Stones To Stories: The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs with Mark Witton

Plymouth, summer of 1841. Richard Owen stepped before the British Association for the Advancement of Science and coined a word that would reshape our understanding of the deep past: Dinosauria. This episode follows that word from Owen’s meeting hall to South London, where sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins turned fragmentary bones into life-size stone giants.
I am joined by palaeoartist and author Mark Witton for a conversation about the history of the site and then Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs trustee Andrew Brady, and Jurassic Outpost’s Caleb Burnett and I go for a walk through the world’s oldest surviving prehistoric animal park.
For the extended interview with Mark Witton, you can hear it by subscribing to the Plus version of the podcast in Apple Podcasts or clicking the ‘support the show’ link below.

Guests

Mark Witton
Palaeoartist, palaeontologist and author
Markwitton.co.uk

@mark_witton

Andrew Brady
Trustee of the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, the charity formed in 2013 to conserve and celebrate the geological court at Crystal Palace Park. Follow the ongoing restoration and find out how to support the project.

Cpdinosaurs.org

@CPDinosaurs

Facebook

Links
Report of the 11th Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Plymouth 1841

https://archive.org/details/reportofeleventh42lond

The Art and Science of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs by Eleanor Michel and Mark Witton
All author proceeds go to the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs.

https://cpdinosaurs.org/projects/the-art-and-science-crystal-palace-dinosaurs

The Dragon of St Paul’s by Reginald Bacchus and Cyril Ranger Gull
The 1899 story referenced in the episode, in which a prehistoric creature thaws from a block of ice and runs amok across London. It can be found in Richard Fallon’a brilliant prehistoric story collection here:
https://amzn.eu/d/0ceDiAs4 (this is an affiliate link so might earn commission when using)

Transcript

Owen Coins "Dinosaur" In Plymouth

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Imagine you are sat in a meeting hall in the southwest English city of Plymouth. It's the summer of 1841, and you are with your learned colleagues and gentlemen scientists of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. When a thin, slightly balding man in his late 30s takes to the stand. He is about to coin a term that will up-end our understanding of prehistory. The man is Richard Owen, and the word is dinosaur. I'm Roland Squire, and this is the Pirates Don't Eat the Tourists. Richard Owen was born in Lancaster, England in 1804 and started his studies as a surgeon apprentice at the Royal College of Surgeons. He would later go on to be in charge of the Natural History Department at the British Museum before successfully lobbying government to open the Natural History Museum that stands still to this very day in South Kensington in 1881. He is someone that seems to have had this innate power for anatomy, and he was able, so it was said at least, that even from one bone he could describe with great accuracy what the animal looked like and how it was put together, how the bones fitted together. He's probably most famous for though today coming up with the term dinosauria, which he did in that meeting in 1841. Now, in front of me here, on my computer, I've currently got that report. Report of the 11th meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held at Plymouth in July 1841. And this was printed by John Murray Press in 1842. Right, let's just make it a bit bigger. So looking at the contents, we've got uh objects and rules of the association that goes on for quite a few pages. There's uh treasurer's accounts, it's the the meetings, the the nitty-gritty of running this association. Um and then further down we've got the reports of researchers in science. There's reports on poisons, uh the uh leaf tide observations. Uh there's not many pages for that. Um, here we are. So if we go page two of the document, uh the contents, you get the report of British fossil reptiles by Richard Owen Esquire. So let's make our way to that

Inside Owen’s 1841 Fossil Report

SPEAKER_04 3:44

page. Scroll through all the offices, the various bits, right? I will put a link to this document in the show notes because I think it's worth just anybody just having a look at these historical documents. If you've never looked at one before or don't think that you have access to them, you do seem to have landed on a page with a load of Ah, here we are. Dinosaurians. I'm on page 102. Uh so uh initially he starts off talking about the the characteristics, the um the reason for why this term is going to come about is because he believes that structurally, anatomically, they are very different to what uh he's found in part one. And so they deserve their own classification, their own naming. And in this bit, the combination of such characters, some as the sacral ones, altogether peculiar among reptiles, others borrowed as it were from groups now distinct from each other, and all manifested by creatures far surpassing in size the largest of existing reptiles. You're not kidding. Um is presumed to be deemed sufficient grounds for establishing a distinct tribe or suborder of Saurium reptiles, for which I would propose the name of Dinosauria. There we are, it's in print 1841. Just that paragraph of how he's broken that down and then leading to that's that's his cold open to all of this. And there's a little asterisk next to it, so we so we understand the derivation of the word, and it is so it's from the Greek meaning fearfully great and lizard. So fearfully great lizard. I always thought it was terrible lizards or terrific lizards, but no. Fearfully great.

Fearfully Great Lizard And Scientific Feuds

SPEAKER_04 5:47

That's an interesting term that he uses because really his naming of this is seen now as being in direct conflict to what Charles Darwin would put forward for evolution. Owen believes firmly in I mean he's a creationist, so he firmly believes in the fact that evolution can't happen, because that would take out God from the equation. He believes that animals change over time, but not in the way that Darwin does and the way that now we understand they do. And so to name them dinosaurs and call them fearfully great means that the r reptiles that we have in present day are lesser. Uh so yeah, there there it is. Another thing that is important in the Owen story is that he was famous for clashes and feuds with many prominent scientists of the day. I'll cover that in more detail later on in the series. But Owen had a falling out with Gideon Mantel, um, and later in the century with uh Charles Darwin over his views and beliefs of evolution. And actually, in fact, in this very report that I'm looking at, there is a recorded spat between Owen and another member, um Naismith, about who spoke about a certain term first. And we've got all the letters in this document between the two, and uh Owen is uh exceptionally forceful with his demands that the president should expunge Naismith's paper from the meeting and uh not just give proper attributation but that actually the whole thing should be dismissed as plagiarism. It is clearly a dog-eat dog world, and it seems that Owen, many, many times, despite his stature and appearance, came out as the bigger, more aggressive dog. And the reason for that is because Owen had a lot of influential friends, and therefore, when the centerpiece of Prince Albert's 1851 great exhibition that happened in Hyde Park, uh the Crystal Palace, was given a permanent residence in South London, uh, Owen was tasked with overseeing a project to bring animals from prehistory back to life in sculptural

Mark Witton Guides Crystal Palace Origins

SPEAKER_04 8:24

form. Now, to give me some background to what happened there and what would become known as the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, I reached out to the incredible paleo artist, paleontologist, and author Mark Whitten, and I asked him where you can actually find them.

SPEAKER_00 8:43

You'll find them in the southern suburbs of London. So they're in a in a park that's called Crystal Palace Park now. This was a dedicated space built in the 1850s to hold an enormous sort of World's Fair type event. That uh it was it was a permanent installation that was built off the back of another event called the Great Exhibition.

