Crystal Palace Field Trip Part 2: Walking With Victorian Dinosaurs

[Previously: the Permian and Triassic]

The next part of the Crystal Palace Dinosaur trail depicts the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Most of the featured animals here are actually marine reptiles, but a few dinosaur species do make an appearance towards the end of this section.

A photograph of a Crystal Palace ichthyosaur statue, posed hauled out of the water like a seal or crocodile. It's partially obscured by plant growth, and is in a state of slight disrepair – moss and lichen patches cover its sides, and a plant is growing out of a crack on its back. A moorhen can be seen in the water swimming towards it.

Although there are supposed to be three Jurassic ichthyosaur statues here, only the big Temnodontosaurus platyodon could really be seen at the time of my visit. The two smaller Ichthyosaurus communis and Leptonectes tenuirostris were almost entirely hidden by the dense plant growth on the island.

Two photographs of the Crystal Palace ichthyosaurs. On the left the island is clear of foliage and all three can be seen; and on the right is the current overgrown state.
Ichthyosaurs when fully visible vs currently obscured
Left side image by Nick Richards (CC BY SA 2.0)
Two photographs of the large Crystal Palace ichthyosaur, showing closer views of the eye, flipper, and tail fin. Int he background a second ichthyosaur can be seen through the foliage. A moorhen is pecking around near the flipper.
Head, flipper, and tail details of the Temnodontosaurus. A second ichthyosaur is just barely visible in the background.

Ichthyosaurs were already known from some very complete and well-preserved fossils in the 1850s, so a lot of the anatomy here still holds up fairly well even 170 years later. They even have an attempt at a tail fin despite no impressions of such a structure having been discovered yet! Some details are still noticeably wrong compared to modern knowledge, though, such as the unusual amount of shrinkwrapping on the sclerotic rings of the eyes and the bones of the flippers.

An illustration comparing the Crystal Palace depiction of an ichthyosaur with a modern interpretation. The retro version has long toothy jaws, very large eyes, a seal-like body, four scaly-looking flippers, and a small eel-like fin on its tail. The modern version is a much more dolphin-like animal with smaller eyes, smooth triangular flippers, a dorsal fin, and a vertical crescent-shaped tail fin.
Continue reading “Crystal Palace Field Trip Part 2: Walking With Victorian Dinosaurs”

Crystal Palace Field Trip Part 1: Walking With Victorian Monsters

This past week I’ve been out of town and unable to work on much art, but instead here’s something a little different. I finally got the chance to go visit some familiar old faces out in the wilds of south London, so let’s go on a little tour of these iconic Victorian-era retrosaurs…

A photograph of an informational sign in London's Crystal Palace Park. The text on it reads, "The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs 1854, a journey through time and science". Three of the iconic Victorian dinosaur statures are also pictured below the title, showing the Iguanodon, Hylaeosaurus, and Megalosaurus.

The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs take their name from the original Crystal Palace, a glass-paned exhibition building originally constructed for a World’s Fair in Hyde Park in 1851.

In 1854 the structure was relocated 14km (~9 miles) south to the newly-created Crystal Palace Park, and a collection of over 30 life-sized statues of prehistoric animals were commissioned to accompany the reopening – creating a sort of Victorian dinosaur theme park – sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins with consultation from paleontologist Sir Richard Owen.

The Palace building itself burned down completely in 1936, and today only the ruins of its terraces remain in the northeast of the park grounds.

Two images of Victorian London's Crystal Palace building. On the left an old black-and-white photograph from around 1854 shows the original structure, a grand glass-paned building with ornate terraced gardens in front of it. On the right a more modern photo from 2011 shows what little remains today – just the ruins of the terraces and stairs.
The Crystal Palace building then and now
Left image circa 1854 (public domain)
Right image circa 2011 by Mark Ahsmann (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Six sphinx statues based on the Great Sphinx of Tanis also survive up among the Palace ruins, flanking some of the terrace staircases. They fell into serious disrepair during the latter half of the 20th century, but in 2017 they all finally got some much-needed preservation work, repairing them and restoring their original Victorian red paint jobs.

A photograph of one of the surviving sphinx statues in the Crystal Palace ruins, reclining on a plinth beside some stone steps. It's recently renovated with a coat of terracotta red paint to match its original Victorian-era appearance. In the background the huge Arqiva Crystal Palace telecom tower can be seen.

…But let’s get to what we’re really here for. Dinosaurs! (…And assorted other prehistoric beasties!)

