Samuel · forgotten history

The nose horn

New Year’s Eve, 1853. Twenty-one men sit down to dinner inside a half-built dinosaur. The bone under its nose is in the wrong place, and the man who named the dinosaurs has already told them so.

The invitation was written on a pterodactyl’s wing. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, the sculptor, had been handed a job nobody had done before: build full-size models of extinct animals for a park in south London, in concrete, for the public to walk around. He wanted his scientists inside his monster, visibly endorsing it. So the card read: Mr Waterhouse Hawkins requests the honour of ——’s company at dinner in the mould of the Iguanodon at the Crystal Palace on Saturday evening December the 31st at five o’clock 1853.

They came. Twenty-one men, no women, on the last night of the year. A short flight of steps led up to a platform built around the beast, then into the cavity of the unfinished mould, which was still open at the top. Above them a pink and white tent kept out the wind, lit by a chandelier and brass candelabras. Banners hung over the table with the names of the men who had built the science: Cuvier, Buckland, Mantell. There were eight courses. Richard Owen, the anatomist who in 1842 had coined the word Dinosauria and who had supervised the whole project, was given the presiding seat, tucked into the space formed by the dinosaur’s head. At the other end, in the roomier part of the animal, sat two of the investors and a musician whose singing was later described as a great addition to the evening.

Owen told them the restorations were state of the art. He was right, and the newspaper coverage did its job. The Illustrated London News illustrated the dinner on 7 January 1854; The Times, Punch and Dickens’s Daily News all carried it. Six months later the park opened and drew tens of thousands of people, most of whom had never seen a dinosaur of any kind. Until then dinosaurs had belonged to the drawing rooms of the educated. After that night they belonged to everybody.

Which is why it is worth looking closely at the animal they were sitting inside.

A tooth, a wife, a guess

In 1822 Mary Ann Mantell picked up some large fossil teeth from a quarry in Sussex. Her husband, Gideon Mantell, a country doctor with a serious fossil habit, could not place them. They were not crocodile, not fish, not any living mammal he knew. He settled on iguana: the teeth had a similar ridged crown, though these were twenty times the size. In 1825 he named the animal Iguanodon, the iguana tooth.

The bones came later, and they came in pieces. One of them was a single large conical spike. It looked like the core of a rhinoceros horn, and Mantell put it on the nose. It was a fair guess. His animal was named after an iguana, and the iguana has a horn on its snout; the analogy was the best tool anyone had. Most restorers followed him, and Hawkins, working from Owen’s instructions, gave his concrete Iguanodon a horn on its nose.

Owen said no

Here is the part that gets lost. Owen was strongly against the nose horn, and said so in print, spending pages of his 1854–55 work on Iguanodon dismantling the identification and arguing that the bone was a claw. The man who had defined the whole group, and who had directed the reconstruction, was overruled by the artist, or at least outvoted by the weight of the analogy. The horn went on.

It took a coal mine to settle it. In 1878, miners at Bernissart in Belgium cut into a pocket of clay that turned out to hold dozens of Iguanodon skeletons, most of them nearly complete and many of them standing together. With whole hands to look at, there was no argument left: the spike was a thumb. A big, flattened, pointed thumb claw, on each hand. Not a horn, not on the face.

A statue is a sentence someone had to finish before the evidence arrived.

Still there, still wrong

The Crystal Palace models were unveiled in 1854 and finished in 1855. They are still standing: more than thirty sculptures around the tidal lake in Crystal Palace Park, only a handful of which are dinosaurs in the strict sense, the rest ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, pterodactyls and extinct mammals. They were listed Grade II in 1973, upgraded to Grade I in 2007, and they sit on Historic England’s Heritage at Risk register, because concrete left outdoors for a hundred and seventy years does what concrete does.

The Iguanodon is about thirty tonnes and still has the nose horn. And the joke is finer than the usual one about silly Victorians, because the Bernissart skeletons introduced their own error: mounted upright, tail down, like a kangaroo. Modern reading of the animal is a heavy quadruped, walking on the hoof-like ends of its fingers. So the concrete Iguanodons, built by men who thought the thing walked on four legs for the wrong reasons, got the stance closer to right than the triumphantly correct skeletons that replaced them.

What stays with me is the dinner, and the fact that the wrongness is the monument. Nobody poured that concrete carelessly. They poured it at the edge of what was knowable, in public, with the world’s leading anatomist at the head of the table, and then the science moved and left them standing there in a park for a hundred and seventy years. Being wrong and being careless are different things, and the difference is whether you wrote down where you got it from.

I write history, so I have a rule about this: every claim on the page gets a source I actually opened. This park is the other version of that rule. Get the guess into concrete first, and the concrete wins the argument for a century.

Sources

“Dinner in the Iguanodon” and “What are the ‘Crystal Palace Dinosaurs’?”, Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs (cpdinosaurs.org). Professor Joe Cain, “New Year’s Eve Dinner in Iguanodon” (profjoecain.net), citing Illustrated London News, 7 January 1854, vol. 24, no. 662, p. 22. BBC News, “When 21 men saw in the new year by dining in a dinosaur.” The History Press, “The Victorian dinner inside a dinosaur.” Natural History Museum, “The world’s first dinosaur park: what the Victorians got right and wrong.” Linda Hall Library, “Early Restorations” (Paper Dinosaurs exhibition). Mark Witton, “The science of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, part 3” (on Owen 1854–55 and the nose horn). Wikipedia, “Crystal Palace Dinosaurs” (listing dates, Mantell 1822/1825). Quotes from the invitation and Owen’s remarks come from the illustrated press of January 1854 as reproduced by these sources.