SPEAKER_04 9:07

Oh, yes, of course, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:08

And in the middle of the great exhibition is this enormous glass building. People liked it so much they said, let's make this thing permanent, let's move it to a dedicated space in London, and we're gonna call it the Crystal Palace, and it's gonna have these huge park grounds. Within the palace itself, there were all uh many different types of exhibitions showcasing all sorts of stuff to do with Victorian culture, Victorian understanding of the world. So you could walk through parts of ancient Egypt, you could walk through recreated ancient Greece, you could go through the Renaissance, and if you went out into the park grounds, not only did you see fabulously landscaped sort of open space to walk through with these enormous fountains, but you could also go and see that how the Victorians understood prehistory. And the idea was that you would walk through different parts of geological time. You wouldn't just see dinosaurs here, but you'd see sculptures of all sorts of extinct animals. So you'd have some fossil mammals, you have the uh flying reptiles and marine reptiles along with dinosaurs, and then you'd have animals that were even older than dinosaurs. Alongside this were geological displays. So you had these simulations of coal outcrops and of iron outcrops. And these were course related to how the Victorians built their empire.

SPEAKER_04 10:23

You know, this is probably as important as anything else that they were doing there, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

Absolutely. The guidebooks would say, you know, the coal is what's powering the train that brought you to Crystal Palace, and the the iron is what built the rails that the train ran on. So the idea was that these uh exhibits, both the prehistoric and the historic, you know, it would be an educational experience. At the same time, it was also a commercial venture. So you're actually paying to get into the Crystal Palace, you're paying to see the dinosaurs. So this is one of the first times that we had this mix of sort of education and commerce. And it was a bit of an experiment, and it didn't really pay off, to be honest. The Crystal Palace, I think it only started to make money in the 1930s, shortly before the building burned down. But the dinosaurs have had this continued legacy because they were the only part of the big enterprise that survived until the modern day intact. So you can still go to Crystal Palace Park, you can see the foundations of the building, things like the fountains are gone, the other recreations from history are all long gone. But in the little corner of Crystal Palace Park, you can still walk through the geological court pretty much as people did when the Crystal Palace opened in 1854. Amazing.

SPEAKER_04 11:33

And what sort of impact did that have on Victorian society? Was it a a big attraction of its day?

SPEAKER_00 11:39

I think so, yeah. I mean, this is it it was certainly uh uh uh well liked enough as the great exhibition, and there was a big public push for for this to this to occur. You know, that this is the politicians of the time were a bit uncertain about it, but certainly among the public, there was a big push to to have the have a permanent, you know, great exhibition to keep it keep it going and form the Crystal Palace Company. And it was certainly very popular. The reasons for its you know struggling is commercial struggling. I I think that there's a multifaceted discussion to be had there. It's all about when it was available to the public, you know, with the the people working incredibly long hours back then, people didn't have as much free time as we have now. Yeah. Issues to do with um the availability of alcohol, this sort of thing. I don't think they had an alcohol license for a long time. So for certain people, yeah, you know, if you've got your your Sunday afternoon off, you're not going to Crystal Palace, you're gonna go to the pub. So there's all sorts of reasons that that affected why it wasn't uh a commercial success. But the the dinosaurs were a big hit, with the public at least, and they liked hearing about them being built. They were showcased regularly in newspapers, so even before the park was open, the dinosaurs were being used to advertise Crystal Palace. Right, okay. I'm sure many people will have heard of the New Year's Eve banquet in one of the iguanodon sculptures, which it wasn't the sculpture that's still in the park today, it was actually the clay, life-size clay sculpture that they used to get everything in place, and then there's a what we have in the park now is essentially a cast of that that's been built, rebuilt in in brick and and and concrete. But of course, what a great publicity stunt that was. And it got a full page spread in the Illustrated London News, and there was all sorts of other coverage by the newspapers. The Guardian was following developments of uh of Crystal Palace because it wasn't actually the dinosaurs, the the geological court, they weren't actually finished by the time that Crystal Palace Park opened. And the best record we have for that is the Guardian's continuing interest to say, oh, today in May 1855, Waterhouse Hawkins is installing the last of the pterosaur sculptures, and it describes how he took it across that the the the a number of the sculptures are on an island, and so it describes how Hawkins was floated across on a little raft with the pterosaur sculpture, and we're sort of holding on to it. So who is this Waterhouse Hawkins? You end up talking about this so much we just forget that let's let's let's let's uh you know forget to introduce the main man. So we're talking here about Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, who was a 19th century natural history illustrator, and he's also the the man who led the team who built the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. So there are actually a couple of people working on the geological court. We can't give Hawkins all the credit. The geological illustrations were overseen by Thomas Anstead, who was a geologist. He was helped by uh another individual who had helped her with the with the landscaping. So we've got a team for the geology uh side of things, but then on the paleontological side of things, we have Hawkins doing the sculpting of the models, and in theory, he's overseen by Richard Owen. And I say in theory about Owen's involvement because the historic record doesn't really support the amount of influence that he is sometimes said to have had. There are plenty of books that say that Hawkins was really being directed very closely by Owen, and some sources even go to say that you know this was all Owen's idea. Okay. You know, that the entire idea for the geological court came from Owen.

SPEAKER_04 14:58

Were they written by Owen at all?

SPEAKER_00 15:00

No, it I mean he he seems to have barely ever visited them while they were even being built. And we say this because there are letters from Hawkins and from the Crystal Palace Company, i.e., the people who are paying paying Owen to be the consultant here, and and they're writing letters to him saying, can you please come and have a look at these things at Hawkins' building? Can you please do your job? What history records and what people have been saying about the Crystal Palace dinosaurs aren't quite the same thing. And this is um a few years ago I I helped to write a book on this. It's called The The Art and Science of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs. And this is one thing that we're very keen to clear up in that is that Owen was certainly involved in the project, but he was essentially a sort of a celebrity scientist. He was just a stamp of authority to put over everything. It seems that the real paleontological intellect behind the creation of the of the extinct animals was probably all Hawkins. We think that he was doing, yeah, he was coming up with the designs, he was doing the research himself. We know that he wrote to people like William Buckland to say, can you give me some dimensions of Megalosaurus? This is the kind of thing that you'd expect Owen to have have been doing. We know that Owen was working on Megalosaurus around the same time that Hawkins would have been building his version of Megalosaurus, and yet Hawkins is reaching out to other scientists to say, can you help you?

SPEAKER_04 16:18

Yeah, why why why do you think Owen wasn't that involved then?

SPEAKER_00 16:22

I mean he was a busy man. I'm not not not to say that he he has a has a good excuse, but obviously he was he was a sought-after, busy individual. You might have thought the whole thing was a little bit beneath him. Right, but okay. I wonder. I mean I'm not an Owen expert, and that there's lots to you know lots to talk about with which you know and lots of lots of opinions, you know, that there's a there's an attempt to I I found this, you know, when publishing in this area, sometimes you get comments back from you know the reviewers of your papers. Uh and I've had people accuse me of sort of towing the line of like, oh, you know, Owen's the villain and he's uh you know trying trying to trying to drag his name through the mud. And my attitude on this is that I don't I'm not an expert on Owen. All I can say is the the history of this site, what we know about it, suggests he wasn't really doing his job. You can fit that into whatever model of Owen you like as a sort of misunderstood, complex historic figure, or someone who was you know quite a dartedly underhand, you know, uh you know, selfish individual out to out to further his own own good. All I'll say is that for whatever reason he he didn't do the job he was being asked to do.

