Chapter 2
Dinosaurs existed in a long arc from 230 million to 65 million years ago, but they weren’t truly born until the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in London.
With their tempers of hot steam, and teeth and claws that Death could sharpen its scythe on, dinosaurs were buried deep under the Earth they once subjugated. They lay submerged and forgotten, as epoch piled upon epoch, misunderstood by the occasional Greek peasant or Plains Indian disinterring them as the Monster of Troy or the Thunder Bird.
The “Blind Men and the Elephant” methodology to interpreting bones half as old as time changed forever in the 1820s when fossil hunter Mary Anning exhumed the first intact skeleton of a Plesiosaurus skeleton, and later the bones of a pterosaur which became known as Pterodactylus, the first specimen of its kind located outside Germany. At roughly the same time, in 1824, William Buckland gave the first scientific description of the world’s first dinosaur—the 30-foot-tall, 1.5-ton, meat-munching Megalosaurus—and in 1842 paleontologist and zoologist Richard Owen coined the term “dinosauria” (“terrible lizard”) to give the creatures a name like Adam did all the beasts in his Eden, specifically Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and Hylaeosaurus, the only known dinos at the time. (Pterosaurs were related to dinosaurs but not technically ones themselves. The public, of course, cared little for taxonomic distinctions and saw only monstrosities the size of bears that could fly up, up, and away like hawks.)
But just as the alien reaches of outer space weren’t universally accessible until Chesley Bonestell painted the cosmos in colors and vistas that whirled around viewers’ minds like the plumes from an opium cigarette, the exotic reality of dinosaurs didn’t become tangible until geologist/paleontologist Henry de la Beche painted a watercolor depicting Mary Anning’s discoveries. There, in a humid patch of sea, land, and air sketched by de la Beche, a free-for-all of dinos fought and grazed and stomped. Now modern men and women could talk of monsters as perhaps their ancient ancestors spoke of Cyclops and Hydras.
The one creature that enraptured the Victorian mind the most was the pterosaur, for reasons best clarified in Reverend Charles Kingsley’s “The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby.” Writing the story in serial form from 1862 to 1863, then publishing the allegory of evolution as a compete book, Kingsley grasped how scientists had brought wonder from laboratories outfitted only with cold instruments.
“Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.”
Flying dragons were nonetheless not the purview of Richard Owen. One of the judges and organizers of the 1851 exhibition, Owen also administered the fair’s zoological and botanical exhibitions. Helped by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, a natural-history artist who had been appointed assistant superintendent for the fair, Owen helped create the first full-scale figures portraying dinosaurs. According to some accounts, a few models were originally crafted for the exhibition, but the saurians’ Jurassic Park moment had to wait until after the fair. Following the Great Exhibition’s close, the Crystal Palace was disassembled and a new enlarged version constructed South of London. Here, Owen and Hawkins would populate the new Palace with thirty-three dinosaur sculptures made of iron skeletons underneath a dermis of bricks and concrete.
To celebrate the pristine new locale and their nineteenth-century version of de-extincting the dinosaurs, Owen and Hawkins hosted New Year’s Eve dinner in 1853 for twenty-one scientists, newspaper editors, and representatives of the Crystal Palace Company. Hawkins drew the invitations by hand, sketching a monstrous version of one of the primeval brutes, requesting the pleasure of the invitee’s attendance to “dine in the Mould of the Iguanodon.”
On the closing night of 1853, the guests supped inside a hollowed-out model of a monster 125 million years old with thumb spikes. While the Iguanodon had chomped on a diet of plants, the august visitors dined on dozens of dishes, including mock turtle soup, raised pigeon pie, mayonnaise de filets de sole, pheasants, and charlotte russe, washed down with sherry, madeira, port, moselle, and claret.
