurs were introduced, but as a Victorian artifact of the Crystal Palace I thought it was worth posting. As the Great Exhibition was set to begin in 1851, the James Nisbet company published The Crystal Palace: A Little Book for Little Boys, which is exactly what it says it is. It tells the story of Frank and George, two little boys who await their chance to visit the Crystal Palace with fevered anticipation. While Frank is a good, obedient child who minds his elders and trusts in the wisdom of his grandmother, George is unashamedly greedy and impatient, often shocking his friend with the depth of his selfishness. He sneaks out when he's told to stay in. He thwarts his governess Mary's attempts to discipline him. He bullies younger children and throws tantrums.

The exhibition, organized to show off the wealth of England as the industrial revolution gained steam - excuse the pun - was seen as a way to showcase the potential of technology to pave the way to a better future. The Crystal Palace is a pious work, clearly written to remind the adult "Georges" of the world that their technological wonders could not offer true peace. It closes with Frank's dying friend Harry using the glass that encloses the wonders of industry as a metaphor for people reshaped by the hand of God: "...in this very furnace of affliction has my heart of flint, and my loose sand of character, that would not fix itself to any good, been melted down by God, to what you see."

It's basically an eighty page tract, and a nice little peek into the changing Victorian world.

Of all the precociously articulate language put in the children's mouths, my favorite bit by far is this mama's-boy fantasy, dreamt up by Frank. He's just become aware of just how put-upon George's mother is, and imagines himself switching places to serve as the doting son she so richly and desperately deserves.

"I should like to sit upon a stool beside her," said he to himself," and read some pretty book, and talk it over afterwards, and put her pillows smooth, and watch when she seemed tired, and then hold my tongue awhile, and let her fall asleep. I would walk on tip-toe in her room, and never talk too loud to make her head ache, and run of all her errands, and so try to save the servants trouble. Mary would not grumble then, I hope. I must persuade poor George to turn over a new leaf, and see if he is not more happy by it."

The fate of George is left open at the end, but I bet he snuck out of the house the first chance he had once the Hawkins dinosaurs were unveiled.

Guest Post: The Pocket-Sized Crystal Palace Dinosaurs

Today we welcome back guest blogger Rohan Long of the University of Melbourne, who joined us in February for a look back at Crichton's The Lost World novel. This time, he shares some cool relics from paleontology in the Victorian era.

---

Every reader of this blog must surely be familiar with the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. These were the life-size dinosaur models made around 1854 by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins in collaboration with Richard Owen and placed in a naturalistic, outdoor setting in Crystal Palace Park. They were the very first dinosaur models ever made. The story of these magnificent and ground-breaking models has been told extensively elsewhere, but I’d like to share with you slightly lesser known versions of these famous sculptures.

From their inception, Hawkins and his supporters saw the sculptures as being primarily educational and accessible to everyone – not just the educated elite. Hawkins thought of his dinosaurs as ‘one vast and combined experiment of visual education’. The sculptures were envisioned not as mere spectacle, but as a public educational resource to improve the mind, for all classes of Victorian society. The dean of Hereford, Richard Dawes, a cleric and educator, suggested to Hawkins that small-scale models of the dinosaurs be made for the purpose of scientific studies in schools and other educational institutions. In the spirit of inclusiveness, Dawes said:

‘He should be glad to see those models multiplied at a price which would enable them to be introduced into village and ordinary school, as every one could not visit the Crystal Palace, and he therefore hoped that specimens like those before them might be rendered attainable by those in remote and secluded districts, who would not have the advantage of witnessing the splendid and gigantic illustration of the extinct creation of the early ages of the world which would be there exhibited.¹

Knowing a good merchandising deal when he saw it, mineralogist James Tennant struck an agreement with Hawkins to produce the models, along with a series of six posters depicting the prehistoric animals that had been sculpted. Tennant, capitalising on the lucrative market of well-to-do gentlemen naturalists, and had built up a successful business selling fossils, shells, minerals and the tools needed to collect them. (By 1854, Tennant laid claim to the impressive and unique title of ‘Mineralogist to her Majesty’). Small- scale models were produced of the dinosaurs Megalosaurus and Iguanodon, the aquatic reptiles Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus (combined as a tableau), the pterosaur Pterodactylus, and "Labyrinthodon," an obsolete name for the temnospondyl amphibian Mastodonsaurus.