Hawkins Versus Owen On Creative Control

SPEAKER_04 17:27

You mentioned in your your book actually that the opening of the Crystal Palace and the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, kind of the impact of that and its combination of, you know, as you say, commerce and art and science is sort of equatable to the release of Jurassic Park.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

I mean in the in the day it was. Um these were, for a long time, these were people these were what you know that what lay people at least thought dinosaurs were like. Um we have to remember that in the 19th century, dinosaurs weren't as popular as they are today. People wouldn't even have really thought about these as dinosaurs. They would have thought about them as you know, primordial animals, as you know, uh uh things from beings from deep time. They wouldn't have necessarily been thinking about them specifically as dinosaurs. So, of course, when we talk about crystal palace dinosaurs today, dinosaurs needs to be in quotation rules because we're really talking also about several, you know, um several species of mammal, flying reptiles, marine reptiles, dysynodonts, temnospondils, plesiosaurs, teleosaurs, and ichthyosaurs as well. So this you know, dinosaurs here is being used in its loosest possible term of extinct, you know, any sort of extinct animal. But but certainly, yeah, in in the in the 19th century, these reconstructions were very influential. And so even in places like America, people were selling models of the Crystal Palace reconstructions. So, yeah, you know, around the world, when people were thinking of dinosaurs, whether they were directly being shaped by Crystal Palace or or or not, the artwork was being copied from Crystal Palace. It was coming to turn to them sort of through secondary and tertiary sources. So these reconstructions were really filtering into the culture of popularised paleontology. And this in itself is quite fascinating because one of the things that people know about some of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs is that they don't really look anything like modern interpretations of those animals. And there's some nuance to this because some of the reconstructions there are actually really good and they really stand the test of time. So the extinct mammals, they're not a million miles away from how we would restore them today. The marine reptiles, again, they're not too bad. We'd there's some tweaks we'd make here and there, but he has he had pretty good fossils to be looking at.

SPEAKER_04 19:37

They seem to be quite abundant, those fossils as well.

SPEAKER_00 19:39

Indeed, and uh abundant and relatively complete. So there was no question about, well, is that the real proportions of plesiosaurus? Because we had a complete plesiosaurus that Hawkins could work with. Whereas with a dinosaur, you had this really quite alien animal form that was coming through the geological record to us initially in bits and pieces. And yet we can look back with historic hindsight and say, aha, actually, there are some specimens that Hawkins or if Owen or Gideon Mantel was also involved in this very briefly. You know, if those guys had really looked at this thing very carefully, they might have pushed dinosaur science ahead by by several decades had they looked at this one specimen carefully enough. But of course, it's really easy to say that in hindsight once we've got you know 200 years of additional expertise on our side. Generally speaking, Hawkins didn't have much to work from. And so it meant that the visions of dinosaurs he came up with were quite different to what the actual animals were like. But the thing I would emphasize here is it's very easy to look at everything he got wrong, but I think it's more interesting to look at what he got right. And there's so much about all three dinosaur species that he reconstructed that he was actually quite precedent about. So they're upright stance, for instance, they're all walking on columna limbs. They're all clearly reptilian. And we know that he was looking at things like uh modern iguanas for anatomical reference, but he was able to override those modern analogues, if you like, by saying, Okay, I'm going to look at an iguana, but this is an iguana that stands like a rhinoceros with its limbs down from its body. He he was clearly considering the musculature of the animal. So if you if you're lucky enough to ever get close to them, you can and you can see this a little bit, you know, even from the pathways that surround the island, but you can see on his dinosaurs that he's sculpted in a muscle plan that conforms to you know the sort of standard tetrapod muscle plan that we would expect. So these are very carefully produced models with all sorts of details and and little nuances to them.

SPEAKER_04 21:37

How how long did they stay accurate and what about them still holds up today, do you think?

SPEAKER_00 21:43

So they didn't last all that long, to be honest, in terms of their you know scientific accuracy. Within uh really you know a decade or so, we started finding dinosaurs in North America that were hinting at bipodality for big ornithopods, so things like iguanodon were getting their sense that. These animals are actually walking around on their back legs and with they have significantly shorter forelimbs. And the same with with theropods, we we found tryptosaurus in uh the the northeast of the United States, and this of course being a tyrannosauroid has got very short forearms and much longer hind limbs, and so that that's showing oh, that kind of bear like a megalosaur at Crystal Palace, or almost certainly nothing like that.

SPEAKER_04 22:24

Do they actually make a skeleton that look like the creatures that are in Crystal Palace at any point? Or are they going off theories about what the bones could look like?

SPEAKER_00 22:33

Good question. This this is part of the the story that we don't have much data for. The planning and the design phase has not been uh part of us through history in any great detail. We know that they built scale models first, which were in theory sent over to Owen and he would then you know give give his uh sign-off on the whether or not there were you know skeletons and things being produced. We we we certainly don't have any evidence of that. I mean my my gut feeling is probably not, because when you have a look at Hawkins' other projects where we do have a little bit more archival data, there isn't any indication that he was producing detailed skeletal sketches or anything of the of the animals he was reconstructing. Hawkins uh does have his hand in building the first ever dinosaur skeletal reconstruction of Hadrasaurus. So there is that there is an element of him having an understanding of dinosaur skeletal anatomy. But I think that's an exception. You know, if you look at his his uh he does sketches of things like pterosaurs and marine reptiles and things, and he's just going straight, or what we have evidence of him doing is going straight to the the outline of the body and the the full flesh reconstruction. Yeah, it's something that we'd like to know a lot more about. He certainly had it in his head as to what was going on under their skin.

SPEAKER_04 23:45

So I'm looking at the dinosaur fiction this season, and I was wondering whether you'd come across any stories that actually featured the dinosaurs uh from Crystal Palace.

SPEAKER_00 23:53

Yeah, so they they they do they they creep their way into educational books, some of which are written for children and they have a sort of story element to them. So rather than just telling the the the history of life on on a in a sort of fairly dry, uh totally factual fashion, it'll be characters taking children back to to look at the the age of monsters. Uh and of course they also enter into pop culture through things like the the satirical par cartoons of Hunter. Right, okay, yeah. And magazines of that of that of that type. So they they're used in a sort of a satirical sense. So yeah, they they they do start to penetrate aspects of of you know beyond pure science and beyond pure education. They they also be they have some influence on how people depict dinosaurs uh in general. So just in terms of their uh their influence on wider culture, people start copying them a lot. So if anyone was writing about dinosaurs in a fiction con fictional context or or otherwise, there's a good chance that for several decades after Crystal Palace this is what people thought dinosaurs were like. But of course, it's as as you'll have you know understand from from your own reading, in the 19th century the dinosaurs weren't what they uh are today in terms of their cultural impact and their popularity. When we think about the uh you know prehistory nowadays, we really go very quick quickly to dinosaurs. But in the uh 19th century, you know, we're talking about prehistoric saurians, we're talking about prehistoric animals in a much more general sense. People weren't you know, when when the the advertising and the promotion for Crystal Palace, the dinosaurs weren't really referred to as dinosaurs, they were just you know like primordial reptiles and you know uh primitive reptiles, this sort of thing. Yeah, so that we did we didn't really start using the word dinosaur as a descriptive term for them uh until much later.

