Last issue I spoke of the remarkable display of life-sized brick-and-concrete dinosaur models that the sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins created for London’s Crystal Palace Park in 1854, barely a dozen years after British scientist Richard Owen had coined the term “dinosaur.” I told something of how the park had come into being and spoke of finally visiting the park myself in the summer of 2005, after having known of its existence for many years, while I was in Great Britain to attend the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow. Let me now take you on a tour of this extraordinary place.

You get to Crystal Palace Park, which is in a suburban town just to the south of London, by a twenty-minute train ride from Victoria Station. The train lets you out right at the park entrance; but to get to the dinosaurs themselves you need to walk past a modern sports stadium and a few other buildings before you reach the island of the Iguanodons and Plesiosaurs. (Of the Crystal Palace itself, that phenomenal specimen of nineteenth-century engineering prowess, no trace remains. The vast glass-and-iron exhibition hall burned to the ground in 1936. A few of the outlying structures of the original amusement park that surrounded it still exist—and, of course, the Waterhouse Hawkins dinosaurs.)

A sloping trail takes you down toward the artificial island where the dinosaurs cluster. One of the first beasts that greets you—not, in fact, a dinosaur—is Teleosaurus, a gigantic crocodilian of the late Triassic, sprawling in the shallow water of the lake. The distinctive pelvic arrangement of true dinosaurs allowed them to stand upright, as birds do today. Teleosaurus has the characteristic legs of crocodilians, splayed out to the sides. But it is enormous, and Waterhouse Hawkins has endowed it with a truly intimidating set of sharp teeth. And how astounded the visitors to Crystal Palace Park must have been to think that crocodiles once inhabited the British Isles! (The first Teleo-saurus fossils were discovered in 1758 on the cliffs of the Yorkshire coast.)

Nearby in the water lurks a Plesiosaurus, extending its long serpentine neck toward the island, and next to it is an even bigger sea-going dinosaur, the Ichthyosaurus, with its immense toothy mouth agape. (Waterhouse Hawkins tended to give many of his dinosaurs the facial structure of crocodiles.) The Ichthyosaurus is starting to come up on shore, where ichthyo-saurs have no business being; but such details of habitat were still largely unknown in 1854.

The real show is just beginning. As you come around the bend, you glimpse several Permian amphibians, Labyrinthodons, clustering at the water’s edge. The Waterhouse Hawkins Labyrinthodons are no bigger than cows, but what makes them impressive is that they are really weird—sturdy big-headed humpbacked things that look like colossal frogs. (Actually Labyrinthodon looked more like a crocodile, but the only fossil evidence of it that was known then was its skull, which led Richard Owen to guess that its body was froglike in shape.) Another extinct amphibian and another wrong guess is next: Dicynodon, portrayed as a massive critter with a turtle-like shell and two big jutting fangs. Again, Owen and Waterhouse Hawkins were working from nothing more than a skull and a few other bones. In fact Dicynodon looked more like a hippopotamus than a turtle, but give the sculptor high marks for imagination.

A couple of Pterodactyls perch on the main sector of the island. (These are modern replicas, built from photographs; the 1854 originals did not wear well and had to be removed.) Just behind them is the awesome Megalosaurus, a ponderous beast with the huge head and humped back that Waterhouse Hawkins favored for most of these creatures. Fossilized Megalosaurus bones had been discovered in England as far back as the seventeenth century. William Buckland, whose scientific analysis of Megalosaurus bones in 1824 was the first such description of any dinosaur ever published, visualized it from its skull and thighbone as a carnivorous reptile of super-elephantine proportions, forty feet long and seven feet high. The Waterhouse Hawkins version is not that big, but it is quite big enough and looks mean and hungry, and you would not want to meet a live one in the park. Once again only fragmentary fossil evidence was used in the reconstruction, and the result had more fantasy than science about it. We now know that Megalosaurus stood upright on its hind legs, somewhat in the manner of a Tyrannosaurus. But, like all the land-going Crystal Palace dinosaurs, it is depicted here as a quadruped, since no one then, not even Richard Owen, believed that creatures as bulky as dinosaurs could be capable of standing on two legs alone.

