Crystal Palace Dinosaurs

The Dinosaur Court in Crystal Palace Park, south London, is the world's first life-size sculpture park devoted to prehistoric life and has been Grade-I listed since 2007. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins built the roughly 30 figures between 1852 and 1855 in close consultation with the anatomist Richard Owen, who had coined the word dinosaur twelve years earlier. At the opening dinner on New Year's Eve 1853, twenty-one scientists dined inside the belly of the half-finished Iguanodon, a piece of Victorian showmanship still quoted today. By modern standards the figures are anatomically wrong, four legs instead of two for the Iguanodon, a bulky pose instead of a slender sprinter, but that is precisely what makes them historic. A short circuit leads past the dinosaur islands, with panels explaining each correction made by later science.