The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs with Paleoartist Mark Witton

 I’m joined by palaeontologist, palaeoartist and author Mark Witton to explore the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs in Crystal Palace Park: what they are, why they were built, and how they turned fragments of fossil evidence into full-bodied animals that shaped public imagination for decades. 

We talk about the Crystal Palace as a 1850s experiment in spectacle and learning, where geology, industry and empire sat right alongside “primordial reptiles”. Mark explains why the public loved the models, how the New Year’s Eve banquet inside an Iguanodon became a masterclass in Victorian publicity, and why the usual story about Richard Owen directing everything does not match the surviving letters. 

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Guests

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

@mark_witton

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Presented and produced by Roland Squire

Theme music: Caleb Burnett (@calebcomposed)

Cover artwork: @thejurassicartist

Find us: @JurassicPiratesPod on Instagram 

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:07

Hi Mark, thank you so much for joining me. What I was wondering for people who might not be familiar with your work, if you'd just like to introduce yourself.

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Yeah, so uh my my name's Mark Mark Whitten. I'm a paleontologist, uh paleo artist, and an author. I'm based in the southern UK, and people might know me from a few different things that I've done over the last few years. Um, you might know me from my books, and so I've written books on things like flying reptiles. My first book was on pterosaurs. I've also done lots of books on paleo art, so I did the paleo artist handbook a few years ago. I've written about the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, so the history of paleo art as well. Uh more recently, I've done some books on dinosaurs. So I did a book, big book on T-Rex called King Tyrant. I had another book come out last year with Dave Hone on Spinosaurs called Spinosaur Tales. So you might know that side of my work. Um you also might know me as a artist, so I'm uh you know fairly regularly posting new new artwork online. I've been producing paleo art now for about 20 years in sort of the professional realm. And I also do consultation. So uh I was a consultant on prehistoric planet, walking with dinosaurs, a few other things I can't tell you about just yet. But uh yeah, so I'm making a living doing all sorts of things.

SPEAKER_03 1:11

Great. So today I'd love to talk to you about the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. So if we can start with the basics, really, please, and tell us where they are and also what are they?

SPEAKER_00 1:21

So the Crystal Palace dinosaurs are probably familiar to lots of your listeners. I think if you're into dinosaurs, you've probably come across them somewhere. You'll find them at the very beginning of lots of dinosaur textbooks where they're introduced as part of the history of the study of dinosaurs. But a lot of time they don't get a huge discussion, so many people don't really know much about them, like when they were built, where they're based, etc. You'll find them in the southern suburbs of London. So they're in 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. It was it was a permanent installation that was built off the back of another event called the um called the the Great Exhibition. And this was in 1851. So you have the Great Exhibition, 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 many different types of exhibitions showcasing all sorts of stuff to do with Victorian culture, Victorian understanding of the world. So you go there and you could see recreations of history as the Victorians understood it. So you could walk through parts of ancient Egypt, you could walk through recreated ancient Greece, you go through the Renaissance, and if you went out into the park grounds, not only did you see fabulously landscaped, you know, very attractive, 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 as the Victorians understood it. So 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 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 outcrops and of iron outcrops. And these, of course, were related to how the Victorians built their empire. This is you you were go uh you're looking at a coal outcrop and in the guide books.

SPEAKER_03 3:35

Absolutely there, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

Yeah, the guidebooks would say, you know, the coal is what's powering the train that brought you to that 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 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. So it wasn't commercially successful. But the dinosaurs have had this continued legacy because they were the only part of this big, what's the word I'm looking for, this big enterprise that survived until the modern day intact. So you can still go to Crystal Palace Park and you can see the foundations of the building, and you can see that that some some of the layout of the park still exists. But 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, it's called the geological court, the little part that the dinosaurs are included in. You can still walk through the geological court pretty much as people did when the Crystal Palace opened in 1854.

SPEAKER_03 4:54

Amazing. And what sort of impact did that have on Victorian society, in in particular kind of I suppose moving to Crystal Palace and was it a a big attraction at the of of of its day?

SPEAKER_00 5:04

I think so, yeah. I mean this is it was certainly uh well liked enough as the great exhibition, and there was a big public push to 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 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 it's 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, but the the people working incredibly long hours back then, people didn't have as much free time as we have now. Issues to do with 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, you know, if you've got your your Sunday afternoon off, you're not going to Crystal Palace, you're going to go to the pub. So there's all sorts of reasons that that affected why it wasn't a commercial success. But the the dinosaurs were a big hit, with the public at least. There's maybe something we can cycle back to later on about the academic response. But the public really liked them. And they liked hearing about them being built, so they were showcased regularly in newspapers. So even before the park was open, the dinosaurs were being used to advertise Crystal Palace. So there were, 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, and then the uh the the outside of the clay model was cast and put into place around the the more robust structure. And so it was the clay model that everyone had New Year's Eve, their their New Year's Eve banquet in. 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 that the geological court they weren't actually finished by the time that Crystal Palace Park opened.

