New Year's dinner inside an Iguanodon
Scientists dine inside the mould of a dinosaur statue
On New Year's Eve 1853 the sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins held a dinner party inside the mould of his Iguanodon. His Crystal Palace models were the world's first life-size dinosaur sculptures, and wildly wrong by today's standards: only three of the 15 genera are true dinosaurs.
Wikipedia (English) · 19th century
Did you know
The word 'dinosaur' is younger than photography: the daguerreotype was unveiled in 1839, while Richard Owen coined the 'terrible lizard' only in 1842. Share →
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1853–1856 Crimean War — same year
- 1861 Emancipation of the serfs in Russia — 8 years later
- 1864 End of the Caucasian War and the Circassian expulsion — 11 years later
- 1867 Alaska Purchase — 14 years later
- 1869 Tolstoy's War and Peace — 16 years later
Middle East
- 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay — 25 years earlier
- 1839 The Edict of Gülhane opens the Tanzimat — 14 years earlier
- 1839–1842 First Anglo-Afghan War — 14 years earlier
- 1876–1878 The first Ottoman constitution — 23 years later
Africa
- c. 1835–1846 The Great Trek — 18 years earlier
- 1847 Liberia declares independence — 6 years earlier
- 1869 Opening of the Suez Canal — 16 years later
Asia
- c. 1831 Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa — 22 years earlier
- 1839–1842 First Opium War — 14 years earlier
- 1850–1864 Taiping Rebellion — 3 years earlier
- 1853–1854 Commodore Perry's Black Ships — same year
- 1868 Meiji Restoration — 15 years later
Americas
- 1846 First public demonstration of ether anaesthesia — 7 years earlier
- 1846–1848 Mexican–American War — 7 years earlier
- 1861–1865 American Civil War — 8 years later
- 1863 Emancipation Proclamation — 10 years later
- 1876 Invention of the telephone — 23 years later
Oceania
- 1851 The Australian gold rushes — 2 years earlier
Alive at the time
- Charles Darwin (aged 44)
- Abraham Lincoln (aged 44)
- Karl Marx (aged 35)
- Queen Victoria (aged 34)
- Fyodor Dostoevsky (aged 32)
- Leo Tolstoy (aged 25)
- Dmitri Mendeleev (aged 19)
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (aged 13)
- Thomas Edison (aged 6)
- Vincent van Gogh (aged 0)