No doubt the esteemed guests toasted the near future of the distant past. The thirty-three statues (representing a fraction of the 700-plus named dinosaur species today) set off a dino-mania that has never gone out of style in 170 years. The Victorians’ passion for the paleontological dwarfed even their collateral obsession with another aspect of natural history, insects. (Beetles and butterflies exerted a mental tug on the era’s popular culture to such an extent that the great Shakespearean actress Ellen Terry wore a dress made of beetle wings when she played Lady Macbeth.) Charles Dickens invoked a Megalosaurus as a metaphor for London weather in 1852’s “Bleak House.” James De Mille’s 1888 “A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder” posited a balmy world of primordial brutes. Frank Mackenzie Savile’s 1901 “Beyond the Great South Wall” invoked a brontosaurus with the “the neck of a boa-constrictor” revered as a god by contemporary Mayans. In 1910, Jules Lermina published “L’Effrayante Aventure,” where a veritable safari park of prehistoric creatures, including Triceratops and Iguanodon, long frozen underneath the streets of Paris, thaw out to become the most unusual flâneurs of all. These exploitations of a cultural trope achieved their apogee in 1912, with Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World” and its multiple film offshoots, reminding us, in notes both mesmerized and melancholy, of an era when giants truly held dominion over the earth, monsters who could conquer anything but even more monstrous rocks from outer space that hit with a billion times the power of the Hiroshima atom bomb.
Courtesy of Michael Gilbert and “The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs”
The Crystal Palace dinosaurs became a beloved national institution of sorts, and a few years ago received Grade I status, placing them on the same legal pedestal as the Houses of Parliament and Nelson’s Column.
Courtesy of Sinclair Oil Corp.
Over time the “terrible lizards” evolved into the benevolent face of the Sinclair Oil Corp. at the 1933–1934 Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago. Dubiously asserting that the older the oil fields your gasoline comes from are, the better the fuel’s quality, the company dramatized its fuel’s ancient origins in Pennsylvania 250 million years ago with a robotic Tyrannosaurus rex, a Brontosaurus (now called the Apatosaurus), and others made of plaster spread over a steel skeleton, with cloth and rubber covering the joints between sections. Part of an ongoing promotion, the dinosaurs proved so popular that Sinclair sold rubber versions of them at its gas stations and trademarked the silhouette of a large arugula-green Brontosaurus, an image that became one of the world’s most iconic—and most beloved—corporate logos.
Founded by Harry F. Sinclair in 1916, the company wheeled out NASCAR-like promotions in the 1920s: Motorcycle pioneer Floyd Clymer and 1920 Indianapolis 500 winner Gaston Chevrolet, to name a few, sported tailored white coveralls emblazoned with the Sinclair name. Their star power helped Sinclair’s sales surpass the billion gallon mark in 1926. But Clymer took a detour to Leavenworth federal penitentiary on mail fraud changes and Chevrolet died in a crash on the Los Angeles Speedway. Then, by 1930, the Depression helped evaporate the pre-tax price per gallon of gas to 16 cents, a profit-vaporizing drop of nearly 35 percent since 1918. That same year, Sinclair’s advertising copywriters, looking to rev up its sales, took a different tack to popularize its gas by using science, not celebrity. Noting the Mesozoic origins of its oil fields, the company began using a medley of the monsters from that era of geological and evolutionary tumult: red-in-tooth-and-claw T. rex, the harpoon-horned Triceratops, and the passive-vegan Brontosaurus, as well as the Stegosaurus, Protoceratops, and Trachodon. The creatures appeared on maps, oilcans, and other advertising ephemera with the pacific Brontosaurus quickly emerging as the public’s favorite. Nicknamed Dino, the lumbering lizard’s name became a stand-in term for Sinclair’s gas itself, much as Xerox and Google became de facto descriptions for their own generic functions.
But the 1933 exhibit tipped the antediluvian brood from a current fad into a cultural phenomenon. Designed by Hollywood special-effects whiz, P.G. Alen, it became the Jurassic Park of its time, with the nonthreatening Dino as a kind of saurian Paul McCartney. Building on the exhibit’s momentum, Sinclair placed life-size models of Dino at several stations and, in 1935, also issued stamp books, where customers ultimately filled up 4 million albums with 48 million stamps. Its association with dinosaurs now hardwired into the public’s imagination, the company financed the expeditions of Dr. Barnum Brown, aka “Mr. Bones,” renowned as the greatest fossil hunter of the twentieth century. Named for P.T. Barnum, the flamboyant Brown discovered the first T. rex fossil in 1902. With Brown cutting an Indiana Jones–like swath across the world, Sinclair’s branded expeditions and its exhibit helped bring the leviathans from the primeval swamp into the classroom and the living room for an ongoing course in rex education.