A Dinner Party Inside a Dinosaur

The Victorian Height of Eccentricity To celebrate the completion of the world’s first life-sized dinosaur sculptures at the Crystal Palace, sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins hosted a surreal banquet. Twenty-one leading scientists and dignitaries squeezed into the hollow mold of an Iguanodon. Inside the beast’s belly, they enjoyed an eight-course meal including sherry, venison, and pigeon pie. The guests reportedly toasted to the "prehistoric world" while sitting in a creature that was, at the time, still a brand-new scientific discovery.

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