Continue reading “Crystal Palace Field Trip Part 1: Walking With Victorian Monsters”

Nihohae

Nihohae matakoi was a dolphin that lived in the coastal waters around what is now Aotearoa New Zealand during the late Oligocene, about 25 million years ago. Part of a group known as waipatiids, it was much closer related to modern South Asian river dolphins than to modern oceanic dolphins.

Around 2m long (6’6″), it had unusually long tusk-like teeth at the front of its jaws, splaying out almost horizontally forwards and to the sides.

These teeth lay too flat to effectively interlock as a “fish trap”, and their fairly delicate structure and lack of wear marks suggests they also weren’t used for piercing large prey, sifting through gritty sediment, defending against predators, or for fighting each other. But Nihohae did have a highly flexible neck and the ability to quickly snap its jaws from side to side – although with a relatively weak bite force, suggesting it was primarily tackling small soft-bodied prey that could be easily swallowed whole.

Overall its feeding ecology seems to have been similar to modern sawfish, stunning prey such as squid with rapid slashing swipes of its jaws.

Funcusvermis

Biofluorescense is the term for when living organisms “glow” under certain types of light. Although it’s not usually directly visible to human eyes, wavelengths such as ultraviolet can reveal it – and we’re still only just starting to discover how widespread it really is in nature.

This phenomenon has been found in all major groups of modern amphibians, with most of them glowing green under UV, suggesting that it originated in their ancestors at least 300 million years ago.

So, ancient species like Funcusvermis gilmorei here could probably glow green, too!

Living during the late Triassic (~220 million years ago), fossils of Funcusvermis were found in what is now Arizona, USA. It’s only known from fragmentary remains, but those pieces are distinctive enough to identify it as the earliest known relative of modern caecilians.

It had a caecilian-like jaw with two rows of teeth, but unlike its worm-like modern relatives it still had small legs and wasn’t as highly specialized for burrowing. The shape of its vertebrae suggest it had a tubular body, and while its exact proportions and full length are unknown it may have been comparable in size to the smallest modern caecilians, around 10cm long (~4″).

Its combination of anatomical features gives further support to the idea that all modern amphibians share a common ancestor among the dissorophoid temnospondyls. The more distantly related but also caecilian-like Chinlestegophis may be a case of convergent evolution, representing a separate branch of temnospondyls that were coincidentally exploring a similar sort of lifestyle at around the same time.

São Miguel Scops Owl

When owls find their way onto isolated islands lacking any terrestrial predators, they have a tendency to take up that role for themselves – evolving longer legs and shorter wings, and specializing more towards hunting on foot. From New Zealand to Hawaii to the Caribbean to the Mediterranean to Macaronesia, leggy island ground-owls have independently happened over and over again in the last few million years—

—And, unfortunately, they’ve all also become victims of the Holocene extinction, their fragile island ecosystems too easily disrupted by human activity and the arrival of invasive species.

The São Miguel scops owl (Otus frutuosoi) was found only in the Azores on São Miguel Island. About 18cm tall (~7″), it was slightly smaller than its relative the Eurasian scops owl, with longer legs, a wider body, and much shorter wings.

Its wing proportions indicate it would have been a poor flyer, instead primarily hunting on foot in the dense laurisilva forests. Since there were no terrestrial mammals or reptiles on São Miguel at the time, its diet probably mainly consisted of insects and other invertebrates – and it would have in turn been the potential prey of larger predatory birds like buzzards and long-eared owls.

All currently known subfossil remains of the São Miguel scops owl date only from the Holocene, between about 50 BCE and 125 CE. It’s likely that it was extinct by the 1400s, following the settlement of humans in the Azores, destruction of its forest habitat, and the introduction of rodents, cats, and weasels.

Serpentisuchops

While the most iconic types of plesiosaur were long-necked with small heads and short blunt snouts, some of these marine reptiles actually developed the opposite sort of arrangement, with groups like the polycotylids and the pliosaurs independently evolving short necks, larger heads, and long snouts.

…Except some of them didn’t keep it quite that simple.

Serpentisuchops pfisterae here lived during the late Cretaceous, about 70 million years ago, in the ancient Western Interior Seaway covering what is now Wyoming, USA. This 7m long (~23′) plesiosaur was a member of the polycotylid lineage, but along with a long slender snout it also had an unusually long neck.