SPEAKER_03 7:11

Right.

SPEAKER_00 7:12

So, 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 a number of the sculptures are on an island which is surrounded by water, and so it describes how Hawkins was floated across on a little raft with the pterosaur sculpture, now he's sort of holding on to it. So yeah, the fact that there was continued newspaper interest means that there's it shows us that the A, there was a lot of public interest at the time, and B, for us as historians of science, it gives us, you know, lots of information that otherwise wouldn't have been recorded.

SPEAKER_03 7:51

Yeah. So is it so who is this Waterhouse Hawkins? Is it Benjamin Hawkins?

SPEAKER_00 7:56

Yeah, that that's correct. Yeah. So you end up talking about this so much you just forget the let's let's let's let's 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 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 another individual who had helped with the landscaping. I'm struggling to remember his first name. It's Campbell. But we don't know much about Campbell. He's uh he's he's lost a history. We have a name and that's it.

SPEAKER_01 8:37

Right.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

Well which is why I can't really remember his his first name because it's just we have we don't we don't really talk about him because we don't have anything to say. 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, who of course is a famous paleontologist. He's the man who coined the term dinosaur. Owen is what was the preeminent natural historian in Britain in the 19th century. So you know, you could make a case for him being the pre-eminent natural historian in the world at that time. Yeah. So he he was contributing to all sorts of areas of zoological research, both looking at modern animals and extinct animals. He described all sorts of fossil animals that we know about today, all sorts of dinosaurs, all sorts of marine reptiles. 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, that the entire idea of the channel. Were they written by Owen at all? No. I mean he he seems to have barely ever visited them while they were even being available. 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 they're writing letters to him saying, can you please come and have a look at these things that Hawkins is building, can you please do your job? So what history records and what people have been saying about the Crystal Palace dinosaurs aren't quite the same thing. I think this is uh 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 a sort of a celebrity scientist. He 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 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 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?

SPEAKER_03 11:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

Because I don't have the data here.

SPEAKER_03 11:05

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

SPEAKER_00 11:09

I mean he was a busy man. I'm not not not to say that he 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, I wonder. I mean I'm not an Owen expert, and that there's lots to you know lots to talk about with Richard Owen. Yes. Lots of opinions, you know, that there's a there's an attempt to I found this, you know, when publishing in this area, sometimes you get comments back from the reviewers of your papers. And I've had people accuse me of sort of towing the line of like, oh, Owen's the villain and he's uh you know trying to 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 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 quite a dartedly underhand, selfish individual out to further his own good. You can you know I'll uh other people can can decide that. All I'll say is that for whatever reason he he didn't do the job he was being asked to do.

SPEAKER_03 12:11

Yeah. You mentioned in your book actually that the opening of the 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. Do you think that's it's an interesting time to think of that? Because I was talking to people before talking to you about Crystal Palace dinosaurs, and actually there's n there's not a lot of people that actually know that they are there. I mean, I would I would uh and anticipate this thing that has been there for two hundred odd years, that it would, you know, be I don't know, larger outside of people who just like dinosaurs.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

In the day it was. These were, for a long time, these were what you know what lay people at least thought dinosaurs were like. We have to remember that in the nineteenth century dinosaurs weren't as popular as they are today. So people wouldn't even have really thought about these as dinosaurs. They would have thought about them as primordial animals, as you know, 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 marks because we're really talking also about several several species of mammal, flying reptiles, marine reptiles, dysynodonts, temnospondyls, plesiosaurs, teleosaurs, and ichthyosaurs as well. So this you know, dinosaurs here, people were selling models of the Crystal Palace create reconstructions. Wow. So so around the world, when people were thinking of dinosaurs, whether they were directly being shaped by Crystal Palace or or not, the artwork was being copied from Crystal Palace, so it was coming down to them sort of through secondary and tertiary sources. So these reconstructions were really filtering into the culture of popularized paleontology in the middle parts of the of the 19th century. Their influence starts to wane really when you get to sort of the 1880s and 1890s, but they linger on in paleontological culture for a long time. 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. There's some tweaks we'd make here and there, but they certainly have, you know, they're recognizable to what they're meant to be. Some of the things that have dated more radically, of course, are the true dinosaurs. So we're talking here about iguanodon, megalosaurus, and hella. And the issue here was that Hawkins was working from very fragmentary remains for the dinosaurs, for the true dinosaurs, you know, that he didn't have much to work with at all. For the plesiosaurs, the ichthyosaurs and the mammals, he had he had pretty good fossils to be looking at.

