Crystal Palace Park dinosaurs to be turned into 3D interactive models
- Published
It might be surprising but there’s a park in London where you can see dinosaurs. The Crystal Palace Park dinosaurs were created by natural history artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins in 1854. They are thought to have been the first attempt in the world to create life-size extinct model animals, using fossil remains as evidence.
The sculptures were created between 1853 and 1855 and can be found on an island in the park in South London. There are technically only four dinosaurs - the rest are ancient mammals, amphibians, and marine and flying reptiles.
Now the sculptures are being turned into interactive 3D models. Historic England, the organisation that looks after the country's historic environment, carried out many digital scans of the animals to create the photogrammetric models. Photogrammetry is the science of making reliable measurements by using photographs.
Historic England created the scans so it could study "the sculptures' conservation problems" and help with restoration work. The dinosaur models in the park are approaching 170 years old and some are damaged. The new 3D models mean visitors can "get up close and personal with the 'dinosaurs' without disrupting the vulnerable animal artworks or their setting", Historic England said.
This is one of the non-dinosaur sculptures. It's megatherium americanum, an extinct animal related to giant sloths that lived in the grasslands and woodlands of South America in the last Ice Age. Knowledge of the dinosaurs has improved since the models were created, so although there are some inaccuracies, they are still thought of by many to be an important moment in the history of science.
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