SPEAKER_04 25:37

Because I came across the there's a good story, the Dragon of St. Paul's by two amazingly named journalists, uh Reginald Bacchus and Cyril Ranger Gull. And in there, this like winged creature is thawed out from a big block of ice and runs amok across London, and part of it, one of the like a bystander who sees it screams that it's heading towards uh Crystal Palace. There's no actual mention of the dinosaurs, but it's clearly a like a satirical nod. And the fact that you don't have to even mention the dinosaurs there, but it proves that the readers at the time would have known exactly what they meant just by that reference.

SPEAKER_00 26:11

Yeah, and of course, there's also um similar just you know, sort of sort of small sip snippets here and there in in other literature, things like uh bleak house, you know, Charles Dickens bleak house that mentions the megalosaurus trying to set the mood. And again, as you as you say, there's no sort of elaboration in particular of what a megalosaurus is. You just assumed people know what it is, because these these were a big deal at the time. Among the public at least, you know, they they were a big deal and and and widely liked.

SPEAKER_04 26:37

And did Crystal Palace spark like imitators across the world where did other countries start opening up like dinosaur parks and uh things like that?

SPEAKER_00 26:45

Uh really not actually. There were a few efforts to to do uh bits and pieces like this. So there was actually a uh it didn't get very far, but there was plans for building uh models of prehistoric animals in uh in parts of France before Crystal Palace, but I don't think that ever moved beyond sort of a conceptual set stage. In in Russia, much later in the 19th century or the 1880s, there is a sort of indoor uh exhibition with uh sculptures of prehistoric animals, some of which are based on other bits of paleo art from the 19th century. But yeah, they're few and far between. It isn't really until we get to the 20th century that the the the dinosaur park as a concept is uh really popularized, and you start seeing concrete dinosaurs on the side of the road in an in North America and the World's Fair and this sort of thing. So it's it was um you know uh not entirely unique throughout the entire 19th century, but it it was certainly a you know it's not many of them. And Crystal Palace is is the only of the things that were sort of planned or or executed during the 19th century. Crystal Palace is the only one that survived. Uh so it's a very special place.

SPEAKER_04 27:53

I really hope you enjoyed that interview with Mark and thank you so much Mark for your time. Um that was fantastic. I'll I'll be uploading our full interview next week for subscribers where we chatted about his paleo art background um and much, much more. It's it's incredible. You can also find his artwork and buy a print for yourself, which I urge you all to do by visiting markwitten.co.uk. That conversation really just made me want to visit the Crystal Palace Park and have a look at these sculptures myself.

Arriving At Crystal Palace For Tour

SPEAKER_04 28:29

So I got in touch with Andrew, a trustee, and the friends of the Crystal Palace, the dinosaurs, and arranged a tour. We are now approaching Crystal Palace. So after about three train cancellations, I finally made it. And also, my visit coincided with Caleb Burnett from Jurassic Outpost being in the UK. So he joined me on the tour. Hey! Nice to meet you.

SPEAKER_02 29:12

I'm good. Yeah, how are you? Sorry I'm late. No, no, where is it all? I have nowhere else to be.

SPEAKER_04 29:17

Cool, right. Try and find Andrew. That might be Andrew. Andrew! This is the first time for both of us seeing these sculptures and Caleb's first time in the UK. So let's get on with it.

SPEAKER_01 29:33

My name is Andrew Brady. I'm a trustee with a charity called the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, who were formed in 2013 to during a period where they were looking pretty sad, and we I guess have a group of locals enthusiasts and scientists who banded together to work out how best to conserve them. Right, okay, okay, nice.

SPEAKER_04 29:58

Let's make our way to the to the pump.

SPEAKER_01 30:01

So this yeah, this this station was built um when the Crystal Palace was moved here, and part of the reason why the Crystal Palace was moved here was because one of the kind of board members of the Crystal Palace Company owned land here. Oh right. And he was also um senior in the London to Brighton Railway. So the station that we just we we just came out was um was like created as an offshoot of the London to Brighton Railway to serve the new Crystal Palace.

SPEAKER_04 30:30

Okay, because I was going to ask why why this part of London? Because South London, was this a particularly salubrious or kind of a recreational spot in Victorian London?

SPEAKER_01 30:40

This was not this was not part of London.

SPEAKER_04 30:41

This was yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:43

Um so if you look at most old maps of London, they don't go they don't go out this far at all. Yeah, this was an area called uh Penge Place or Penge Common, and Penge Place was owned by Leo Schuster, I think his name was. Who was yeah, he was also who was a a founding member of the of the Crystal Palace Company, who who formed to purchase the the great exhibition building that was in Hyde Park, and so a mixture of hit him owning part of this land, the the the cut the views out to the kind of Kent and Surrey Hills being very pleasant, and the the fact that a a line could be built fairly um fairly easily off of the main London London to Brighton line.

SPEAKER_04 31:32

Right, okay.

SPEAKER_01 31:33

This was it was viewed that train would be one of the major uh transport methods to actually get here. Because Crystal Palace was originally in Hyde Park, yes, because yes, the um the the when the great exhibition was built, which was a big project of Prince Albert, and it was nicknamed the Crystal Palace from I think Punch magazine. Right, yeah. Um because of how it kind of glistened.

SPEAKER_04 31:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:56

And it was only going to be there temporarily. I assumed it was just carried here by horse, by many horses and carts. The original black and iron, and it was expanded on, so yeah, although the original Great Exhibition building was longer and wider, it was kind of lower and had less kind of surface area inside. So it was it was um it was a much grander build. And we're walking past the the athletics stadium, which is in a sort of is in a sort of ball shape in the ground. And this was one of the original giant water fountains. So when you when you look at the um when you look at a lot of the old illustrations and photographs, in front of the palace you see a range of of water fountains, and there are there are two main ones off of the central walkway, and the site of those is now um the athletic the athletic stadium on one side and the national sports centre on the other side. Yeah, so that would have been the dramatic kind of opening elbow to Yeah, these were the huge, these were the main fountains that you know to rival Versailles. Right. Lots of projects can be traced back to let's let's let's compete against the French, pretty much. That's a big thing to do. A large part of the Crystal Palace Park site was its collection of kind of water pipes and steam-powered pumps to pump the water around the park because the park is on a gradient, which makes things tricky. And you'll often see photos that have the giant water towers inside of the palace uh designed by Zambard Kingdom Brunel. And those are the ones, yeah, those that's part of the big that's part of the big water fountain infrastructure. But they realized even before the palace was finished that they wouldn't be able to afford to run the fountains on a regular basis. And when Queen Victoria came to open the palace in June 1854, they weren't they weren't finished. So she had to come back a little bit later on to for the kind of grand opening, and then they owned the whole system of kind of steam engine pumps and everything ended up only being used for kind of special occasions and royal visitors, and then these main these main areas, these main fountain, the the the natural bowls of the major fountains were uh grassed over, maybe 40 years after the palace opened. And we're walking past um somewhere called Cape Hull Manor Farm. And this is where we think um Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins had his workshed. Oh, okay. So this is kind of holy grand. Yes. Although it was it was a wooden structure, so nothing has ever been found of it. But from accounts of people visiting, we believe it was it was here, so quite near the um quite near the area where he was he was very busy in his life for for about two years.