SPEAKER_03 15:03

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

SPEAKER_00 15:06

Indeed. 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 we can look back with historic hindsight and say, aha, actually, there are some specimens that if Hawkins or if Owen or Gideon Mantel was also involved in this very briefly, and if these, you know, if those guys had really looked at this thing very carefully, they might have pushed dinosaur science ahead 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 of additional expertise on our side. But uh yeah, so 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, you know, what the actual animals were like.

SPEAKER_03 16:06

I was wondering if we could talk about the actual dinosaurs that are in Crystal Palace. So who do we have?

SPEAKER_00 16:12

So there are the there's over 20 species of extinct animal present in the geological court, but only three of them are true dinosaurs. So where we call them the crystal palace, dinosaurs is actually just a bit of a a captured term for all of them. So the the three species that are present there are the three original named dinosaurs. So we've got Megalosaurus, and then the other two were named by Gideon Mantel. We've got Iguandodon and Helleosaurus. Now, these species, certainly two of them, will be very familiar to anyone interested in dinosaurs. Megalosaurus, of course, is the large-ish, we don't know exactly how big it was, but a large-ish middle Jurassic theropod. In Crystal Palace, it's reconstructed. Something like a sort of monitor lizard comes bear kind of thing. It's a slightly strange reconstruction. Big shoulder hump, big kind of somewhat crocodilian lizard-like face. Then, of course, there's the iguanodon. Two of them, so that's the only dinosaur that there's two sculptures of. There aren't many sort of duplicate sculptures of species, but they made two iguanodons, and they were they're huge. They're some of the biggest sculptures that they made. And of course, this is famous for having the the horn on its nose. This is an interesting, there's an interesting little story behind this because there's this is often attributed to just what people thought at the time. People, you know, there's an idea that paleontologists at the time just universally thought that the iguanodon thumbspike, as we now know it, went on the nose of of the iguanodon. It was actually controversial even in the even in the the 1850s when when these things were being produced. Richard Owen, he thought he recognized it for what it was. He thought it was a claw of some kind. Now he got it a little bit wrong because he he thought it was a claw that went on the foot. But Owen sussed out that the that the thumb spike was a limb element and not a nose horn. So that actually came from Gideon Mantell putting it on the uh on the nose. And so this is one of the yet more evidence that Owen didn't really wasn't really that involved. Yeah, because if he if he was involved, he would have told Hawkins, nope, get that thing off the off the snail and put it on the put it on the feet. And uh the other little bit of trivia about those is that if you look closely, there's actually two nose horns on both iguanodon. They're based very closely on rhinoceros iguana. So there's a big nose horn at the front and then there's a smaller one behind, which is the condition that you see in in in some iguana species. And that is that's really what the iguanodon look like. They are sort of mammalian iguanas. So the thing that makes them look mammalian is that the the limbs are held underneath the body.

SPEAKER_03 18:31

Right, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:32

In other respects, they are quite iguanine in their morphology, and that includes our features of the face, so there's a the subtympanic disc that iguanas have. There's a you know specific features that you see in uh iguanine reptiles included on them. And the final dinosaur, of course, is Heliosaurus, which is the most obscure of all the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, and you know, it's not not exactly a total unknown among the sort of modern dinosaur fans, but it's it's not a species that has attained the same fame as iguanodon and and and megalosaurus have. This is uh an ankylosaur, probably a nodosaur of some kind, which is known from only from the shoulder region, a bit of the neck and the and and the back of the head. So it was enough to give us some rough idea of you know what Heleosaurus looks like, but yeah, we've not found any more substantial material other than the single specimen that was found. As Restaurant at Crystal Palace, again, it's it's somewhat sort of like a mammalian lizard. So it's probably the most lizard-like of them all. It's got these very long, lizard-like feet with these very long toes, including a long fifth toe. The strangest thing about that sculpture is that it actually faces away from visitors. So when you're walking around the park today, that you're looking at the rear end of the Heliosaurus, and that shows off it's got a row of midline spikes, which is a reference to armour that was found on the specimen. So on the original Heleosaurus specimen, we have got the the armour spikes which went down the side of the body we now realise, rather than down the middle. And but again, Mantel thought they were midline elements, knew different. He realized that they were actually paired elements and that they should be going in rows down the body.

SPEAKER_03 20:05

Right.

SPEAKER_00 20:07

Another bit of evidence that Hawkins and Owen weren't really talking that much about what these things look like. Yeah, so that's that's the three the three dinosaurs that are there. There's lots about them that which is very precedent, you know, for you know, very forward-looking.

SPEAKER_01 20:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:21

Yeah. Obviously, lots of people like to point out that they're really nothing like what these animals were.

SPEAKER_03 20:26

That's what I was wondering. But how how long did they stay, I suppose, accurate, and what about them still holds up today, do you think?

