Hairy Museum of Natural History

This Sunday’s New York Times has an article (registration required) on the search for buried dinosaurs in Central Park. In 1868, British sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (who created the first life-sized dinosaur sculptures for London’s Crystal Palace) was invited to work on a series of restorations of extinct American animals for a planned “Paleozoic Museum” in Central Park. Hawkins, however, had the misfortune of working on the project through a change of New York City government, and found himself on the wrong side of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. Tweed had vandals break into Hawkins’ studio and smash his sculptures, and rumor has it that at least some of the pieces were buried in Central Park. A group of present day “urban explorers” are hoping to find a few pieces and possibly recreate the sculptures.

Little-seen photographs of Hawkin’s studio with some of his Paleozoic Museum models are online here and here. A “virtual tour” of the unbuilt Paleozoic Museum is online at the UnMuseum’s “The Museum that Never Was.”

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Museumabilia, Paleo-Pop.