SPEAKER_04 34:59

And they and so the dinosaurs weren't actually finished by the time it was maybe a bit like the fountains, they weren't actually finished by the time.

SPEAKER_01 35:08

No, they were not finished. So you've got you can pretty much kind of split the the site between in terms of the an in terms of the extinct sculptures between the secondary island with the reptiles and the tertiary island with the more recent mammals. And the mammals were not on site, right? Okay, so they were still in his workshed when the park, when the park opened, the water in the lake was not um was not present either. Okay and most of the reptiles I think were pretty much in place. I think there were some pterosaurs that were possibly not there quite yet, but also they hadn't finished painting. People who would visit on on the on the main railway line would see the you know the larger sculptures, and they would all they would there's there's accounts of them being either wet red or white.

unknown 35:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 35:59

And that corresponds to their their base coats. Right, so pretty much painting was um was going on until the waterpowers Hawkins left the Crystal Palace project in uh mid to late 1855. Right, okay. But the other thing to the other thing to say is, you know, we're we're walking past trees and grass and foliage. A lot of this was mud. Okay. Um we're also walking on a uh a paved surface, yeah, and um a lot of that even wasn't in place when the when the palace opened. So particularly for journalists coming to preview what was going on in early 1854. Um, you know, I think people had a people had a job actually actually getting here. There were bits that were fenced off, bits bits of grass that were being grown. So um it was a challenge. And in one one account, Waterhouse Hawkins calls the secondary island Mud Island to kind of give give an idea of of what the situation was because this was all landscaped and the lake, which the you know, which most of the sculptures are very near, was was built as a as a reservoir for the for the water fountain system.

SPEAKER_05 37:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 37:09

Um and as part of the water fountain system, it would the the level of the water around the sculptures would would rise and fall to kind of um to kind of mimic ancient tides. So you would see some of the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs sometimes partially submerged. Um as the Victorians thought, the Victorians thought that the plesiosaurs in particular were much likely to head on land almost like seals.

SPEAKER_05 37:35

Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:36

The and the ichthyosaurs slightly were could also do that maybe sometimes, but were were much more the kind of ocean, yeah, the ocean guys.

Walking The Geological Court Through Time

SPEAKER_04 37:46

So we've just rounded a kind of top of the hill, and we can get our first view of of the sculptures. My first time seeing them, they're quite my first time as well.

SPEAKER_01 37:56

Incredible. Yeah, so so yeah, we we have a view now of the kind of secondary island, and where we are is we are backwards in geological time. So the air was if you're a Victorian coming to visit, this whole this whole site was a was it was an educational project in geology and paleontology. You're walking through rocks of different ages brought from actual rocks brought from different parts of the UK to the site for the purposes of um of showing them in this geological court. And you've got there's there's rocks from Yorkshire, from from Derbyshire, from Bristol, and the whole the whole aim was that you would walk through geological time with your little handbook, and you would look at the sculptures that were placed on the rocks of the same formation that their fossils were were found in.

SPEAKER_05 38:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 38:49

And so roughly how it was described in the in the guidebook was you've got the uh you've got the kind of three geological periods, you've got the primary, secondary, and uh tertiary. So the bit we're standing on kind of now, and a little bit that we'll we'll go around in a bit is kind of primary rocks.

SPEAKER_02 39:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 39:08

And then the secondary rocks start with the actual sculptures.

SPEAKER_04 39:13

Ah, brilliant. I mean to the. Yeah, I mean, I've only actually ever seen them in like textbooks and stuff like that. Yeah, it's I don't know, it's just we we're probably getting a better view of them now than they actually did when when that you, you know, if it was mud and you know it's nice with all the trees and that, you know, nice paved path, we're probably in a better experience than the Victorian.

SPEAKER_01 39:35

Yeah, I mean, there's there are very few photos that exist of the site. Um, there's a couple of main ones that are used for reference, and you know, they show a very barren landscape. You know, you get a couple of photos in the kind of very late um 19th century where things grow pretty fast. Okay. And things growing pretty fast is one of the conservation challenges of the site, as with anyone's um as with anyone's back uh garden.

SPEAKER_04 40:01

And I can see people actually working on the sculptures now.

SPEAKER_01 40:04

So this is yeah, this is one of the advantages of of coming on a weekday. Yeah, so what we have we're looking at the the very tip of the secondary island. What on the what in the Crystal Palace guidebook, which was written by Richard Owen, um, was this the this is the area called the New Red Sandstone. And what we're looking at are the two arguably the the word wrong is obviously a key word which orbits any any conversation about the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. And the the the labyrinthodon and the dicinodont, which you see behind them, are the are the key wrong species, uh much more than much more than the uh dinosaurs. The labyrinthodon captured imagination because it's effectively a giant frog. So people were calling it a cross between a frog and a cow, a frog and a rhino. And this was a big thing about the Victorians. This is what kind of this is what caused a lot of kind of uh flexion, I suppose, in that these creatures were something crossed with something.

SPEAKER_04 41:09

Yes. Of which no current I mean you get that in current happiness. Yeah, I'm I'm looking at um Journey to the center of the earth. Yes, and with the when they describe the ichthyosaur and the plesiosaur, it it it is described as like five or six different animals. Yes, and they can't take it as its own thing, they have to kind of work with their frames of reference, I suppose.

SPEAKER_01 41:31

And with the with the with the labyrinthodon and the and and the dicinodons, only the skulls were really found at at the time. And um with the labyrinthodon, Owen in his again in his guidebook correctly was veering towards this is skull as looks like a bit like a a salamander, so a bit like an amphibian, but because of the confusion around footprints that were found at at many in many of the kind of fossil areas, there was a confusion over it how it kind of got around. So what you've got is effectively you've effectively got two confused species, resulting in a giant frog. And often what you would see, what you'd see in um old art of the labyrinthodons would be its footprints behind because its footprints were extremely famous as part of its kind of story. Okay. So in the end, Watthouse Hawkins, looking at everything, came to came to the conclusion that we're seeing.