Hawkins' Iguanodon in miniature, held by the Tiegs Zoology Museum. Photo by Lee McRae.

Hawkins' Iguanodon in miniature, held by the Tiegs Zoology Museum. Photo by Lee McRae.

In addition to these models, replicas were made by Henry A. Ward, an American professor of natural science and dealer of in fossils, bones and other scientific specimens. Ward was advertising the models from at least 1866 and sold them from his business, Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, in Rochester, New York. According to Ward’s catalogue of the time, a full set of the five models could be purchased for $30, or individually from $5 to $10.²

We have two of these small-scale models in our Tiegs Museum Zoology Collection at the University of Melbourne, an Iguanodon and a Megalosaurus. They were donated to the collection sometime between 1916 and 1921 by trail-blazing zoologist Associate Professor Georgina Sweet. Due to the university’s historically close association with the British scientific establishment, I suspected our models were Hawkins’ originals rather than Wards replicas. After some detective work I found that although the two model types are very similar in their shape, there are differences in the models’ colouration. Ward’s models are a coppery-brown colour, with a green plaster underside. Our models, and all of Hawkins’ originals, are painted a glossy black, while the exposed plaster underside is a mottled white, grey and green.

Hawkins' Megalosaurus in miniature, held by the Tiegs Zoology Museum. Photo by Lee McRae.

Hawkins' Megalosaurus in miniature, held by the Tiegs Zoology Museum. Photo by Lee McRae.

While I was researching these models, I visited the collections of the Melbourne Museum to see their own Iguanodon (also a Hawkins’ original). A geologist friend of mine was there with the collection manager. He heard about my project and scoffed cheerfully; “Why are you interested in those things? They’re wrong!” This is a common reaction to these dinosaurs and I think it’s short-sighted. If I was writing this in the eighties, I’d be correcting Hawkins’ assumption that Iguanodon was quadrupedal and reconstruct it instead as the awkward, kangaroo-postured biped we all know and love. But paleontological research has brought us full circle and Iguanodon is again considered predominantly quadrupedal, albeit more lightly built than the Victorians had envisioned. Any student of the history of paleontological illustration should be wary of the notion that current reconstructions aren’t every bit a work in progress as their predecessors. Imagine how silly all of these featherless dinosaurs are going to look to the next generation of dinosaur devotees.

Footnotes

1. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, ‘On visual education as applied to geology’, Journal of the Society of Arts, (London), vol. 2, 1853–54.

2. Henry A. Ward, 1866, quoted in Jane P. Davidson, ‘Catalogue of casts of fossils (1866) and the artistic influence of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins on Ward’, Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science, vol. 108, nos 3–4, Fall 2005, pp. 138–48.

---

You can catch up with Rohan on Twitter @zoologyrohan and listen to his new musical project, Bronzewing, at bronzewing.bandcamp.com.

Crystal Palace, part II

I feel it incumbent upon me to open this appendix to Marc's Crystal Palace Park report by explaining to our readers that being referred to as an 'adorable mammal' is perhaps one of the highest compliments one could earn from him (grumpy misanthrope that he is)*.

With that in mind, here are a few more adorable mammals and other miscellaneous tidbits from the park which didn't quite make it into Marc's post.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: J.M.W. Turner

Apologies if this is out of left field, but whenever my current studies intersect with paleontology, I can't stop myself from sharing it. In my recent research into the foundations of the Arts and Crafts movement, a multi-faceted philosophy spurred by distaste for the excessive ornamentation of Victorian design and the early industrial revolution's devaluing of traditional craftsmanship, I inevitably met the figure of John Ruskin, an art critic whose writings were instrumental in the development of the views of William Morris, considered the most important figure in the movement.

One of Ruskin's major works was a multi-volume tome called Modern Painters, a book which has oddly enough received a bit of attention in the art and science blogosphere recently (see here and here). Ruskin is one of those figures I find particularly challenging to deal with: on one hand, he had a major influence and is still studied today. On the other, he was one of those 19th Century intellects who held firm against Darwin's revolution of thought, agonizing over humanity's demotion to the realm of "lesser animals."

