The London Illustrated News/Public Domain
On New Year’s Eve in 1853, a group of scientists, businessmen, and newspapermen sat down to dinner inside a life-size iguanodon model. It was one of the first reconstructions of a dinosaur ever made, and the dinner was a publicity stunt that helped launch an incredibly successful craze: Our obsession with dinosaurs.
By the time of the dinner, scientists had found and studied fossils for millennia. But dinosaurs didn’t yet have today’s grip on the public imagination. Even the word “dinosaur” was new—invented by one of the dinner’s attendees in 1842.
Richard Owen was a paleontology pioneer and the dinner’s guest of honor. Trained as a doctor, he spent much of his career researching fossils. He also advised artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins on the design of 33 concrete dinosaur models, including a certain iguanodon. The Crystal Palace Company had commissioned the statues to accompany the reopening of the Crystal Palace, a massive structure of glass, steel, and iron that had been erected for an international exhibition and then laboriously moved nine miles away.
The British public had seen prints and drawings of dinosaurs, but not full-sized replicas. The Crystal Palace Company made a savvy bet that the models would draw a crowd to the Crystal Palace. The dinner in the iguanodon, hosted by Waterhouse Hawkins, was part of this effort. The iguanodon model was thirty feet long, and guests lined its…
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