Paleontology is unique among the natural sciences in its grip on the public imagination: the number of five-year olds who can proudly rattle off Hadrosaur or Elasmosaur far outweighs those who know of Drosophila or Danio.

Dinosaur fossils have been known since antiquity, but the recognition of dinosaurs as past life was a project of the nineteenth century (rather, the recognition of dinosaurs as distinct from other known life; the first dinosaur bone recognized as a fossils was as early as the seventeenth century). William Buckland described Megalosaurus - megas + sauros, great lizard, based on the jaw and teeth of a British specimen. The first described dinosaur was quickly followed by Iguanodon, and a few decades later Richard Owen recognized the slowly accumulating ancient reptiles as belonging to their own clade: Dinosauria. (Slightly before his description of Megalosaurus, William Buckland along with Henry De la Beche and Everard Home had produced a series of papers on articulated Ichthyosaurs, though that taxonomic description had yet to be named, from Lyme Regis. Although not a dinosaur, ancient reptilians were known as articulated specimens, and at least one was on public display, before dinosaurs).

Dinosaurian finds continued to accumulate throughout the 1840s and 1850s, but no articulatable material had yet to be discovered: isolated bone fragments or limbs, crushed jaws, individual teeth were tantalizing clues as to what had once lived in Britain and continental Europe, but how, exactly, they went together remained unknown. In 1851, Richard Owen assisted Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins in constructing life-sized models of ancient animals, including dinosaurs, at the new site of the Crystal Palace. Hawkins' reconstructions were somewhat fantastical (large, lumbering reptiles, rather than the diverse body types we know today--a medium between Hawkins' sculptures and the 'shrinkwrap' effect of the early twentieth century), but serve as the first attempt to model dinosaurs. Completed in 1853, Hawkins celebrated with a dinner inside the large Iguanodon sculpture. The public was fascinated by the sculptures, variously enraptured by their grandeur and scale, or frightened of it. The monumental history of deep time was destabilizing for some, while others were reassured by the march of progress: these monsters are no longer here, while we are.

Although much of dinosaur paleontology had focused on Europe, especially England, up to mid-nineteenth century, the close of the century would be dominated by American scientists. The first articulated dinosaur was discovered in New Jersey in 1838, excavated in the late 1850s and, following the Civil War, mounted with the assistance of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins at the Academy of Natural Sciences. Much was missing from the specimen, but the articulated limbs and tail allowed William Parker Foulke and Joseph Leidy, allowed for a full reconstruction towering above visitors. Tens of thousands flocked to Philadelphia to see the first dinosaur, and over the following decades casts appeared in New York, Washington, and England; by the 1890s, dozens of specimens peppered American museums, and the Golden Age of dinosaur paleontology was in full swing. Much like the statues of the Crystal Palace, reactions ranged from apprehension and disgust to captivation; Lukas Rieppel's book on American paleontology showcases the interrelationship between American exceptionalism, Gilded Age capitalism, and dinosaurs.

Turning to the popular representations of past life, the fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Arthur Conan Doyle feature dinosaurs, while the art of Charles Knight caught the public eye by bringing bones to life. One of the earliest animated films was Winsor McCay's 1914 Gertie the Dinosaur, drawn from his vaudeville act. The mid-twentieth century saw a decline in the public fascination of dinosaurs in the West, but they still remained a cornerstone of collections at the AMNH, Field Museum, and Smithsonian. Dinosaurs were, however, still quite significant in the Soviet Union, and the Orlov Paleontological Museum was not founded until 1937 showcasing material primarily from Mongolia.

Jurassic Park merely rekindled an enduring public fascination with the most iconic past creatures: dinosaurs were a key part of the cultural landscape beginning in the mid-nineteenth century.

For additional reading on the history of public paleontology, I would turn to Martin JS Rudwick's Worlds Before Adam and Bursting the Limits of Time (Earth's Deep History is a condensed, readable overview of Rudwick's earlier work). Lukas Rieppel's Assembling the Dinosaur is about the symbolism of dinosaur paleontology in the Gilded Age, where robber barons funded museum expeditions for philanthropic prestige. Nancy Marshall's article on the Crystal Palace dinosaurs is very much worth reading as well.

Rudwick, Martin JS. Worlds before Adam. University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Rieppel, Lukas. Assembling the Dinosaur. Harvard University Press, 2019.

Marshall, Nancy Rose. "'A dim world, where monsters dwell': the spatial time of the Sydenham Crystal Palace Dinosaur Park." Victorian studies 49, no. 2 (2007): 286-301.