Next to the Megalosaurus is another oddity: Hylaeosaurus, a stocky quadruped of medium size with plates of armor on its body and a strange row of spikes running along its back. Hylaeosaurus, discovered in 1833, was the third dinosaur to be identified, but the Crystal Palace reconstruction was made using only the skimpiest of fossil evidence, and, alas, not much more has come to light since then, so we have no idea how close to its real appearance Waterhouse Hawk-ins came. As a work of imagination, though, it succeeds most excellently.

The most famous of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs—and the one that involved Owen and Waterhouse Hawkins in the biggest whopper—stand majestically nearby. These are the Iguanodons, perhaps a dozen feet high and thirty feet long: the second known dinosaur, and the first superstar of the tribe, in those days before Brontosaurus and Tyrannosaurus had been unearthed. Iguanodon was discovered by the English physician and naturalist Gideon Mantell, who named it “Iguana tooth” because of the resemblance of its teeth to those of the modern South American lizard. Mantell, publishing an account of his find in 1825, calculated on the basis of the teeth alone that Iguanodon might have been a hundred feet long, larger than the largest whale, and one can easily imagine the stir that that caused in the England of George IV’s time. Other discoveries in the next few years showed that Iguanodon was nowhere near that size, but nevertheless must have been unthinkably large. And so they are depicted at Crystal Palace.

But the feature that makes the Crystal Palace Iguanodons special is the large rhinoceros-like horn that each one has on its nose. It is a very striking ornament indeed; but what Owen and Waterhouse Hawkins didn’t know was that the pointed bone that they identified as a nasal horn was in fact one of a pair of thumb-like spikes that Iguanodons had on their hands close to their wrists. So there stand the Crystal Palace Iguanodons, grand and huge, with jaunty thumbs on their noses! (They also stand on four legs, though we now know that they, too, were bipedal dinosaurs.)

The one remaining dinosaur on the island is the aquatic reptile Mosasaurus, portrayed simply as a great menacing head sticking up out of the water, since nothing more was known of it then but its skull. As you continue around the site, though, you will find reconstructions of extinct animals of more recent times lurking in the shrubbery: an impressive Megatherium, or giant ground sloth; a couple of tapir-like Paleotheriums; a Megaloceros, or giant Irish elk, and so forth. Apparently the plan had been to extend the display to include mastodons and other extinct mammals, but they were never constructed, perhaps because funds had run out.

Political chicanery rather than a shortage of money was the reason why New York City’s Central Park does not have a similarly delightful exhibit of nightmare monsters out of prehistory. In 1868 a New York city official contacted Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, who was then visiting the United States, and invited him to create dinosaur models for a proposed Paleozoic Museum, a Crystal Palace-like structure to be erected on the western side of the park near 63rd Street. Hawkins accepted enthusiastically, and it was quickly decided that he “should attempt to reproduce the original forms of life inhabiting the great Continent of America, rather than repeat the European forms that had been already illustrated in the Palace Park at Sydenham, in England.”

Waterhouse Hawkins went off to the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, to the Smithsonian, and to Yale University to study such newly discovered and imposing American dinosaurs as the duck-billed forty-foot-long Hadrosaurus and the fierce-looking carnivore Laelaps (now known as Dryptosaurus), a Megalosaurus relative. But this was the era when New York came into the hands of the corrupt administration of the infamous Boss Tweed. Tweed put his own men in charge of Central Park; the new administrators, seeing no gain to be had for themselves from a Paleozoic Museum, quickly scrapped the plan; and the models Waterhouse Hawkins had already constructed were buried somewhere in the southern part of the park, never to be seen again.

The grand and glorious Crystal Palace dinosaurs remain on view to this day, though, and, because of a major rehabilitation project in the 1980s and 1990s, they look as good as they did on the day Queen Victoria opened the park in 1854. As I have indicated, we know now that they are not distinguished for their scientific accuracy, although they represented the last word in paleontological knowledge when they were constructed a century and a half ago. They have the terrifying look of monsters out of ancient time, yes, but it’s hard to repress a grin as we stare at their great squat humpbacked bodies, their oversized heads with that ominous multitude of teeth, and, of course, those thumb-spikes on the noses of the Iguanodons. I found my journey to the dinosaur island of Crystal Palace Park greatly rewarding, both for the beauty and strangeness of the sculptures and for the sense they gave me of the pioneering intensity of scientific inquiry that existed in the dynamic Victorian Age. And, oh, how utterly fantastic those dinosaurs must have seemed to the visitors who viewed them long ago in Queen Victoria’s time!