SPEAKER_00 20:34

So they didn't last all that long, to be honest, in terms of their their scientific accuracy. Within really a decade or so, we started finding dinosaurs in North America that were hinting at bipodality for big ornithopods. So things like a guanodon, we're getting the the sense that all these animals are actually walking around on their back legs. Okay. And with they have significantly shorter forelimbs. And the same with with uh with the predatory dinosaurs, well, the same with you know with theropods. We found tryptosaurus in uh the the northeast of the United States, and this of course being a tyrannosauroid, has got very short forearms, much longer hind limbs. And so that that's showing that a kind of bear-like megalosaur at Crystal Palace, almost certainly nothing like that. But this is not to say that there weren't already some hints that things may not have been quite as Hawkins put them together. There's a specimen known as the Mantel piece, which is it's a jumble of iguanodon bones. There's there's a good good chunk of skeleton there, including lots of hinder material and lots of fall-in material. This was for a long time one of the most complete dinosaur specimens known, and we specifically know that Hawkins referenced it and that both Owen and Mantel looked at it to it to you know it to a some extent to a certain amount of detail. But what no one did at the time was take that specimen you know uh apart to the point where they get the idea of what the proportions of Iguanodon were truly like. And it had they have done that, the iguanodon reconstruction would have looked entirely different because there you could get the sense of the smaller, shorter forelimbs being present and the longer, more powerful hind limbs.

SPEAKER_03 22:10

So were they did did did they actually sorry, did they actually make a skeleton that look like the creatures that are in Crystal Palace at any point? Did they or are they going off kind of theories about what the bones could look like?

SPEAKER_00 22:22

Did they Yeah, so good question. This this is a part of the the story that we don't have much data for. We n the the did the planning and the design phase has not been passed down to 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 give his sign-off on them. Whether or not there were skeletons and things being produced. 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 Hadrosaurus. So 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 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, because if you look at the the sculptures, you can see that there's things like a muscle plan that's been mapped out, and it's really good. You know, you if if you know anatomy and you look at the iguanodon or you look at the megalosaurus, you see where the the muscle contours have been sculpted exactly where they should be for a an animal of you know for a tetrapod of that kind of size and and and bulk, you can see that there would be a skeleton underneath this and that there's the the right kind of form has has been built into it. So he clearly had an idea in his head as to what they should look like underneath. Whether or not he actually sketched that out, we don't know.

SPEAKER_03 24:16

Yeah, I I love the in in your book you pull you pull the Crystal Palace dinosaurs like the remind reminder of ideas. And I I I really like the idea because I feel the same way when I look at dinosaurs in the books that I've been reading for this series, because they change so much over the stories. Did Crystal Palace spark like imitators across the world? Would other countries start opening up dinosaur parks and things like that?

SPEAKER_00 24:39

Uh really not actually. There there's there were there were a few efforts to do bits and pieces like this. So there was actually a it didn't get very far, but there was plans for building models of prehistoric animals in in parts of France before Crystal Palace. But I don't think that ever moved beyond sort of a conceptual st stage. In Russia, much later in the 19th century, until the 1880s, there is a sort of indoor exhibition with sculptures of prehistoric animals, some of which are based on other bits of 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 dinosaur park as a concept is really popularized, and you start seeing concrete dinosaurs on the side of the road in an in North America and at the World's Fair and this sort of thing. So it's it was, you know, not entirely unique throughout the entire 19th century, but it it was certainly a, you know, there'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 survives. Right. So it's a very special place.

SPEAKER_03 25:46

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

SPEAKER_00 25:55

Yeah, so 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 history of life on on Earth in a sort of fairly dry, totally factual fashion, it'll be characters taking children back to to look at the the age of monsters and this sort of thing. And of course, they also enter into pop culture through things like the satirical cartoons of of Punch and magazines 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 beyond pure science and beyond pure education. They also be they have some influence on how people depict dinosaurs in general, just in terms of 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 you'll have you know understand from from your own reading, in the 19th century dinosaurs weren't what they are today in terms of their cultural impact and their popularity. When we think about the you know prehistory nowadays, we really go very quic quickly to dinosaurs. But in the nineteenth 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 uh excuse me, when there was 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 d we didn't really start using the word dinosaur as a descriptive term for them until much later.

SPEAKER_03 27:45

Okay, because I came across the there's a good story, the uh the Dragon of St. Paul's. I came across it's by two amazingly named journalists, Reginald Bacchus and Cyril Ranger Gull. And in there, this like winged creature is thawed out from a big block of ice and runs amuck across London. And part of it, one of like a bystander who sees it, screams that it's heading towards 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 proves that the readers at the time would have known exactly what they meant just by that reference.

SPEAKER_00 28:20

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

SPEAKER_03 28:46

Do you have a favourite like paleo fiction novel or short story?