Modern Painters is largely a defense of the painter J.M.W. Turner, and here is where we come to Ruskin's writing on the saurian beasts that so captured the imagination of England in the Victorian era. In a paper published by Prose Studies in 2008, Ruskin's Rewriting of Darwin, Andrew Leng proposes that Modern Painters V, published in 1860, is in fact the very first serious response to The Origin of Species, mirroring its "tree of life" motif. In the book's conclusion, which Leng calls "a paleontological apocalypse which dramatizes the triumph of the protean dragon," Ruskin brings all of his verbal weapons to bear as he bemoans the further defilement of the human spirit (and, by extention, the arts): first by the dehumanizing industrial revolution, now by Darwinian evolution. "Ruskin’s remorseless campaign against Darwin’s presiding emblem," Leng writes, "indicates his realization that The Origin had appropriated the almost universal symbol of the sacred tree of life, thereby investing the theory of natural selection with talismanic authority."

The dinosaurs whose existence was just now being revealed by the infant science of paleontology were seen by many as symbols of British power. Ruskin, however, saw this as a terrible irony; these dinosaurs were the great dragons of ancient times, symbols of avarice. In Turner's 1806 painting "The Goddess of Discord Choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of the Hesperides," the artist depicts the dragon guarding the titular garden in a way that, to Ruskin's eye, is nothing less than a premonition of Hawkins' Crystal Palace Iguanodon.

Here's Turner's original, from Wikipedia. You can hardly make out the beast at the pinnacle in the center of the image.

Luckily, Ruskin commissioned a detail engraving for his book.

Ruskin writes,

"There is something very wonderful, it seems to me, in this anticipation, by Turner, of the grandest reaches of recent inquiry into the form of the dragons of the old earth. I do not know at what period the first hints were given of the existence of their remains; but certainly no definite statements of their probable forms were given either by Buckland, Owen, or Conybeare before 1815; yet this saurian of Turner's is very nearly an exact counterpart of the model of the Iguanodon, now the guardian of the Hesperian Gardens of the Crystal Palace, wings only excepted, which are, here, almost accurately, those of a pterodactyle. The instinctive grasp which the healthy imagination takes of possible truth, even in its wildest flights, was never more marvellously demonstrated."

Having established Turner has a modern master; Ruskin was now imbuing him with the power of prophecy. I'm not sure that "healthy" human imagination has an "instinctive grasp" on any truths. If it does, however, Ruskin would be better served by another example. The Crystal Palace Iguanodon was doomed for obsolence less than thirty years after it was unveiled, when Louis Dollo's studies of the bounty of new fossils discovered atBernissart overturned scientific understanding of the animal.

Crystal Palace, finally

Eventually, one simply has to make the pilgrimage. Frankly, I'm not sure how I managed to delay it for so long. For anyone with an interest in palaeontology - and especially for those with an interest in palaeoart - a visit to Crystal Palace Park is simply a must. More than that - it's unavoidable. You will end up here, one day, staring up at Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' concrete monstrosities. Here is the Land Where Ugly Life-Sized Dinosaur Models Began. And it's quite wonderful.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Victor Meunier

Of the three founding members of Sir Richard Owen's dinosauria in 1842, Hylaeosaurus is easily the most obscure. Iguanodon is a classic, giving a spiky thumbs-up in dinosaur illustrations for well over a century. Megalosaurus is a fairly well-known wastebasket taxon, and was selected as the taxon of Earl Sinclair, blue-collar patriarch of the sitcom Dinosaurs. Hylaeosaurus? Despite being represented at the Crystal Palace exhibition, it barely rates a mention in most dinosaur books.

Hylaeosaurus, now known to be a primitive nodosaur of the Early Cretaceous, is probably best known from two artistic representations: The Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins sculpture and the set of German Tiere der Urwelt trading cards from about a century ago.

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' illustration of Hylaeosaurus for his Crystal Palace Exhibition sculpture. From Paper Dinosaurs.

F. John's Hylaeosaurus from the Tiere der Urwelt cards, obtained from Copyright Expired.

This latter illustration, like the other illustrations in the card set by F. John and Heinrich Harder, is based on an earlier one, which I've traced back to a French publication from about forty years prior.


Hylaeosaurus from Meunier's L'Animaux d'Autrefois (1869).

In 1869, french science writer Victor Meunier wrote an overview of extinct animals called L'Animaux d'Autrefois (Animals of the Past). Three years later, William Henry Davenport Adams published a translation of Meunier's text, expanded and revised for his English audience, called Life in the Primeval World. Adams writes that he believes it to be the first paleontology book published in English for a lay audience. I think he may well be correct in this. Samuel G. Goodrich published his Illustrated Natural History of the Animal Kingdom in 1859, but Adams focused exclusively on extinct creatures.