SPEAKER_03 42:25

The surname Owen brings to my mind Owen and Jurassic World. Yes. And you were talking about how they're sort of a conglomeration of creatures and in Jurassic World, we have the hybrids. Yeah, so like it feels a little bit full circle. Which that's just very cool. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:42

So yeah, the the labyrinthodons are interesting, I think, for the Victorians because the Vic the Victorians world, the a lot of the articles on the Victor on the Chrysopallis dinosaurs, when people first come to see them, is almost the kind of journalists in their Victorian prose manner, beginning this epic tale of ancient life. You know, once upon a time the earth was a, you know, the earth was a molten ball going through to fishes in, you know, fishes in the sea. And the the labyrinthodons represent, for the Victorians, you know, the first vertebrates on land. Um so trying to imagine a world in which creatures are starting to populate the earth, uh, rather than just the ammonites of the sea or the fishes, the fishes of the sea.

SPEAKER_04 43:28

And it looks like they've sort of just crawled out of the water. This is this is life taking its first step.

SPEAKER_01 43:35

Yes, but I mean very much, I mean, I think Warthouse Hawkins was aware of um the fact that they would be on the water's edge and that the water levels would raise. And because of the way that vertebrate fossils were were found, you know, the Victorians understood that the that fossils were the fossils of land animals were being found because they were being washed away. You know, they this was, you know, they'd be they'd be formed, they'd be they'd be ripped. River banks, there would be estuaries, and so they would they would they associated a lot of the prehistoric life with naturally and automatically living by the water's edge. And then we have a collection of plisosaurs and ichthyosaurs, and there was an article that said that Hawkins did What House Hawkins did have a plan to have an ichthyosaur and plesiosaur in their classic stereotypical fight.

SPEAKER_05 44:26

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 44:26

So one of that again, another another vision from the very first paleo art, you know, Juria is you know that the ichthyosaurs and plisosaurs were locked in eternal combat, eternal enemies, and I it might well be that it was too complicated to make something like that. The Victorians were, I think, very wowed by these. Um, they they're this they're the subject of a lot of of a lot of kind of compliments in the articles. I think partly because their form is much more well understood at that time because of the much more complete fossil. You know, the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs were well understood from Lyme Regis for you know quite a few years. The ichthyosaur in particular is not usually referred to as a fish lizard. And again, that the kind of those kind of combinations of traits, complete with paddles, I guess, really kind of um captured the Victorian's imagination. And also the understanding from looking at them that these were kind of these are probably very swift, agile creatures. And with the plesiosaurs, they're often called serpent, you know, serpent fish in the literature, partly you know, because of their their snake-like neck. But a lot of the a lot of the journalists that visited like equated the snake-like neck with being swan-like. So they had this these images of the plesiosaur kind of kind of swimming in shallow water with its head kind of looking around like a swan. Uh, obviously that the flexibility of the neck is probably one of the main areas that the plisisaurs aren't as accurate as our current uh understanding. And we also think, I think generally these are quite, these creatures are quite, the plisosaurs are quite slim as well compared to what we now we now understand them to actually be.

SPEAKER_04 46:10

Yeah, I mean you were at the Natural History Museum a couple of days ago and you're looking at the at those. I mean, that that would have been translated directly onto this, those those skeletons that Mary found. And then this is the real thing.

SPEAKER_01 46:24

And the you know the art the art of the these you know the the the depictions of them here is not is not arguably not that much different from the the actual paleo art um of the of the kind of time as well. People are looking at this through the lens of creatures that were here before man, and creatures that were on a on a you know in a world not fit for man.

SPEAKER_05 46:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:48

And these creatures made way because they were you know they were primal, they were inferior, they were not uh destined to be in the natural order of things. And I think so a lot of the descriptions of the of the dinosaurs that carry into um carry into later in the 19th century are quite wretched creatures, quite almost almost kind of almost kind of doomed and hapless. And whereas with the you know, with the ichthyosaurs, there is maybe because they can imagine dolphins and how creatures with fins and flippers would would live in the and seals, you know, how they would imagine them them being. So it's a it's an interesting contrast, I think.

SPEAKER_03 47:26

I feel like they're an early monument to our fascination with yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:31

You I mean someone called them the the the Stonehenge of Paleontology. Yeah, yeah. This is like kind of this is kind of ho like kind of sacred ground, but this is when you see them. I mean, I'm a you know, I am not a paleontologist, I have an interest in the history of science, but as kind of when you know the story and just but when you see them as objects, you can turn around a kind of corner and you can see them every single time every single time you're like, whoa. Yeah. And it's almost like I think if you you know if you like trains or if you like planes and you see your favourite things in museums, and no matter how many times you see them, you are taken aback because you kind of know you know their story and you know how kind of tenuous their existence is, particularly outside with the elements.

SPEAKER_04 48:18

Yeah.

Facing The Dinosaurs And Their Legacy

SPEAKER_04 48:19

And now we get to Yeah, so we have just this this is our John Hammond moment.

SPEAKER_01 48:23

We have just we have just passed um a pair of of of uh uh teleosaurs.

SPEAKER_04 48:28

And suddenly there we were, in front of the four dinosaur sculptures. First up, megalosaurus with its huge mouth full of sharp teeth and a huge muzzled hump between its shoulder blades. So it looks like it's uh stalking its prey, which happens to be the Haleosaurus with its uh back to us to accentuate its imposing spines to the megalosaur across its flank. And finally, two massive iguanodon with their famous thumb spike incorrectly placed on the end of their nose. They really are fearfully great.

SPEAKER_01 49:10

There's no official record why there are actually there are actually two iguanodons. It could be differences of opinion of how they how they stood, how they lived, and also because iguanodon was by far the most famous of the three at that particular time. Yeah. Because I guess the most of it was um the most of it was found.

SPEAKER_04 49:30

Yeah, and I've so on my beach in Bex Hill, yes, they have the iguanodon footprints, amazing, and then you know, those coupled with a little a little bit um further away in West Sussex, you have them finding the teeth, yeah, Gideon mantle, yeah, and yeah, it's just it that is my image of what a iguanodon looks like, no matter sort of what how wrong or incorrect it is. This is that pose of it with its looking kind of up yeah, keeping a bit kind of guarded. Yes, yeah, it's front pore on a uh on a bit of uh what's that palm tree or something?