Some earlier polycotylids like Thililua had fairly long necks, too, but all of Serpentisuchops’ closest relatives were short-necked species, so it seems to have actually re-evolved this condition rather than inheriting it from its ancestors. Since no other marine reptiles in its habitat had this particular body plan, it was probably occupying a very specific ecological niche – the presence of attachment points for powerful neck muscles suggest it was able to swing its head sideways to snap its jaws at prey at high speed, with its longer neck giving it more reach than other polycotylids.

Feilongus

Feilongus youngi was a pterosaur that lived during the early Cretaceous (~125 million years ago) in what is now northeastern China.

Known only from two skulls and a few neck vertebrae, its full body proportions are uncertain, but it’s estimated to have had a wingspan of somewhere around 2.4m (7’10”). As part of the ctenochasmatid lineage it was probably a wader specializing in snagging aquatic prey between its interlocking needle-like teeth.

It had two bony crests on its head – a long low one along its snout, and a backwards-pointing one at the very back of its skull – along with a distinct overbite at the front of its jaws. These structures are only seen in the larger of the two known specimens, suggesting that they either only developed towards full maturity or that this species was sexually dimorphic.

Keraterpeton

Keraterpeton galvani here was part of a group of amphibian-like early tetrapods called lepospondyls.

Living in what is now southern Ireland during the Late Carboniferous, about 318-314 million years ago, this 30-40cm long (~1′-1’4″) fully aquatic animal was the earliest known member of the diplocaulid lineage (although its skull was much less elaborately modified than its famous boomerang-headed relative Diplocaulus).

It had a broad short-snouted head with eyes set far forward, and a pair of backwards-pointing bony “horns” at the back of its skull. Its forelimbs were smaller than its hindlimbs, and unlike most other diplocaulids it had five fingers on its hands instead of four.

Its vertically flattened paddle-like tail was also around twice as long as the rest of its body, and was probably its main source of propulsion in the water.

Keraterpeton seems to have been quite numerous in the coal swamps it inhabited, representing the most common species preserved in the Irish Jarrow Assemblage site – a location where fossil specimens were uniquely “cooked” and partially replaced with coal during the fossilization process.

Tuzoia

The tuzoiids were an enigmatic group of Cambrian invertebrates known mostly just from their spiny bivalved carapaces. Although hundreds of fossils of these arthropods were discovered over the last century or so, only vague fragments of the rest of their bodies have been found even in sites usually known for preserving soft tissue impressions.

…Until late 2022, when several new specimens from the Canadian Burgess Shale deposits (~508 million years ago) were described showing tuzoiid anatomy in exceptional detail, finally giving us an idea of what they looked like and where they fit into the early arthropod evolutionary tree.

Tuzoiids like Tuzoia burgessensis here would have grown up to about 23cm long (~9″). They had large eyes on short stalks, a pair of simple antennae, a horizontal fluke-like tail fan, and twelve pairs of appendages along their body – with the front two pairs at the head end being significantly spinier, and most (or all) of these limbs also bearing paddle-like exopods.

The large carapace enclosed most of the body, and was ornamented with protective spines and a net-like surface pattern that probably increased the strength of the relatively thin chitinous structure.

Together all these anatomical features now indicate that tuzoiids were early mandibulates (part of the lineage including modern myriapods, crustaceans, and insects), and were probably very closely related to the hymenocarines.

Tuzoiids seem to have been active swimmers that probably cruised around just above the seafloor, with their stout legs suggesting they could also walk around if they flexed their valves open. The arrangement of their spiny front limbs wasn’t suited to grabbing at fast-swimming prey, but instead may have been used to capture slower seafloor animals or to scavenge from carcasses.

Ambulator

Diprotodontids were large herbivorous marsupials distantly related to modern wombats and koalas, with some species reaching body sizes comparable to rhinos.

Ambulator keanei here was a mid-sized example, closer to bear-sized at around 1m tall at the shoulder (~3’3″). It lived in South Australia during the Pliocene, about 3.9-3.6 million years ago, at a time when the climate was becoming drier and the local habitat was shifting towards open grasslands – and so it was was one of the first diprotodontids known to have specialized its limb anatomy for more efficient long-distance walking.

A bone in its wrist was modified into a heel-like structure, and skin impressions show large cushioning fleshy pads on the undersides of its feet. Its feet were also rotated to bear weight mainly on the outside edges, similar to the condition seen in some ground sloths, and its fingers and toes appear to have been held raised up off the ground while walking.