I presume that these woodcuts were done by Meunier himself, as neither the Meunier nor the Adams volume credits anyone else. Some are clearly based on earier works, such as this Megalosaurus, which owes a clear debt to Owen and Hawkins.


Meunier's Iguanodon is based on Mantell's and Owen's ideas of a quadrupedal, spike-nosed beast, but is one of the more fearsome of the early depictions, likely influenced by Louis Figuier's version which predated it by two years.


Of course, those flying dragons who so excited the minds of writers made an appearance, too, with Pterodactylus striking a pose and an awkwardly rendered Rhamphorynchus.





The watery world got some love too, with the rarely illustrated thallatosuchian Teleosaurus and the de rigeur Plesiosaurus, rearing swan-like upon the waves.







If these can be sourced to someone other than Meunier, please enlighten me, as I'd love to be able to dig even deeper. As always, you can find these in the Flickr Vintage Dinosaur Art group, along with hordes of other dinosaur images. For your convenience, you can even add it as a feed in your reader of choice. Easy peasy mac n' cheesy!

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs and more Dinosaurs - Part 2

Onwards with the second part of our exploration of this frequently unsettling book. Do take a look at part 1 and David's 2010 post on the artist (George Solonevich) for more background.

Dinosaurs and more Dinosaurs might boast a significant number of relatively obscure beasts when compared with similar books, but that doesn't mean it shies away from the staples. Here, for example, we have an Iguanodon, easily identified by its approving hand gestures. There's something particularly peculiar about the head on this beast - it seems to have borrowed the head of a theropod from a more sober book (in DaMD, it would have dozens of moray-like teeth and/or a snaking tongue). The oddly humanoid proportions of the forelimbs are, of course, entirely in keeping with contemporary depictions of the animal. All in all, this one isn't too 'out there'; it's not like it's scaling a tree trunk, flicking out a lizardy tongue and brandishing a feathered tail, for example.

Yeah, you saw that one coming, I know.  In any case, Hypsilophodon is hardly known for bringing the crazy; the poor little creature is normally depicted scurrying around (or running hastily away from) much larger, more awesomebro species. Sure, there was the infamous 'tree kangaroo' Neave Parker depiction, but even then it was just standing around, looking suitably placid and harmless. Leave it to Solonevich to make even this most innocuous of animals into a creeping, crawling nightbeast with many-jointed limbs, a feathered (or is that beaver-like?) tail and Venom's tongue. By comparison, the gangly, vertical Ornithomimus on the right looks very conventional indeed, and there is something quite beautiful about its lovingly 'sculpted' legs.

Speaking of the conventional versus the very unconventional, the majority of the book's ankylosaurs follow the era's rather dull tendency to produce squat, short-tailed, no-necked armadillo-turtles. This more unusual depiction, then, is surely to be welcomed, even if it looks still more outlandish. The bony nodules are superbly painted - it's almost possible to get a tangible sense of how rough this animal's hide is - but I'm sure you're nevertheless wondering what on Earth this thing is supposed to be. Well, it's Pinacosaurus (here identified as Syrmosaurus). Hey, at least it's got a nice long tail, right?

Now here's a fun exercise in pointless hypothetical alterna-history - what if, just as Waterhouse Hawkins was sculpting the mighty Crystal Palace monstrosities, someone had tripped over a hadrosaur skull weathering out of a hillside somewhere? What would have happened had Hawkins hurriedly incorporated it into his dino designs? I like to think that the result would have looked something like the above. I'm particularly fond of the melty feet and hugely thick neck and tail. Magnificent stuff.

While the above Anatosaurus (aka Anatotitan, aka Edmontosaurus) is furnished with the full-mega-portly-body treatment, only the head of Pachycephalosaurus is shown. There's a good reason for this, of course; Pachycephalosaurus isn't known from very much else, so any full-body reconstruction would be subject to a great amount of speculation, and might end up looking a bit freaky some decades down the line.

I love its angry little face. Bless.

If you want marginocephalians in all their glory, you'll have to consult the ceratopsian pages. The above animal has a masterfully textured toad body. Somehow, it's ended up with the (not all that bad, for the time) head of a Styracosaurus. I'm sure it's a mask.