SPEAKER_01 50:12

Yeah, yeah, which is that's been replaced many times over the years. So yeah, the megalosaurus generally, in in terms of when people first saw this and when people were writing up the site, this I guess was kind of the sort of top dog because it's the biggest and it's the carnivore. Yeah, you know, and it's it's often again the the when you don't know something, you're thinking it's something crossed with something, and you can take your pick, you know, you can uh hi hippo crossed with cross crossed with a a a crocodile, lion crossed with an elephant, you know, they're looking at they're looking at this as a you know as an extremely ferocious beast. But what they're also looking at this as, I think, is again, when I we're looking at this and we're thinking this was a you know, this was a predator, we're we're we're imagining it, you know, with it in its current form, you know, much more what we understand it to be. But often the you know the often the the adjectives used to describe it were kind of you know colossal, um slow. There's I really like one adjective which was it's trying to describe the megalosaurus walking down an old river Thames and it's hobbling. As if hobbling is its default, as if as if hobbling is what a megalosaurus does. You know, it's afflicted because it's it's kind of it's kind of doomed. Yeah. You know, there's obviously that in the Victorian's eyes, these guys are slow, sluggish, in locked in eternal combat with each other, but again, at a probably probably at a slower rate than the than the marine lizards. I think that the mega I mean the the the hump being one of the main features which Waterhouse Hawkins kind of kind of tried to decide how can a kind of quadruped support such a huge you know, such a huge jaw of teeth. And you have the kind of, you know, you have the hump that has been formed.

SPEAKER_04 52:10

Yeah, and I suppose it it then gives it that sort of I don't know, like a little bit like the hunchback in Notre Dame, that sort of character. Yeah, that doomed creature and uh, you know, Dickens. Yeah. I don't know whether whether there's any records of him actually coming here and looking at the Megalosaur. I'm sure he would have done of out of interest, or whether just sat at home and read about it in the newspaper.

SPEAKER_01 52:31

Yeah, we we were looking at we were looking at this. We were looking at doing some historical research, and there was we think he might have visited he might have visited Warthouse Hawkins workshop. Okay there was a an article that was attributed to him uh that actually it turned out wasn't written by him. Um but yeah, I mean particularly we'd be we're always interested in finding out if certain people visited the site. We've got no record of Charles Darwin visiting, uh which we would really like because Darwin was involved in the Crystal Palace. He was a patron of the cat show. Him and his wife. His wife would visit a lot more often, and he would come and visit animal shows because his other interests were in particularly in uh poultry and pigeons and chickens, and um the Crystal Palace would have shows on. It would if there was a show up to to kind of exhibit something like flowers, cats, dogs, animals, it would be held at the Crystal Palace. And uh so Charles Darwin did visit did visit a few times, but we've got no we've got no letters or archival evidence of him visiting. And a lot of the history of the palace, a lot of the history of these dinosaurs and Owen and Mantel and Warthouse Hawkins, it kind of predates the the beef he had with Charles Darwin and Charles Darwin's allies. So Darwin is often, which much to my relief is often external to the Crystal Palace dinosaur stories, because then the you know the arguments with Owen and Owen and Darwin and all of that, that kind of phase of Owen's life, um, I'm happy to talk about separately. Yeah. Because uh talking about Owen is exhausting because he was so busy, yeah, and he was everywhere, and he was many things to many people. Yes. Yeah. And of course, you know, he he he's at the head of the he's at the head of the table in the iguanodon dinner. Yeah. He does a very eloquent speech. Um he raises a glass to you know his his his rival Gideon Mantel, who he always viewed as being um, you know, he always viewed Mantel, I think, as being less professional. He's quite an amateur in its eventry, doesn't it? Slightly lower, lower class. Class is a big thing back there. Yeah. You know, some of the stories about the rivalry where he Owen is paying off certain fossil collectors, similar to how the how the you know the what happened in the in the bone wars, you know, is true. A lot of Owen's views on credit in particular are, you know, is if you've found something, it's irrelevant as if you as until you've actually published something. So if he beats someone, if he beats someone to the you know, to the print, to print, then that's fair game. But then also some of the some of his legacy, I think, is you know just the amount just the amount of work he did, the amount of species he looked at, the amount of papers he published. There's a lot of there's a lot to be said for I think he made himself so busy around this period and after that he be that often part of his often accused of kind of ghosting people and just losing correspondence, and there is evidence to say that he just becomes absent-minded. He gets older and he is he's trying to be everything everywhere. And even at this point, he's got his eyes on a natural history museum.

SPEAKER_04 55:51

I suppose that's so the um Crystal Palace that burns down quite dramatically. That's just before the Second World War.

SPEAKER_01 55:59

Yeah, the Crystal Palace burns down in 36, um 1936, which is a kind of key moment in kind of London history and the kind of memory of anybody that lived in London. I think it could be seen from miles away. Winston Churchill called it the end of an era, kind of like the end of the kind of a visual ending of the Victorian kind of legacy. So I think one of the attractions of the dinosaurs and the geological, the wider geological course, is that um you know the Crystal Palace is extinct and as a you know as a kind of as a as an attraction and as a as a concept, and these creatures are extinct, but these kind of transcend the extinctiveness is an official scientific term. And that that's one of the kind of that's one of the alluring features, I think. And they could they they could have easily vanished because everything else is gone, like a lot of this is gone.

SPEAKER_04 56:51

This is these are the only things that really remain of time.

SPEAKER_01 56:54

Yeah, but even there was a there was meetings of uh there was meetings of a meeting in I think 1870 where one of the one of the members of the Crystal Palace Company said that these sculptures had lost their much of their of their truth. So I think what they were looking at is are these a laughing stock now compared to our understanding, our increased understanding particularly of the of of of sort of dinosaur form? Um and should we do something something about it? And I think it it his words were misread to mean that they needed fixing. Like I say, they were broken or they had cracks, um, and it turned out that that wasn't taken forward. Um but again there was a pa there was a book there was a paleontology book in the 1880s where the the intro to the to the book calls these unauthorized replicas rather harshly. So, you know, with all of the findings going on in the later in the later 19th century, these these are viewed as um these are view these are viewed as old and these are viewed as wrong. But nostalgia is creeping in, yeah even back then, which is um which is which is really good to see. The other thing we had as well is um we had these have suffered from people trespassing and and vandalizing, and you know, people were climbing on them not that long after the first open. You know, there was enough there was no fence to really um lock things off. There was often access via a water via a kind of stepping stones. And I think sometimes the Victorians would just jump jump to the lake into in in in times of lower water. So the first official uh damage of uh I think is of a of a of a boy sitting on uh the snout of a teleosaurus. And I think they would also uh they would also break off the uh teeth. Okay. Um again, and maybe a mixture of vandalism and a mixture of maybe they thought they were original teeth and valuable things. Right, yeah. Um for many, for many decades people would climb inside the uh uh dinosaurs as well. So they've got access hatches underneath. Or like a kind of effectively a circle with a with a well now we're with a metal grill. But again, when access was much more common and security in the park was different, you know, you speak to a lot of local people and they've got memories up to the up to the 80s of just of just of just playing in them. And you know, kids were playing them, teenagers were smoking them. They sometimes light fires in in their mouths to make them look like you know they were belching smoke. Dragons. Yeah. And because the uh teeth were made of lead, that wasn't maybe the best thing. In hindsight, not not the best thing. Because obviously the um these are the main four dinosaurs are hollow. Okay. They've got a kind of they're made of a combination of well, a kind of concoction of bricks and roof tiles and drain tiles. Again, I think wartime talkings just had them available on site. You've got this kind of hot hollow, hollow core with kind of uh metal supporting rods, and so you could climb in them quite easy. There was an urban myth that somebody died, that a child died in them, or they were used as kind of wartime shelters. Um so yeah, the the the mythology of them is quite interesting.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:15

