In 1853, a group of eminent professors and palaeontologists held a New Year's Eve feast inside the concrete mould of an Iguanodon in Crystal Palace's Dinosaur Court. The first full-scale reconstruction of dinosaurs ever attempted went on public display when the park opened in June 1854.
Dinosaur remains were being discovered up and down the country and dinomania was in full-swing. English sculptor and natural history artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807-1894) was commissioned to build the Crystal Palace figures based on cutting-edge science and theories of the time.
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