Paleozoic Museum

Like Hyde Park'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 dinosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs with extinct Cenozoic mammals.

[3][2] Extant drawings by Hawkins, along with other records, indicate that the Paleozoic Museum would have included life-sized restorations of the theropod Laelaps (=Dryptosaurus), the hadrosaurid Hadrosaurus, the plesiosaur Elasmosaurus, and the mosasaur Mosasaurus (all from the Upper Cretaceous marls of New Jersey), along with glyptodont models, a pair of giant ground sloths, giant Pleistocene elk, mammoths, and extinct mammalian carnivores.

After the plans for the museum fell through, Hawkins went to Princeton University where he painted a number of restorations of America's Late Cretaceous environments; these works have survived.

A new governing board of Central Park appointed in April 1870 still included Andrew Green, who had been supportive of the project, but reduced him to a mere member.

[3] Various sources blamed Tweed for having sent the vandals, often linking it to ethnic bigotry—Tweed's Tammany Hall "machine" was the party of Irish immigrants, Hawkins was English, and Irish-English relations were famously tense in the era.