So, yeah, just standing here, and you've got the water right in front of us, and that is a clear divide in the Victorian's mind of where dinosaurs are and where those stuff are, is a more um palatable um form of paleontology.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:29

And what you've got sitting in what you've got sitting in the water right in between these two islands is the mosasaurus. Ah yeah, I couldn't even see that. One of the one of the main the main OG casualties of the KT extinction, you know, one of the kind of top dogs. Again, one of the one of the kind of key species to understand extinction.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:48

And the dinosaurs have their back to us at this point. Yes, so again, that's a good point.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:53

So they're turning away, that's no more. What's interesting is that obviously, you know, in our eyes now, the the dinosaurs here are long extinct. Yes. Uh by by by the the the time, you know, the the main extinction happens. But obviously they weren't to know that. No. And the Victorian's view is the Victorians, I think, understood that labyrinthodons and kind of Triassic stuff was, you know, there were no labyrinthodons when there were when there were when there were dinosaurs. So the Victorians understood that the the anti-deluvian world, anti-deluvian being a key word in terms of before the flood. So you'd often see the word either antediluvian or pre-adamite. Okay. And so originally that's this is this is the Victorians' minds being expanded. That the antideluvian world was not just a simple, simple world, it was it consisted of stages, it consisted of layers where some things found in layers, some layers were not found in other layers. So one of my favourite sculptures is probably the Anopliterium coming out of the water because um unfortunately we can't get up there right now, but it looks like it's effectively shaking itself dry. And again, it's a testament to Waterhouse Hawkins. Yeah, I think that's what comes out of all of these, is that they are really good, like there's a lot of art involved in them and uh conscious construction, not just about the paleontology of them, but there's there's some arguments with with the mammals, you know, Hawkins has much more much more reference uh to kind of kind of go on, and there's maybe some arguments that maybe he was not late not necessarily lazy, but uh didn't just kind of just kind of went with features involved in kind of current mammals, but they are still amazing pieces of work. And what we've got around this area is unfortunately fewer sculptures than I than Walthouse Hawkins wanted. So we've we can we can see in optotheriums and paleotheriums, we can see the megatherium, we've got some Irish elks over there. We know Hawkins was planning um calyptodons, dinotheriums, civatheriums. In a tribute to Owen, he was planning a a mower and a dodo. Again, that would be quite simple. And newspaper articles say he was working on a a a mammoth in eight in July ish 1855 when he was told to say money's gone, please leave. Thank you very much. Uh newspapers claim that the foundations had been lit, but no eviden no illustrations other than a small clay model in a museum, which may or may not have been linked to this site. Yeah, the the mammoth is lost in lost in time. So yeah, I think the Crystal Palace was expensive to maintain as a as an undertaking. They had to pay a lot of money back to the London and Brighton Railway for the railway station and the railway line that had been built to facilitate visitors. They had originally, in terms of coming here to kind of eat food and have refreshments, their initial set setup was not to the visitors' uh test. Money issues in the in the fire that happened, money issues in the maintenance of the um yeah, the general maintenance and gardening and uh the upkeep, and not only the upkeep of the you know, the outside sculptures and gardens, but the just you know the the Crystal Palace was full of the Crystal Palace was full of thousands of replica sculptures of um of art of historic art and sculpture from museums around Europe that was arranged in in kind of in different courts. So you had a kind of Roman court, a medieval court, various different um ages, and so all of these all of these sculptures needed uh touching up painting. Um so it was um yeah, it definitely had a heyday, but I don't think because of the concentrated impact that the great exhibition had in the in the in the months in the mere months it was open in Hyde Park. Maybe the golden period was the original period where there were the first major major concerts happening. You know, there was a there was a the main concert, main concert area could hold thousands of musicians and singers. So it was extremely grand, but it was hard, I guess, to keep up that that that grandness as time marches

Jurassic Park Boom And How To Help

SPEAKER_01 1:05:25

on.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:25

I also had to ask Andrew about the impact of Jurassic Park's release in 1993.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:32

Jurassic Park changes everything in terms of I think dinosaur views in. If you just do a simple exercise in counting newspaper articles that mention keywords about dinosaurs over the years, 93 is an is an explosion. Absolute explosion. And so in so when Jurassic Park comes out, the park is under different owner, different management. It's still kind of technically owned by by legally owned by Bromley County. There are Park Rangers. There is an organization called the Crystal Palace Foundation, who still exist to this day. They are local enthusiasts and historians who create a charity at the end of the 1970s, I think, to raise awareness of Crystal Palace, of the richness of the history, to collect kind of oral histories of people's memories of the sites. They were responsible for opening up a museum, which is was just up the hill from the station. And when Jurassic Park comes out, there's a you can you can sense there's a massive opportunity for them. And dinosaurs are huge now. This is where dinosaurs, you know, this is the spiritual hum of dinosaurs. Its impact is, you know, it's almost like a fossil record of newspaper article. Jurassic Park is a it's almost like a it's the start of a new age. And you see plenty of people around here, plenty of kids with teenagers with Jurassic Park t-shirts, and obviously I'm talking to I'm talking to some some biased guys. But interestingly, we did have so we did an event, um, we did a series of events about 2023, I think, 2022, in the park. The park was filled with like lights, uh Christmas lights and like lantern. And um one of the visitors to our stand was Colin Trevor. Oh nice. Yeah, so he said hi. We he's got a Christmas dinosaur t-shirt. He was just I think he was just visiting. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:30

My huge thank you to Andrew for the tour. Both Caleb and I really love learning about the site, and it was just the perfect way to experience these incredible sculptures for the first time. Now, I asked Andrew the best way to support the friends, and he said simply awareness of them was one of the best ways. He's right because I'm still amazed that more people don't know about them, and that's a real shame because they are fascinating and should be as widely visited, I think, as places like the Natural History Museum. You can also find out more about the restoration that is currently taking place there. It's very nearly finished, by following them on Instagram and Facebook at CP Dinosaurs or their website which is cpddinosaurs.org. Another way to help support them is by purchasing Eleanor Michaels and Mark Whitten's book called The Art and Science of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs. They gave up their author rights so that all the money goes to charity. Links to that and everything else that I've mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes below. But my road trip is not yet at an end. As next time.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:51

I know, you know, I came to the museum as a kid, as a as a as a visitor when I was about seven, eight years old, and I don't remember much about that visit, but the f the image that sticks in my head the most was walking in the front door and seeing Dippy, the dinosaur, in the main hall. Um that image is burned into my mind, and I'm I'm sure for a lot of people it's that feeling of awe at the scale of the building.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:19

That's right. Next week I'm bringing you my interview that I recorded at the Natural History Museum. In it I explore its history and impact on the dinosaur story. But until then, I'll just say thank you very, very much for listening and goodbye.