The Cellar - Dc 10th, 2016: Dinosaurs, Alley Oop, Oop

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Inside an enclosure at the Crystal Palace Park in London, is a collection of over thirty concrete sculptures of dinosaurs.
Built more than one hundred sixty years ago, these sculptures were the first ever attempt anywhere in the world to model
dinosaurs as full-scale, three-dimensional creatures. Although the sculptures are wildly inaccurate by modern standards,
they are still an important part of history because they show how the Victorians viewed prehistoric life.

They were cool, then they were a joke/trash, now they're retro.

http://cellar.org/2016/britdino1.jpg

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These concrete beasts were designed and built by sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse-Hawkins in collaboration with Professor Richard
Owen, a celebrated biologist and paleontologist of the time, best remembered today for being the one who coined the word
“dinosaur”, meaning “terrible lizard”. Hawkins and Richards were asked to build a total of thirty three models of dinosaurs, as well
as other extinct animals, in 1852 as part of a new attraction at the recently relocated Crystal Palace Park in Sydenham in south
London. The trouble was, Hawkins didn’t have enough fossil evidence to begin with. For instance, for the Iguanodon, the largest
and the most impressive of the sculptures, Hawkins had no more than a handful of teeth and a few bones. So he did what
anybody with a contract and a looming deadline would have done —he used his imagination.

Money on the line, maybe your career, fake it.

http://cellar.org/2016/britdino 2.jpg

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Back in 1852, more than half a decade before Charles Darwin proposed the theory of evolution, everything that Hawkins did
seemed logical. The sculptor reasoned, and his famed advisor Owen agreed, that an animal as large as the Iguanodon couldn’t
have stood on just two legs. Eventually, the Iguanodon became so large that its open mold could accommodate a New Year’s
Eve dinner for Hawkins, Owen, and twenty other scientists in 1853.

http://cellar.org/2016/britdino 3.jpg

Science hasn't changed, they find bits and pieces then take their best guess at the whole picture. As more pieces of the puzzle are
found they find they guessed right, or change their conclusions to match new evidence.

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