Of course, bring in the ceratopsians, and you also have to present their perpetual foes. Opposite Styracosaurus we have the frightful Gorgosaurus, a cross between a hen, a snake and a Cornish pasty. The character that Solonevich brings to this hunchbacked killer pastry is fantastic; note also the way in which the viewer's eye is expertly drawn to that hideous, bristling maw. Nevertheless, there's only one animal we could possibly end on...

Disappointingly, Solonevich's Tyrannosaurus isn't particularly unusual for the time; there are definite shades of both Neave Parker and, especially, Zdenek Burian. This Rexy is a dead ringer for Burian's monochrome Gorgosaurus, in particular, right down to the gleaming, greasy skin textures. What the prey is intended to represent isn't mentioned. Dave Hone noted that its head looks remarkably like those on contemporary reconstructions of small pterosaurs like Rhamphorynchus; the combination of this mismatched head, extremely thin skin-flap neck and leggy bipedal body is a bit of a mystery. We can only assume that, as with so many of the other illustrations in this book, Solonevich just thought it looked pretty damn...interesting. And it certainly does.

Alas, poor Papo

As some of you may already be aware (and if not, then sit up straight and pay attention at the back), I have a certain hobby that involves collecting certain plastic/resin figures and sometimes reviewing them for a certain website based on their aesthetic qualities, anatomical accuracy and so on. It's a fun way to acrue a large collection of colourful tat and fritter away money that, let's face it, I'd probably just be splurging on booze otherwise.

Anyway, one of the most popular manufacturers of dinosaur collectibles is the French company Papo. While they make no claim to scientific authority or accuracy, their models are nevetheless stunningly sculpted and painted, and often pretty decent anatomically anyway (I particularly like their Styracosaurus). There have been some howlers, but in those cases it's easy to see where they've gone wrong - basically, the sculptor has followed popular, but mistaken palaeoart memes.

And then recently, this was announced.



Oh boy.

The question I wish to put to you, o Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs readership, is this - where on Earth do you think the inspiration for this thing came from? This wouldn't be an issue if Papo were just churning out lazy, poorly-made figures - but they're not. In fact, the fine details and immaculate paintwork on most Papos can't really be matched at their price point. Even when they produce anatomically dubious figures, they at least look pretty.

But this one - it looks like a Crystal Palace plesiosaur with a mosasaur head grafted on, Frankenstein-stylee. Some people have excused it on the grounds that it's 'retro', but Charles Knight was painting more accurate Tylosaurus restorations back in 1899.

Naturally, the figure has sparked off a lively discussion among the prehistoric-animal-toy-collecting community (stop laughing), with some even questioning why Papo are bothering to attach scientific names to figures like this.

However, I'd like a little outsider opinion, especially as I know a number of artists read this blog. As always, please do comment.

Finally, I'm sorry for dragging this silly toy nonsense over to Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs. Superior content (from David) will resume shortly.

Thanks to Christophe for acquiring the catalogue scan.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Private Lives of Animals: Prehistoric Animals - Part 3

Since we've already looked at everything that's more important, let us now turn to the Cenozoic mammals of the wonderful Private Lives of Animals book on extinct beasties. And where better to begin than with a ground sloth with hair so wonderfully painted, you'll want to reach through the screen and run your fingers through it? (Just watch out for fleas and dandruff.)

Back in Action

I've returned from England and now I'm slowly settling into being home and having my daily responsibilities to tend to. It will take a few days to get back into a groove, just as it took me some time to accept that my main concern on vacation was fun and relaxation.

It was an eventful couple of weeks, with a flood of reporting on the new paper suggesting that the small chinese dromaeosaur Sinornithosaurus may have been venomous. Well, "suggest" might not be the right word, as the paper is titled "The birdlike raptor Sinornithosaurus was venomous."

Of course, the Jurassic Park connection was pounced upon by plenty of reporters (Matt Martyniuk pointed out this beauty, which actually says the dinosaur "spit venom" into its prey). One of the best breakdowns of the topic I read was at the always dependable Dinosaur Tracking, where Brian Switek made the point that as there is not a single archosaur (i.e. crocodiles, pterosaurs, birds, and dinosaurs) known to possess this sort of venomous bite, the evidence is going to have to be overwhelming. This topic will surely be debated hotly, and hopefully a wider examination of other dromaeosaurs' teeth will help clear it up.

Part of my plane reading was the recently published Dinosaur Odyssey by Scott Sampson, and I'm really enjoying it. Sampson is really making an effort to flesh out the Mesozoic beyond the "who ate who" picture the media often sticks to. I don't want to get ahead of myself as I'll be posting a full review when I've finished the book, but I'll say that I'm very impressed and entertained by the book so far.