SPEAKER_00 28:50

Gosh. I mean, in terms of literature, I'd have to say probably Conan Doyle's The Lost World. I think I think as as a book, I prefer that to Jurassic Park, the novel. I've I find Crichton's sort of anti-scientific bent a little bit difficult. I used to really like the novel as a as a younger person and and reading it as a someone who now has a you know career and things in science. No, no, he doesn't. I remember when when my wife read Jurassic Park for the first time, she just started skipping Ian Malcolm's like several pages of ranting. It's like, okay, get to the story, get to the story.

SPEAKER_03 29:26

I mean you can see why they left him out of the original scripts for the film, because how who how on earth do you handle that amount of just like tirade at the screen? It would have been awful, but it's a terrible viewing experience.

SPEAKER_00 29:38

Yeah, they they whittled him down to the gems, didn't they, for the film? And now now some of the most iconic lines from the film were things that he said. But yeah, I I think that the The Lost World, Conrador's Lost World, of course, as opposed to Crichton's. I th you know it comes from an era of literature that that if I'm reading, it's pretty straightforward. It's you know got a sort of romantic tone to it, and yeah, it's a style of literature that that I I quite like to read. And and I I like how he uh represents his dinosaurs too. He doesn't make them out to be particularly monstrous. I mean he describes the megalosaurus in a fairly frightening way, but it s behaves mostly like a real animal. Yeah, whereas some of what Crichton has is even though ostensibly he he's he's writing from a much more informed perspective, some of what he has the di dinosaurs doing is is quite ridiculous, like where the velociraptors start chewing through metal bars. Yeah. And I'm thinking, like, what what are their teeth made from? You know, it's not it's not something that most animals are capable of doing. But yeah, I I think I think with dinosaurs have to be handled very delicately in fiction. You can go too far with them, you can turn them into things that they they weren't. And I think a less is more approach often works better, and I think that's where Conan Doyle succeeded.

SPEAKER_03 30:48

Yeah, I love the way that he does there's a there's a bit where he sees the pterodactyls and he sees how they're kind of interacting. And it was surprising to me to see a novel of that time and him connecting the fossils that were being found, and then him relaying, oh well, that's why the fossils are being found in the way that they are, because of this is the way that they live. So that connection was already there between the two. And I thought that's such a forward-thinking kind of idea to put in a a very popular story.

SPEAKER_00 31:18

Yeah, yeah. That we we know that he was reading around about dinosaurs to to try and make them, you know, make make the book as accurate as as he could be. And we know that he was looking at uh Hutchinson's books, I'm trying to remember the title of them, Creatures of Other Days and Extinct Monsters. Uh so we know the text he was looking at. And it's once you know that, you it explains some of the peculiarities about some of the his dinosaur depictions. So the megalosaurus, for instance, is described as hopping like a kind of bizarre toad. And I remember reading that as a when did I first read The Lost World? I don't know, I was twelve or something, but I was thinking like, what on earth is this all about? But it this goes right the way back to the discovery of Lalapse or Dryptosaurus in North America because it had such long legs and such short arms. Edward Cope, who described and named a Lalapse, he assumed it was sort of a kangaroo-like animal and it was hopping around. And so this idea was perpetuated through the book that Conan Doyle referenced, and so then he picks it up in The Lost World and describes a Megalosaurus as hopping after Malone through the forest. So yeah, so there is actually a an explanation for that. It sounds, you know, when when you read it and you don't know the explanation, you just think, gosh, Conan Doyle really didn't know what dinosaurs were like. But actually he was following maybe not the prevailing idea at the time, but he was certainly, you know, he had a reference for this. He was able to point to something and go, ah, look, he actually was following what scholars at the time were considering.

SPEAKER_03 32:44

Yeah. Plus, it's it's such an a a arresting image, I think that he he would definitely enjoy that from the kind of the visual aspect of the story.

SPEAKER_00 32:54

Yeah, indeed. I mean, some of the illustrations of the of the theropod in The Lost World are so bizarre. If you see the the the original uh illustrations, and I'm trying to remember the name of the artist, one of them's Round Tree, and I'm I can't remember the name of the second artist, but they are some bizarre takes on theropod anatomy. One of them looks like the Jabbawok from through the looking glass. Yeah, some truly bizarre ideas about what dinosaurs look like.

SPEAKER_03 33:19

Yeah. As a paleo artist and a paleontologist, how do you balance those the kind of your scientific side and your your creative side?

