Following the success of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was an English sculptor and natural history artist renowned for combining both in his work on the life-size models of dinosaurs in the Crystal Palace Park, Sydenham, south London...

' life-sized concrete dinosaur models created for England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

's Crystal Palace

The Crystal Palace

The Crystal Palace was a cast-iron and glass building originally erected in Hyde Park, London, England, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. More than 14,000 exhibitors from around the world gathered in the Palace's of exhibition space to display examples of the latest technology developed in...

 for the Great Exhibition of 1851, in 1868 the Commissioners of Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

's newly created Central Park recruited the sculptor to create replicas of America

Americas

The Americas, or America , are lands in the Western hemisphere, also known as the New World. In English, the plural form the Americas is often used to refer to the landmasses of North America and South America with their associated islands and regions, while the singular form America is primarily...

's antediluvian

Antediluvian

The antediluvian period meaning "before the deluge" is the period referred to in the Bible between the Creation of the Earth and the Deluge . The narrative takes up chapters 1-6 of Genesis...

 giants for a proposed museum in Central Park

Central Park

Central Park is a public park in the center of Manhattan in New York City, United States. The park initially opened in 1857, on of city-owned land. In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a design competition to improve and expand the park with a plan they entitled the Greensward Plan...

. The museum was to have been known as the Paleozoic

Paleozoic

The Paleozoic era is the earliest of three geologic eras of the Phanerozoic eon, spanning from roughly...

 Museum (or Palaeozoic Museum), and foundations for the structure were laid by architect Frederick Law Olmsted

Frederick Law Olmsted

Frederick Law Olmsted was an American journalist, social critic, public administrator, and landscape designer. He is popularly considered to be the father of American landscape architecture, although many scholars have bestowed that title upon Andrew Jackson Downing...

 at Central Park West and 63rd Street. Like Hyde Park

Hyde Park, London

Hyde Park is one of the largest parks in central London, United Kingdom, and one of the Royal Parks of London, famous for its Speakers' Corner.The park is divided in two by the Serpentine...

's Crystal Palace, Hawkins' display was to be housed within a great iron frame and an arched glass roof. Surviving sketches and photographs show that Hawkins had planned an elaborate, if anachronistic, menagerie, mixing Mesozoic

Mesozoic

The Mesozoic era is an interval of geological time from about 250 million years ago to about 65 million years ago. It is often referred to as the age of reptiles because reptiles, namely dinosaurs, were the dominant terrestrial and marine vertebrates of the time...

 dinosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs with extinct Cenozoic

Cenozoic

The Cenozoic era is the current and most recent of the three Phanerozoic geological eras and covers the period from 65.5 mya to the present. The era began in the wake of the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous that saw the demise of the last non-avian dinosaurs and...

 mammals.

However, unfortunately for Hawkins and future generations, the planned museum ran afoul of 19th Century New York's corrupt politics. After Hawkins spoke out publicly against "Boss" William Marcy Tweed, vandals in the employ of Tweed broke into Hawkins' workshop on a spring day in 1871 and used sledge-hammers to reduce the seven finished models and their molds, as well as other materials, to rubble. The ruined sculptures were then buried somewhere near the southwestern corner of the park.
Afterwards, Hawkins went to Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

 where he painted a number of restorations of America's Late Cretaceous

Cretaceous

The Cretaceous , derived from the Latin "creta" , usually abbreviated K for its German translation Kreide , is a geologic period and system from circa to million years ago. In the geologic timescale, the Cretaceous follows the Jurassic period and is followed by the Paleogene period of the...

 environments (these have survived). He also managed to build one last dinosaur, a hadrosaur (Hadrosaurus

Hadrosaurus

Hadrosaurus is a valid genus of hadrosaurid dinosaur. In 1858, a skeleton of a dinosaur from this genus was the first dinosaur skeleton known from more than isolated teeth to be found in North America. In 1868, it became the first ever mounted dinosaur skeleton...

 foulkii). It was exhibited in Philadelphia and Washington D.C. as part of commemorations of the centenary of the Declaration of Independence

Declaration of independence

A declaration of independence is an assertion of the independence of an aspiring state or states. Such places are usually declared from part or all of the territory of another nation or failed nation, or are breakaway territories from within the larger state...

 in 1876. Though the hadrosaur sculpture was allowed to decay and crumble, some fragments have recently been located, all that now survives of Hawkins' ill-fated American dinosaur models.

Extant drawings by Hawkins, along with other records, indicate that the Paleozoic Museum would have included life-sized restorations of the theropod Laelaps (=Dryptosaurus

Dryptosaurus

Dryptosaurus was a genus of primitive tyrannosaur that lived in Eastern North America during the middle Maastrichtian stage of the Late Cretaceous period. Although largely unknown now outside of academic circles, a famous painting of the genus by Charles R...

), the hadrosaurid Hadrosaurus

Hadrosaurus

Hadrosaurus is a valid genus of hadrosaurid dinosaur. In 1858, a skeleton of a dinosaur from this genus was the first dinosaur skeleton known from more than isolated teeth to be found in North America. In 1868, it became the first ever mounted dinosaur skeleton...

, the plesiosaur Elasmosaurus

Elasmosaurus

Elasmosaurus + σαυρος sauros 'lizard') is a genus of plesiosaur with an extremely long neck that lived in the Late Cretaceous period , 80.5 million years ago.-Description:...

, and the mosasaur

Mosasaur

Mosasaurs are large extinct marine lizards. The first fossil remains were discovered in a limestone quarry at Maastricht on the Meuse in 1764...

 Mosasaurus

Mosasaurus

Mosasaurus is a genus of mosasaur, carnivorous, aquatic lizards, somewhat resembling flippered crocodiles, with elongated heavy jaws. The genus existed during the Maastrichtian age of the Cretaceous period , around 70-65 millions years ago in the area of modern Western Europe and North America...

(all from the Upper Cretaceous marls of New Jersey

New Jersey

New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...

), along with glyptodont models, a pair of giant ground sloth

Sloth

Sloths are the six species of medium-sized mammals belonging to the families Megalonychidae and Bradypodidae , part of the order Pilosa and therefore related to armadillos and anteaters, which sport a similar set of specialized claws.They are arboreal residents of the jungles of Central and South...

, giant Pleistocene

Pleistocene

The Pleistocene is the epoch from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years BP that spans the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. The name pleistocene is derived from the Greek and ....

 elk, mammoths, and extinct mammalian carnivores. Hawkins models from the Crystal Palace exhibition have survived and can be seen today in Sydenham

Sydenham

Sydenham is an area and electoral ward in the London Borough of Lewisham; although some streets towards Crystal Palace Park, Forest Hill and Penge are outside the ward and in the London Borough of Bromley, and some streets off Sydenham Hill are in the London Borough of Southwark. Sydenham was in...

Park.