I unfortunately wasn't able to do anything dino-centric on the trip. We tried to make it to the Crystal Palace to see the nineteenth century dinosaur sculptures, but weather-tormented traffic around London was a mess that day and the park was closed by the time we got there (the same kept us out of Down House). I'll settle for posting this photo I took of a Baryonyx skull at the Natural History Museum in 2008.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Iguanodon Juan

The famous Waterhouse Hawkins Iguanodon at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham. By Willm23, via Flickr.

Yesterday's post dealt with the small town of Maidstone in Kent, whose civic coat of arms bears an Iguanodon. The first of the herbivorous dinosaurs known to science, a specimen discovered in Maidstone in 1834 was a boon to the young science of paleontology. For today's Vintage Dinosaur Art post, I figured I'd share some of the earliest Iguanodon restorations.

Dr. Gideon Mantell, a physician, natural historian, and the first truly dedicated dinosaur paleontologist, published his Wonders of Geology in 1838, which included a full description of the Maidstone beast. It also included an incredible illustration by John Martin, depicting Iguanodon in Mantell's conception of its natural environment.


John Martin's frontispiece for Mantell's Wonders of Geology, 1938. From the Linda Hall Library's Paper Dinosaurs online exhibition. Click to Megalosize.

The Megalosaurus preying on poor, wailing Iguanodon is quite the striking figure, blessed with bulging goggle-eyes and a cleft cranium. I can't help but be reminded of "Uncle Scrotor" from This Island Earth. Clearly, Iguanodon just should have hugged the guy, and he wouldn't be in such a sticky situation. At this time, I should also point you toward Mantell's own go at restoring Iguanodon, which is a true classic.

Here's a similar illustration, published in 1863 in french scientist Louis Figuier's The World Before the Deluge. The artist is Édouard Riou, whose Megalosaurus is decidedly unlike Scrotor. In this depiction, Iguanodon is a bit pluckier, deciding that if he's going down, it won't be without a morsel of sweet Megalosaurus meat.

Édouard Riou's Iguanodon and Megalosaurus, from El Bibliomata, via Flickr.

So when did these early conceptions of Iguanodon taste the bitter fruits of obsolescence? They would be served by Louis Dollo, a Belgian paleontologist who oversaw the excavation of Iguanodon skeletons discovered in 1878 in a mine in his home country. It was Dollo who proposed the upright, bipedal posture that would come to dominate depictions of ornithopods for the next century or so. A notable exception is the work of Gerhard Heilmann, who in the 20's drew ornithopods in a posture more or less like the modern bipedal/ horizontal-backbone/ stiff tail image the scientific evidence has constructed.

More: The banner at the site Paleoartistry features a nice line-up of Iguanodon's evolving image, and the rest of the site is well worth a thorough browsing, including incisive criticism of many paleoartists' work. Strange Science is also an invaluable resource for learning about the evolution of paleoart. A Vintage Dinosaur Art post from last May features John R. Jones' representation of Iquanodon's changing posture.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Naturgeschichte Geologie und Paläontologie

Valeriana Solaris has shared some great scans from an old German natural history text on her DeviantArt account, bundled together in a .zip file. Naturgeschichte Geologie und Paläontologie was published in 1888 by J.A. Schreiber, and its dinosaurs are heavily indebted to Cope's Laelaps and Waterhouse Hawkins' famous Crystal Palace sculptures of Megalosaurus and Iguanodon.

Though this book is dated 1888, I wonder if the engravings are from an earlier edition, as with the digs at Bernissart in 1878, the knowledge of Iguanodon had increased and it was now believed to have a bipedal "kangaroo stance."



A scene from the Triassic includes an early, almost bear-like take on the temnospondyl Mastodonsaurus and Belodon, a phytosaur.





The book also includes excuisite reproductions of famous German fossils such as Archaeopteryx, Compsognathus, and Pterodactylus.



The book's treatment of the Holocene is particularly strong, a dramatic scene of mastodons and musk oxen grazing in a mountainous landscape as a caveman defends his family against a marauding bear.

Valeria has shared these at high resolution for use by collage artists and other creative types. Head over to her DeviantArt account to check out the large files. She has also written a blog post about it.

Updated 2/5/11: Added more context to the Iguanodon illustration.