SPEAKER_00 33:28

Well, I mean, the science always has to take precedent as far as I'm concerned. That's that's the boundaries that I I feel paleo art should work within. Is that, well, what does the science say? And if the science says one thing, no matter how much you want to do the other, well, that that's what you do. And yeah, you know, I I I have said this a lot over over the years that paleo artists we really should be basing as much as we can on understandings of not only the fossils but on living animals and on the the reconstructed paleo environments of deep time. There's there's so much, so much of a research component to to being a paleo artist. And I I think it's sometimes overlooked. It's very easy just to take a skeletal reconstruction and just start going crazy with with this stuff. But when you start doing lots of detailed research, you start to realise that we know a lot more about the life appearance of extinct animals than than most people assume. And we can start to in many cases we don't know exactly what they do look like, but we can rule out what they, you know, other aspects. So there's things about certain tissue types that people reconstruct on on the faces of dinosaurs, for instance. And I look at that and think, well, I'm pretty sure we can say that kind of tissue wasn't there, because if it was, it would lead a certain characteristic scar on the skull. Yeah, there's tons and tons of tons of stuff to to research in paleo-art. But does that mean that you're then creatively constrained? I mean, no more so than you are painting any sort of natural subject. And you know, you can you can paint something as epic as you like or as as small and intimate as you like, and yeah, it's really just about using your imagination and working, finding what the constraints are and then thinking, how do I make an interesting image out of this? And you know, given the fantastical nature of so many prehistoric animals, if you can't make compelling, interesting images out of things like Tyrannosaurus and Diplodocus and Mosasaurs and all the hundreds and hundreds of other species, if you can't make great images out of those things, then it's like you're doing something wrong as an artist because all the material you need is right there. And just because you're working within a scientific framework doesn't mean that you can't do interesting and fantastic paintings with that with that with that uh with that source material.

SPEAKER_03 35:38

Mm-hmm. Do you s do you feel like it's a sort of because unlike anything that we can obviously take a photo of or have film of, Paleo artists have to have almost like the responsibility of this is giving over the only way that we have to see these to see.

SPEAKER_00 35:52

Yeah, I I I think so. I mean there's but I I I in in my head I'm always very conscious that everything we're doing is provisional. And yeah, every every every time some new research is published and we can improve our reconstructions, we're moving a bit closer to the truth. But I I I I I'm aware that we're never gonna get 100% on 99.9% of of fossil animals. There's just not the f the fossil record just doesn't provide us with the information we need to to get you know most most reconstructions correct. I mean the the exceptions are things which maybe went extinct thousands of years ago, not millions of years ago. So we're talking about things from the Pleistocene where we've got cave art and we've got mummified mummified specimens in permafrost, we've got remnants of them from caves. That's when you start to feel like maybe we can start to put these things together more or less accurately. But even then, I mean something like a woolly mammoth, you know, you'd you'd think, well, we know what a woolly mammoth looks like, right? But when you start reading what the mammoth people say about their life appearance and their soft tissues, there's still a lot we don't know. And my my favorite go-to for this concerning mammoths is their colour. So for many, you know, going back hundreds of years, people have restored woolly mammoths with this sort of reddish brown hue. Yeah. Because that's the colour of their hair. You know, when you find it as a fossil, that's it comes out of the of the ground sort of reddish brown. And so it's the assumption's just been, oh, that's the colour that it was. It turns out that that's actually the colour that the pigment decays to. And if you remove that colour and analyse the pigments themselves, what you find is that mammoths were probably much paler in colour. So they're they're sort of straw-colored. They had a darker under fur, but the outer fur, the long, sort of meter-long bits of hair that are covering them, certainly during the winter, are much, much paler. And some of the bits of hair are uh are a variable colour, so they might be sort of have darker and lighter patches. We find that there's variation within mammoth individuals, so some are darker than others. Is this a case of there being different individuals were totally different colours, or is it actually that in some cases we've found a different part of the of a mammoth, and therefore we found a dark bit, and the in the lighter coloured individuals are the you know, are showing us different parts of the body. Yeah, and you think, well, I thought we knew what mammoths looked like, but actually no, we we don't. Yeah, and something as basic as their colour remains elusive. Yeah, so it's it it it as I say, I'm I'm conscious that everything we're doing, we're basically we're visualizing hypotheses, and it's it's nice to think that we are sort of bringing these animals and these plants and other ancient organisms. We are in some respect bringing them back from the dead, but we're sort of bringing them back as as as you know, sort of half-formed ghosts. We're not we're not restoring the real thing. We're restoring the best ideas we have at the minute as to to try and get an idea of what they look like.

SPEAKER_03 38:44

So 2026 is a big year for the Crystal Palace dinosaurs of Phil that they're they're going through their is it the biggest restoration that they've had this year?

