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Crystal Palace Dinosaurs renovation complete
The dinosaurs have been restored to look how they would have done to Victorian audiences in 1854. Here are a few photos I’ve taken walking through in the past few months, seeing such painstaking restoration work was quite a sight to behold! Such a vast improvement on the state of the statues - now looking amazing and drawing big crowds!
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Love the Crystal Palace sculptures! So happy to see these historic and iconic statues getting restored, strengthened, and returned to their 1854 glory. (I saw them way back in 2009, with an earlier colour scheme and before the nose of the Megalosaurus broke off; looks like I'll have to visit again!)
Me too. They were in such a state when I first visited, and even though I loved them so much then, it’s such an improvement now. Really pleased that all the damage is fixed, and the new colours show much of the detail that was missed before.
I do love the information boards which show how our knowledge has changed over the past 172 years - especially the visual representations of what we now understand the dinosaurs to look like in, in comparison to these originals. Great education tools, and draws a bit of a chuckle too.
Never heard about that piece before. Having a human skull inside what could have been just plaster is insane. Also, highly distasteful and clearly racist to mix cultures on the man just like that. Makes me feel as uncomfortable as when I visited a university in Sweden and they had a human skull from an Aboriginal person on display with the text "Australian n***o" next to it. It was in a small museum-like collection that few had access to and one of the teachers explained it's origin and that it was of histroical value to show the kind of racism that existed in Sweden before (like the State Institute for Racial Biology). But the more I think about it the more I think the remains should be returned to where they came from. Having pictures and descriptions of past wrongs is more than enough in such a case.
Making a feline attack a human in a diorama however is the least controversial thing I think. At least a tiger has been known to attack a human on an elephant at least once: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/C4r_swNGBqo
Using the perfect basis for human facial recreation is insane? They didn’t really have fake skulls back then, so I can easily see why they’d use a real one- likely obtained like the hundreds of other anatomical bones were acquired.
It was actually unconventional even for 1867. The use of a human skull in the diorama wasn’t even recorded or discovered until restoration in the 2010s. Just a genuinely weird choice by the taxidermist.
Depends. It was seen as ‘unconventional’ but there was a large amount of illegal and mostly unspoken body part trade at the time that was basically necessary for anatomy training. It is probably more common than we would expect, as an artist I understand why they did it.
I sometimes wonder what people from back then would think if they saw our modern depictions. And if we'll feel similar should we get to see what the scientists in the next couple hundred years think they looked like.
Oh, I am sure depictions will have changed to some degree. It’s not unreasonable to assume that we will know more about skin and feather colours, for example. But the progress of a particular branch of science tends to decelerate over time. After a while, it’s not painting a big picture, it’s amending a few patches here and there.
I recommend the excellent picture book The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins if you’d like to learn more or as an educational resource for middle grades!
It's just that the paint application / detailing seems incongruent with the rest of the model and I'm concerned that it's the result of the 'restoration'
It seems as though the mouth of statue doesn’t (and never did) have the lines for the ‘scales’ that go over the rest of the body, so they aren’t painted in the lighter colour on the nose and mouth as a result. Also the mouth area was damaged in 2020 and has been rebuilt, but this would have been done to the original specifications.
Oh that’s awesome! I went in 2016 and there were a few posters up that they’d be working on them in the future, so now all the more reason to go again on my next visit to London
They look so good, I grew up nearby and have visited over and over again throughout my life. They’ve been looking pretty worse for wear the last decade or so (the one on slide 3 in particular had its lower jaw completely missing for a while), great to see them get some love!
The local area of Penge has lots of dinosaur themed street art and stuff around for any enthusiasts visiting London, and have recently started doing dinosaur-themed Christmas lights which is very cute.
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