Dinner Party Inside a Life-Size Iguanodon: Victorian Scientists Get Creative

Twenty-one Victorian scientists squeezed into the hollow belly of a concrete dinosaur and ate turtle soup. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins had built the first life-size model of an Iguanodon for the Crystal Palace grounds — 30 feet long, crouched on all fours like a massive iguana. On New Year's Eve 1853, he threw a dinner inside it. Richard Owen presided from the head, literally sitting where he thought the brain would be. They got the anatomy spectacularly wrong: Hawkins mounted the Iguanodon's thumb spike on its nose like a horn. But the party worked. When the Crystal Palace opened, two million people came to see the dinosaurs. Paleontology became a public obsession, and the word "dinosaur" — Owen had coined it just eleven years earlier — entered everyday language. That dinner made extinction entertaining.