T. K. Arispe

 The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs need more love! I just really wanted to draw fan art of them. (I know, I need to get better at photographing my art. I'm trying. Lighting is hard.) (I know my lettering also isn't great. An attempt was made. Ironically, my grandmother is a professional calligrapher. I don't know what happened with me.) I definitely need to go see these guys on my (as-yet-hypothetical) grand tour of nerdy places in the UK (which will of course include Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics).

The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs get maligned a lot for being inaccurate depictions of dinosaurs, but considering that no complete (or indeed articulated) skeletal remains of dinosaurs were known at the time of their creation, you have to cut Waterhouse Hawkins a lot of slack. Hawkins was an extremely skilled wildlife illustrator who was probably the best person in England for the job of trying to come up with believable animals based on fragmentary remains. I think his designs, while incorrect, are actually much more biomechanically workable than those ghastly waddling-tripod dinos of the late 19th century to late 20th century. (That one is Louis Dollo's fault, and he tried with those Bernissart Iguanodon, I know, but if you have to straight up break a specimen's tail to get it into the posture you want, that is probably not the right posture for it.) 

If you look closely at the Iguanodon sculptures, you'll notice that they even have beaks. There was no cranial material known for Iguanodon at the time, which makes this all the more remarkable on Hawkins's part, because Iguanodon really did have beaks. A genius inference.

Fun fact: Hawkins's Megalosaurus has that big shoulder hump at Richard Owen's request; he was directing Hawkins's sculptures, and was aware of a set of tall-spined vertebrae that he referred to Megalosaurus (which at the time was basically a wastebasket taxon for all large theropods). Because these vertebrae were found on their own, it was anyone's guess where they went on the animal, so it seemed reasonable at the time to give "Megalosaurus" a tall shoulder hump like bison have. Nowadays the specimen is referred to Altispinax, which may have been related to Concavenator, meaning those tall spines formed a weird mini-hump in the middle of the back. Interesting case of a dinosaur being reconstructed inaccurately because too many unrelated animals were lumped into the same genus.

I'm a big fan of the work of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, and that's why I wrote him into my novel Thunder Girl. If you want a really beautiful treatment of his work with sculpting prehistoric animals, I highly recommend the picture book The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins by Barbara Kerley and Brian Selznick.