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Robert Plot was a distinguished scholar. Nicknamed “the learned Dr. Plot,” he was one of the most significant figures of the British scientific revolution. He established himself as an early secretary of the Royal Society of London, hobnobbing with luminaries like Robert Hooke, Edmund Halley, John Locke, and Isaac Newton. He then became the director of the Ashmolean Museum in London, the first public museum in the country. Like many of his fellow Renaissance men, he studied almost everything, including chemistry, archaeology, medicine, and biology.
That’s why it’s a shame that his name will always be associated with balls.
Among Plot’s numerous interests were fossils. After a specimen was discovered in an Oxfordshire quarry in 1676, its finders brought it to the learned doctor. It was part of a dinosaur’s thigh bone, and it looked like this:
Nobody knew about dinosaurs yet, so Plot thought that the bone might have come from an elephant or one of the giants that appear in the Bible. But science could not resist remarking on the similarity between the drawing and, well, you know.
In a 1763 book, Richard Brookes reproduced Plot’s illustration and captioned it “Scrotum Humanum” — probably not because he thought that he really had a specimen of fossilized human genitalia but just because he couldn’t resist making note of the similarity.
Because the caption matched the later Linnean binomial system (Homo sapiens, etc.), a twentieth-century paleontologist tried to argue that Scrotum humanum should be considered the first officially named dinosaur species. The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature decided otherwise, disappointing, I’m sure, 12-year-olds everywhere.
It was one of humanity’s first stabs at imagining dinosaurs, an indication of the difficulty we’d have in using partial fossils to understand long-lost creatures.
It didn’t occur to anyone until the turn of the nineteenth century that the Earth had once been home to creatures that were now extinct. Georges Cuvier was the first scientist to broach the idea that the planet’s plant and animal species had changed over time rather than being created by God in their current states. His study of extinct mammals like the anoplotherium opened up the human imagination to the possibility of lost worlds:
By the 1820s, scientists like William Buckland realized that Plot’s fossil — and others that were being uncovered around England and the world — had come from extinct giant lizards. Buckland called the fossils he had identified megalosaurus: literally, “big lizard” (Plot’s “Scrotum humanorum” fossil was probably a megalosaurus, but we can’t be sure because the specimen has been lost).
But what had these creatures looked like in life? They seemed to be very different from modern animals, but the fossils left a lot of room for interpretation. Here’s a typical fossil illustration from the 1820s, in this case of a plesiosaur found by the pioneering paleontologist Mary Anning:
It required a real leap of imagination to bring these flattened, incomplete skeletons to life. The first person to take a shot at it was Henry de la Beche, a paleontologist friend of Anning’s. He imagined a scene in ancient Dorset, England, where birdlike lizards flew above a crowded, violent sea. You can see how he modeled his drawings on modern animals like crocodiles and threw in some turtles, squid, and fish for good measure:
De la Beche also used his artistic abilities to mock the trendy scientific theory that natural history ran in cycles, meaning that once-extinct creatures would reappear. In this cartoon, he imagines a world in which ichthyosaurs rule the earth again and humans have gone extinct:
It wasn’t until 1842 that scientists grouped various reptilian fossils together into one category: the dinosaurs. The man who coined the term was one of the most famous paleontologists of the nineteenth century, Richard Owen.
Let’s get this out of the way: Owen was a terrible human being. He stole fossils from his competitors and wrote mean-spirited anonymous appraisals of their discoveries (these articles often contained fulsome praise for Owen’s own work). He got into high-profile battles with supporters of Charles Darwin, who he viewed as one of his primary rivals (sometimes, Owen criticized evolution; at others, he tried to claim credit for the idea). One of his fellow paleontologists called him "overpaid, over-praised and cursed with a jealous monopolising spirit." A modern biographer described him as an “argumentative, petty, jealous, sometimes almost vicious and cunning individual.” He kind of looked the part, too, here posing with the reconstructed skeleton of an extinct moa bird:
Despite his personal failings, Owen was an important paleontologist. He was also an intellectual celebrity — here he’s caricatured at a banquet featuring all of the exotic creatures he studied:
Not only did Owen coin the term “dinosaur” but he tried to help the public envision what the great beasts must have looked like. He and the artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins created a fascinating group of life-size concrete dinosaurs for display in London.
Hawkins had previously worked on depicting modern animals — in the 1830s and 1840s he helped to illustrate Darwin’s The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. He then went on to serve as assistant superintendent of the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was one of the most powerful displays of Victorian England’s economic, political, and scientific prowess. When the exhibition ended, the government wanted to relocate the Crystal Palace, which had been the centerpiece of the fair, to a park in South London. And it seemed like it would be nice to have some other attractions in the park to attract visitors.
