Commissioned in 1852 to accompany the Crystal Palace after its move from the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, they were unveiled in 1854 as the first dinosaur sculptures in the world.

[a] The grounds that surrounded it were then extensively renovated and turned into a public park with ornamental gardens, replicas of statues and two new man-made lakes.

As part of this renovation, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was commissioned to build the first-ever life-sized models of extinct animals.

He had originally planned to just re-create extinct mammals before deciding on building dinosaurs as well, which he did with advice from Sir Richard Owen, a celebrated anatomist and palaeontologist of the time.

[15] Hawkins later worked on a "Palaeozoic Museum" in New York's Central Park, an American equivalent to the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs.

In 1895, the American fossil hunter Othniel Charles Marsh scorned the dinosaurs' friends as doing them a great injustice, and spoke angrily of the models.

A full restoration of the animals was carried out in 1952 by Victor H.C. Martin,[19][20] at which time the mammals on the third island were moved to less well-protected locations in the park, where they were exposed to wear and tear.

[28] The Palaeozoic era is represented in the park by the model rock exposure showing a succession of beds, namely the Carboniferous (including Coal Measures and limestone) and Permian.

[29] Crystal Palace's two Dicynodon models are based on incomplete Permian fossils found in South Africa, along with Owen's guess that they were similar to turtles.

[29] Curiously, it is Hylaeosaurus, from the Cretaceous of England, not Iguanodon, that most resembles the giant iguana stereotype of early ideas of dinosaurs.

Working from fragmentary evidence from Jurassic fossils found in England, consisting mainly of a hip and femur (thigh bone), with a rib and a few vertebrae, Owen conjectured the animal was quadrupedal; palaeontologists now believe it to have been bipedal (standing like Tyrannosaurus rex).

[39] The Mosasaurus at Crystal Palace is positioned in an odd place near the secondary island that was originally a waterfall, and much of it is not visible from the lakeside path.

[40] Owen noted that the Pterodactylus fossils from the Jurassic of Germany had scales, not feathers, and while "somewhat bird-like" they had conical teeth, suggesting they were predatory.

"[44] Anoplotherium commune is an extinct mammal species from the late Eocene to earliest Oligocene epochs, first found near Paris.

[46] Confusion between whether the A. commune sculptures were of A. gracile (= Xiphodon gracilis) is common, resulting from 19th-century guidebooks listing both species as present on the Tertiary Island.

[47][46] The giant ground sloth Megatherium is from the Pliocene to Pleistocene epochs in South America, where Charles Darwin had excavated some fossils in 1835.

During the 1960s these models were lying discarded in the bushes about fifty yards from the original site and, prior to the 2002 restoration, they were in such bad shape that they were removed and put into store.

[50] A replica of P. magnum was commissioned by the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs and built by palaeoartist Bob Nicholls, and unveiled to the public on 2 July 2023.

As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling[b] like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

[54] Several of E. Nesbit's children's books feature the Crystal Palace dinosaur sculptures coming to life, including The Enchanted Castle (1907).

The 1932 novel Have His Carcase, by Dorothy L. Sayers, has the character Lord Peter Wimsey mention the "antediluvian monsters" of the Crystal Palace.

[55] Ann Coates's 1970 children's book Dinosaurs Don't Die, illustrated by John Vernon Lord, tells the story of a young boy who lives near Crystal Palace Park and discovers that Hawkins' models come to life; he befriends one of the Iguanodon and names it 'Rock' and they visit the Natural History Museum.

[57] The title story in Penelope Lively's 1991 novel Fanny and the Monsters is about a Victorian girl who visits the Crystal Palace dinosaurs and becomes fascinated by prehistoric creatures.

[58] George Baxter, a pioneer of colour printing, made a well-known engraving which imagines Crystal Palace, set in its landscaped grounds with tall fountains and the dinosaurs in the foreground, before the 1854 opening.