SPEAKER_00 38:52

It's it's um the biggest one they've had for a couple of decades. So they were really brought back from a fairly significant degradation in the about 20 years ago. I think the the work there was completed in in 2003. These these projects are big enough that they are taking years to do. Yeah. So it's not just a case of someone goes around with a you know a bucket of paint and a bit of filler and and you know, and it's done after a couple of weeks. These are number one, the geological court is a b is a big site with dozens of sculptures, and there's geological displays as well that also need attention. The sculptures themselves are complex in terms of how they were built. They are built from multiple materials, which means that the way they are weathering and changing over time is is complex. So the big dinosaurs, for instance, they're built primarily out of concrete and bricks, but they also have a metal skeleton inside. They've got metal iron, what do you call it, iron columns going through their through their limbs? They've got iron looping around their bodies, and the way that iron is aging is obviously very different to how the surrounding masonry is is weathering. And you have all these effects where where the iron starts to rust, it expands, and therefore it starts to sort of break apart some of the bricks. So they're they are complicated things to try and look after. The entire geological court landscape was also entirely artificial, and so that, of course, is also settling. This isn't something that's been there for thousands of years. This is something that was heaped up by workmen 170 years ago, and so that is shifting, that is moving, which means that where some of the dinosaurs in particular, we think they have separate foundations under the front limbs and the back limbs. We're not 100% sure on this, but we know that where the island is sort of settling, of course, you've also got roots growing through the ground and you've got worms changing the the, you know, changing the nature of the topography, where these things are are shifting, they're they're they're starting to start to crack apart. So there's some very complicated issues to try and solve with them, to try and stabilize them. So a lot of work was done to try and bring them back to full health 20 years ago, but they've been pretty neglected since then. There's been a few smaller scale restoration projects for some of the sculptures since then, but yeah, there hasn't been a geological court-wide effort for a long time. So yeah, that the the project that is undergoing, uh that is underway now, is you know one of the biggest for a long time and hopefully will bring most of the sculptures up to full speed. Obviously that there are limitations with with just how much can be done with budgets, is it's incredibly expensive to work on these things because they're grade one listed sculptures. You can't just you know go through the go to check a trade and get the the local masonry guy to come around and and patch them up. You have to have qualified, trained experts in working on this stuff. So yeah, it's very expensive to get even minor repairs done. So when you're talking about something of this scale, the project costs balloon pretty rapidly.

SPEAKER_03 41:48

Yeah. And how did you become because you're involved in this restaurant? What what's your role in the restoration side of things?

SPEAKER_00 41:54

I'm really just to to help guide on the historic accuracy. So there's some instances where sculptures have lost parts of their of their body, so like heads have fallen off is quite common. And they need to be rebuilt. And in some cases we know that things that have fallen off, they are themselves replacements. So they're they're bits that were replaced maybe in the 1950s, but they weren't replaced entirely accurately. And so there's a case of, well, can we make them closer to how they were when the park opened in the 1850s? And in some cases, we know that there are well that that that we we can we can put things back more accurately than they were even in in the in you know 20 years ago. So yeah, that that's really my role is to is to chip in on these conversations about what can we do to to do this as accurately as possible. And we've been considering you know all sorts of things like uh the the the tree that the megatherium is hugging that died many years ago. And so there's a conversation about well, what do we do with this tree? And because having a dead tree that it's is hugging, it it's just gonna fall away at some point. And so yeah, we've been going back through old photographs going, well, what sort of tree was there originally? And how do we do we do put an artificial tree in? Do we just plant another tree? And so we've been scouring photographs and go and and we've you know managed to see in the far distance of this incredibly faint photograph that actually the there's always been this giant tree that the megatherium was propped up against. So yeah, we're thinking, okay, it's got to have a decent sized tree. Whatever we replace the dead tree with, it has to be something substantial to match what it was like back in 1854. And there's been some really fun new discoveries as well. So things like the original pterosaur heads, they've been hiding in plain sight. There's this bizarre a lead head in the Crystal Palace Museum, and it's so it's it was clearly a broken head from one of the Crystal Palace sculptures, but it looks so different to the current pterosaur heads and all the pterosaur heads that have been been put on these sculptures over the last 100 years. I didn't know exactly what it was. I thought it was there's a there's a marine reptile, Plesiosaurus macrochephilis. I assumed it was the head that had fallen off Plesiosaurus macrocephalus because it looks so sinister. It looks much more like a plesiosaur, like a big-headed plesiosaur than it does a pterosaur. We were looking through photographs. There was a photograph from the 1920s when I saw it with this photograph of a pterosaur with this dragon-like head, just in my brain, the connection was made. And it's like, that's what we have in Crystal Palace Museum. It's this amazing discovery that we've had an original Hawkins pterosaur head in storage for I don't know how long, decades. And yet it hadn't been put together that that's exactly what it was. It was just down as indeterminate Crystal Palace reptile head for the longest time. So it's it's been nice that this round of conservation is not just about using research from the last few years, but it's actually generating new findings in its own right.

SPEAKER_03 44:43

Yeah. That's incredible. And I I love your passion for them as well. Where does that what was your first experience of seeing them and how and and all of that?