So Owen and Hawkins teamed up to reconstruct England as it had been before human habitation. They first tried to create a geological exhibit but eventually decided to spice it up with some dinos. The undertaking was huge, both literally and in the conceptual work required. Hawkins’ early concept drawings borrowed a lot from contemporary lizards:
Hawkins got to work in a shed in the park, as captured in this drawing:
The models were an immense undertaking: Hawkins said that “the quantities of material of which the standing Iguanodon is composed, consist of four iron columns 9 feet long by 7 inches diameter, 600 bricks, 650 5-inch half-round drain tiles, 900 plain tiles, 38 casks of cement, 90 casks of broken stone, making a total of 640 bushels of artificial stone.” He and Owen weren’t above a little showmanship: they held a dinner for 21 scientists inside the model in 1853:
According to the Illustrated London News,
cards were issued at the beginning of last week – and such cards! as startling as the invitation they bore: “Mr. B. Waterhouse Hawkins solicits the honour of Professor ____’s company at dinner, in the Iguanodon, on the 31st of December, 1853, at four p.m.” The incredible request was written on the wing of a Pterodactyle, spread before a most graphic etching of the Iguanodon, with his socially-loaded stomach, so practicably and easily filled, as to tempt all to whom it was possible to accept, at such short notice, this singular invitation.
The dinner, which was luxurious and elegantly served, being ended, the usual routine of loyal toasts were duly given and responded to – allusion being gracefully made by Mr. Francis Fuller, Managing Director, to the great interest evinced and approbation expressed by H.M. the Queen and H.R.H. the Prince, on their recent visit to the extraordinary works by which the company were surrounded.
The finished display looked something like this 1854 print:
You can still visit Hawkins’ and Owens’ dinosaurs (heavily restored in recent years) in South London:
Hawkins’ sculptures were impressive and famous, but they weren’t terribly accurate. That’s because he and Owen didn’t have much to work with — here’s one of Owen’s illustrations showing the fossils on which the megalosaurus was based:
Mostly, Hawkins’ dinosaurs mostly look like bigger, fatter versions of modern reptiles like crocodiles or monitor lizards. They’re green because that’s the color of most reptiles today, and Hawkins simply guessed on the shape of body parts for which there were no fossil records (his hylaeosaurus gazes away from the paths in the park because he didn’t know what its face would have looked like). Modern paleontologists have decided that the spikes on the iguanodons’ noses actually belong on their thumbs and that these dinosaurs didn’t have scales as Hawkins depicted them.
Nevertheless, Hawkins’ work was instrumental in bringing these extinct beasts to life — even if they frightened the occasional kid:
Over the course of the 19th century, paleontologists — and the artists who rendered their finds for the public — evolved their ideas about what dinosaurs must have been like. This is an 1896 drawing of a megalosaurus, with a much longer tail and neck and a more rounded body shape than Hawkins’ imagining:
But artists were still guessing, mostly. Here’s an 1899 drawing of a stegosaurus in which the artist, Frank Bond, didn’t quite know what to do with the animal’s armor plates:
Sometimes, inaccurate depictions of dinosaurs were combined with other scientifically problematic content. In the 1886 drawing, Adam and Eve hang out with dinosaurs, lions, monkeys, and more:
My favorite of these late-19th-century artists was Charles Knight, a legally blind man who devoted his life to depicting extinct animals. He helped to usher in the modern version of dinosaurs that you probably grew up looking at in kids’ books. Not only did he get closer to a modern understanding of stegosaurus in this 1899 model:
He injected some action and fun into his art, as in his famous painting “Leaping Laelaps:”
None of the images I’ve shown you so far would be considered a terribly accurate depiction of a dinosaur today. Scientists and artists have gotten much better at understanding how to turn a pile of bones into a plausible, complete animal. We have a much more complete sense of where dinosaurs fall on the evolutionary tree, how they compare to modern animals, and what their soft tissue (and, in some cases, feathers) may have looked like.
But even as scientists hone in on the truth about dinosaurs, many of us get our ideas about the creatures from movies more than museums. And, as the author Darren Naish says, those depictions all too often follow “the rule of cool.”
Nevertheless, whatever image pops into your mind when you think of dinosaurs is a product of this two-century-long collaboration between art and science. The people who’ve tried to imagine dinosaurs have almost always tried to do two things simultaneously: holding public attention while maintaining scientific accuracy. Whatever the flaws in their approaches, they’ve brought a lost world to life before our eyes.
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