Though it seems outlandish, the scene captured here by the printmaker George Baxter (1804–67) is a real one. These colossal “antediluvian reptiles” really stood outside the Crystal Palace in South East London. Lumbering in the foreground are some of the more than thirty life-sized fossil animal re-creations sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807–94), which were unveiled in 1854. Resting on skeletons of iron, brick, and stone, which are encased in cement, they dwarf the figures promenading below: visitors to the Crystal Palace, pictured in the distance. The diminutive couples seem to belong more to the manicured lawns and fountains around the palace (relocated from Hyde Park in the wake of the 1851 Great Exhibition) than to the reptiles’ swampy islands. Still, both destinations were billed as testaments to modernity and progress. Whereas the palace drew throngs to marvel at the largest glass-and-steel building ever constructed — and the industrial accomplishments it exhibited — Hawkins’ reptilian reproductions and their muddy prehistoric tableaus represented the cutting edge of paleontological science. They were the first attempt to reconstruct extinct life at full scale, the first such exhibit for a public audience, and a spectacle of the Victorian understanding of the deep past. Both the Crystal Palace and its sculptures were a tour-de-force of scientific achievement.

The heavy-set monsters in Baxter’s print were something of a victory lap for both their sculptor, Hawkins, and the eminent British biologist with whom he collaborated, Sir Richard Owen (1804–92). Owen claimed to have perfected the science of paleontology such that he could reconstruct a prehistoric animal from “a single fossil bone”. At a boisterous New Year’s Eve dinner party hosted in the hollowed-out body of a concrete iguanodon — a massive, ancient herbivore around ten metres in length — twenty-one of Britain’s finest academics, editors, and Crystal Palace investors assembled to celebrate Owen’s achievement. There, sitting at the literal “head” of the table, Owen bragged that he and his collaborators “had succeeded in building up an entire animal . . . whose original had once roamed through the vast forests of Sussex.”

However triumphant Owen and his guests may have been, his creations may look a little off to our contemporary eyes. Hawkins’ reconstructions are not identical to those we are familiar with today. Some guides to the park describe the dinosaurs as “frog-like” (though accompanying illustrations are, perhaps, more frog-like than the actual sculptures). In fact, the concrete beasts look a good bit more mammalian than our modern images of them — just as they do in Baxter’s print. Many stand erect on trunk-like legs, with sturdy paws and massive, thick-set heads. This appearance, historian Martin Rudwick argues, reflects Owen’s own anti-evolutionary beliefs (anti-Lamarckian, that is, given that Darwin would not burst onto the scene until 1859). Owen argued that ancient animals like the iguanodon, far from being primitive and reptilian, had more “advanced” anatomy: if that was true, life forms had not progressed over time, as the Lamarckians would have it. The Crystal Palace dinosaurs — hulking and “rhinoceros-like” — reflected these theoretical commitments.

Though the Crystal Palace burned to the ground in 1936, the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs still conserve Hawkin’s “Dinosaur Court” today. You can visit the sculptures in their original context in Sydenham’s Crystal Palace Park, continuing to stand on the rolling hills of their man-made islands. Even without the contrast of the palace glistening in the distance, the dinosaurs remain striking, and charmingly offbeat. The very same extinct animals that seemed to represent the future in 1854 have become, today, an eccentric reminder of the past.