SPEAKER_00 44:51

So I I remember seeing them as a on on documentaries when I was, I don't know, sort of six or seven years old. And as I got a bit older, I went to see them. It was a birthday treat one year to go and see them. Because I well I I grew up in Essex, which isn't too far obviously from where Crystal Palace is. And so we went to see went to see them one year for my birthday. And then that that was pretty much it. You know, I sort of always thought they were they were pretty neat. And as I as I've as was I've become more interested in in paleo art and paleo art history, they loom so large in the discussion about 19th century paleo art that it's hard not to, you know, feel quite enthused and interested in them. But in I'm trying to remember the the the year now, I was invited to give a talk at a an event held in Crystal Palace. Uh it was a talk about how we do paleo art in the modern day. And uh that's when I met everyone from the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs charity, and that's when I first got to go onto the island with the with the sculptures and have a look at them up close. And yeah, you know, that that kind of gave me some some contact. I started writing blog posts about them and I found myself at one point thinking about what a book what what would my next book project be. And and I had a brainwave of let's do a book about the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. I naively thought it would be a very easy book to do, because I thought the history of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs would some someone somewhere would have done a big research project and put it all together, and all I would need to do is read some, you know, read some scientific papers, sorry, read some art history papers and sort of regurgitate that with some nice new illustrations and things and and and we'd be done. Uh but it turned out that really no one had done much in the way of scholarly research into the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs for for quite some time, and that there were all sorts of things about them that we didn't know. And so that book project, which became the book called The Art and Science of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs by myself and the the chair of the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs charity, Eleanor Michelle, that book unearthed so much new content. And the the thing I want to emphasize about that is that we did most of that in lockdown during COVID. So that was primarily researched through archives available online. And now that we're you know happily COVID is in the in the rearview mirror, there is definitely scope for someone to go and visit all the physical archives and add to what we have already done because that there's going to be things that that we couldn't get access to, including things like that pterosaur head that I mentioned. You know, things that I knew this head existed. We had grainy photographs of it that have been shared around for many years, but you know, during COVID, we just couldn't go and have a look at that thing. You know, everything was shut. So uh yeah, there's plenty of work still to be done on the history of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. And uh yeah, it would be nice to come back to that book that we wrote with a second edition, you know, in a few years' time to say, here's everything that we've learned since.

SPEAKER_03 47:35

Yeah. And how best do you think people can actually support the Crystal Palace dinosaurs if they want to? Because it because it's a charity, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 47:43

That's right. So the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs have a website. I'm pretty sure it's cpdinosaurs.com or something like that. If you look up Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs in Google or the search engine of your choice, they're very easy to find. And you can support the charity directly through you can give them donations, give them monthly donations. If you buy our book, if you buy the art and science of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, the author royalties all go to the charity. So Eleanor and I, we haven't received a penny for making that book. Everything about it, from the advance to the to the all the proceeds from the sales, they all go to the charity. So that's a way you can support them and get something back. And the other thing you can do is is just be interested and enthused about the the sculptures themselves. Every now and then there are projects to raise money for certain aspects of the park. So a few years ago there were there was a a big crowdfunding effort to build a bridge to get a permanent access to the secondary island in the where the where the dinosaurs and other reptiles are are held. Access to that previously was via a bridge that was very uns. It was by a by a weir, and it was quite difficult to get across. So and for a while there wasn't really a safe way to get onto the island. But through crowdfunding, a new bridge was installed, which is still safe, it's a swing bridge. So it means that people can't just go wandering on the island when they want to. But if you've got access, you can unlock the bridge and get to the uh get to the island. So those kind of projects, if you keep an eye out for them, uh you can support those as well. That goes a long way. As with everything, the biggest challenge to keeping those dinosaurs and the other parts of the of the geological core together is is money. And so it if you can help them in that way, that's the that's the best way to do that.

SPEAKER_03 49:22

Amazing. Well, I'd just like to say thank you so much for joining me today. How can people find you online if indeed you want them to?

SPEAKER_00 49:29

Well, I mean, if you want to look me up, you're you're more than welcome to. I'm quite easy to find online. There's not too many Mark Wittens in the world. So if you just Google my name, that's a that's a good way to find me. I have a website which is just markwitten.co.uk. I'm on Blue Sky and Instagram, and I've got a Facebook page, Markwitten Paleo Arts. So yeah, if you just sort of generally search for me, I'm quite quite easy to find. Yeah. And you know, if if you go to my website, that's got a full catalogue of the books I've written. It's got a a gallery. If you want to buy a print, you can buy prints there as well. So yeah, that's not a bad place to start if you're looking for more information about me.

SPEAKER_03 50:01

Amazing. Well, thank thanks, Mark, for joining me today. No problem. It's been really fun.