After the
Great Exhibition of 1851 in London,
The Crystal Palace at Hyde Palace was taken down and moved to a new location in South London. The Crystal Palace reopened in 1854, and one of the new exhibits was sculptor
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' life-sized concrete dinosaur models, the
Crystal Palace Dinosaurs. The Dinosaur exhibit was a great success and very popular. Hawkins came to America in 1868 and displayed a mounted dinosaur skeleton in
Philadelphia. Inspired, in 1868
Manhattan's newly created Board of Commissioners of Central Park (BCCP), headed by Comptroller
Andrew H. Green, recruited Hawkins to create replicas of these ancient giants for a proposed museum in
Central Park. He accepted the commission in May 1868. The museum was to have been known as the Paleozoic Museum (or Palaeozoic Museum); despite the name, it was intended to be a museum of all
antediluvian history, not merely the
Paleozoic period. Extant drawings by Hawkins, along with other records, indicate that the Paleozoic Museum would have included life-sized restorations of the
theropod Laelaps (=
Dryptosaurus), the hadrosaurid
Hadrosaurus, the plesiosaur
Elasmosaurus, and the
mosasaur Mosasaurus (all from the Upper Cretaceous marls of
New Jersey), along with
glyptodont models, a pair of
giant ground sloths, giant
Pleistocene elk,
mammoths, and extinct mammalian carnivores. After the plans for the museum fell through, Hawkins went to
Princeton University where he painted a number of restorations of America's Late
Cretaceous environments; these works have survived. Hawkins models from the Crystal Palace exhibition are still extant and can still be seen today in
Sydenham Park. ==Destruction==