Growing up I loved dinosaurs. Who didn’t? They capture the imagination, inspire us, they are the subject of books and movies. Charles Dickens made a passing reference to a dinosaur in Bleakhouse, But it was Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs who really made these creatures central to the story. The life size model dinosaurs in the images below were created for the Great Exhibition of 1852 by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, with the help of Richard Owens. Two of the models are arguably lifelike, the pterodactyl is one which is shown here. But Hawkins and Owen thought that the plesiosaur and Ichthyosaurus would spend more time on land, as depicted here. And the Iguanodon and Megalosaurus are shown walking on all fours. The Iguanodon also has another minor mistake, the fossilised thumb was thought to be a horn, and so they affixed it to the nose!
Given the age of the original subject I opted to present the images as 'aged'.
Ichthyosaurus
Iguanodon
Labyrinthodon
Megalosaurus
Plesiosaur
Pterodactyl
