There are dinosaurs buried beneath New York City’s Central Park. Now these aren’t your typical T. rex or Triceratops left behind in layers of sediment. These dinosaurs aren’t millions of years old and never took a gulp of air. They’re dapper Victorians, made of cement, wire, stone, and clay. They were entertainers and educators, meant to give New Yorkers their first glimpse of the prehistoric creatures that once roamed New Jersey forests and Connecticut lakeshores. But in 1871, these carefully crafted, life-size models were destroyed, smashed into worthless smithereens, and then buried in a small mound in Central Park. According to historian Vicky Coules of the University of Bristol, the event remains the “greatest act of vandalism in the history of dinosaur study and museum development.”
For more than a century, the villain behind the destruction was thought to be William Magear Tweed, a corrupt Tammany Hall politician better known as Boss Tweed, who controlled New York City with his “Tweed ring” cronies. But after almost a year of combing through government and newspaper archives, Coules discovered that the real villain wasn’t Tweed at all, but Henry Hilton, a New York lawyer who was appointed to oversee the city’s parks. And the more Coules dug into the story, the stranger it became. Hilton, she says, “did other things that were just bizarre.”
In the mid-19th century, very few people knew about dinosaurs; the word “dinosaur” had only been coined in the early 1840s. But English sculptor and natural history artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins set out to change that. In 1851, Hawkins created dozens of life-sized, scientifically accurate (at least for the time) dinosaur models in a South London park: the famous Crystal Palace dinosaur display. When they were unveiled, Hawkins’s dinosaurs were a sensation; on opening day, 40,000 visitors flocked to the park. As paleontologist Thomas Holtz of the University of Maryland puts it, Hawkins “is the real start of the popularization of dinosaurs.”
In 1868, Hawkins was commissioned to complete an even more ambitious dinosaur replica project in New York City. He was tasked with creating the show stopping models for the country’s first-ever dinosaur museum, the Paleozoic Museum.