The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs

Today being a lazy Sunday, me and my girlfriend went over to Crystal Palace Park to have a look at the stone dinosaurs that apparently lurk around the gardens. They're dotted in and around the banks of the lake, frozen in the middle of their Jurassic horseplay. While they're fascinating additions to the landscape, we assumed that their purpose was for entertainment; we were wrong. A sign in the park informed us that the stone dinosaurs were scuplted by Benjamin Waterhouse-Hawkins under the instruction of Sir Richard Owen, a 19th century biologist, and were constructed and displayed at Crystal Palace in the first public exhibition

Owen: He was a shit exhibition demonstrating the nature and existence of prehistoric life. The prehistoric trail at Crystal Palace Park is basically the original Jurassic Park, admittedly with prefab inanimate dinosaurs, but still pretty amazing considering that we were expecting a couple of crap statues. These statues are the original dinosaurs, the ancestors of every imagined prehistoric beastie you've ever seen. And what's more (and this is the bit I'm putting it in bold, because I think it sums it up nicely):

Sir Richard Owen, co-creator of the fake dinosaurs in Crystal Palace Park, invented the word 'dinosaur'.

He invented dinosaurs! What a guy. There are fifteen in the park and there were supposed to be three more (including a dodo) but Owen got his funding cut, which at the time made me feel sorry for him. However (sigh) even the most rudimentary investigation into Owen's life and work on Wikipedia has led me to understand that he was s malicious, arrogant shit of the highest order who ripped off the ideas of another biologist by the name of Gideon Mantell (who apparently came up with the first idea of a dinosaur; the last dinosaur was, of course, Denver) and had an ongoing beef with Charles Darwin. So now I don't feel so sorry for him, and I'm also not convinced that he came up with the word or the idea of dinosaurs; but that kind of makes a point about learning new things; they're quite often wrong, and as you dig deeper, you find out lots of other new things, which are also reasonably likely to be inaccurate, and so the cycle continues. For instance, I learnt through my dinosaur-based learning today that The Crystal Palace burnt down in 1936. When I woke up this morning I thought the Crystal Palace was still standing, and was surprised to find it replaced by a TV mast and a running track. Not as interesting as the dinosaurs though, and the shithead who stole other people's ideas (allegedly) and made a concrete Lost World out of them in the heart of South London.