The Lost Works of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins

Two weeks ago, me and my friend John Conway visited London's Natural History museum for a peek into the work of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, probably the world's first artist to make a career out of illustrating extinct organisms. His achievements were not just on paper; Hawkins also made the famous models in Crystal Palace and cast numerous skeletons of extinct large mammals and dinosaurs.

I took some snapshots of the material we were shown, and you can see them here as well. These pictures are extra-large and detailed, so make sure you click on them to zoom in.

Above, you can see one of the famous "creatures of the past" lithographs, from a limited edition of six plates. An Ichthyosaur, some Plesiosaurs and a skinny Teleosaurus (marine crocodile) are enjoying the midday sun and chatting on a rocky beach, as marine reptiles usually did.

Jokes aside, I really wonder if such "beached" compositions were a result of artistic traditions, or were ancient marine reptiles really imagined to have lived like sea lions or otters back then? Look closely at the Ichthyosaur's paddles. These creatures had numerous finger bones, stacked like a row of Mentos. Currently we know that they were buried in a rigid, fin-like paddle, but in this picture the finger bones are all skewed and are showing through like suction discs or traction pads. Possibly, their weird structure was interpreted as an adaptation for crawling on land.

This was probably the best image in the entire collection. Although painfully inaccurate by now, it shows the meat-eating dinosaur Megalosaurus. Although we now know that Megalosaurus was a bipedal runner, back then people "knew" it as a bear-like quadrupedal prowler. All of these images are huge (about A0 sized,) and seeing them up close is an exhilarating experience, whether they are accurate or not.

With Megalosaurus, of course, comes the iconic Iguanodon, the second dinosaur to be officially described and named. Here, the complacent herbivore is pictured as an overgrown iguana with proportions and poses that weirdly recall other artists' ideas of oriental beauties. Am I the only person who has noticed this unnerving parallelism?

The parade of chubby giants continues in Hawkins' poster series with Megatherium, the giant ground sloth. He has depicted this creature as a pinhead with a strange pig-cum-tapir kind of snout and slipper-like feet with dagger-like toe claws. Needless to say, with our current knowledge, we can paint a completely different (but still bizarre) portrait for these creatures.

Imagine what would happen if one of these farted in your face. Furthermore, look at this Megatherium's pose and try not to think about Ingres' painting of the Grand Odalisque you saw earlier.

He's not retarded, he's just different: As I was looking at the pictures, I kept reminding myself how it was so easy to poke fun at such images, how science was at its infancy back then and how Hawkins was doing something no one had done before. Still, this image of a neck-less, pinheaded mammoth with no toes really got me. He just wants to play and be friends, but all the nasty prehistoric hippopotami and bears are avoiding him and calling him names.

Besides the series of six posters, (I only showed you details of five of them above,) we also got to see some "minor work" of Hawkins. One of the most fascinating was this "Comparative Sizes of Extinct Animals" diagram. If you click on the image and enlarge it, you can see that there is a 50-foot scale at the bottom. All of the other animals figure out nicely, but what the heck wrong with that 200-foot-long, dragon-like Iguanodon?!?

Also worthy of notice is the Deinotherium in the middle row. This creature looked more-or-less like an elephant with inverted jaws, but Hawkins has drawn it like a frog, or a desmostylian.

We also got to see a lot of Hawkins's sketches and preliminary drawings. Here is a paint sketch, perhaps done in preparation for the Ichthyosaur scene you saw in the beginning of this post.

Just a cheerful Jurassic meadow, Ichthyosaurs and sea crocodiles and Plesiosaurs all taking a pleasant walk in the sun, saying "hi" and "cheerio" to their Megalosaur and Iguanodont neighbors as they pass each other by... Vertebrates used to know each other back then. And didn't even lock their doors at night!

Out of everything we saw, this was perhaps the most interesting one; a faded sketch of some antique, giant, frog-like amphibian. Funny as it sometimes was, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' artwork was a fascinating glimpse of the palaeoart of yesterday.

We had our laughs at the spastic mammoth, the eerily sexual giant herbivores and the 60-meter-long Iguanodon, but our own palaeoart will doubtlessly look as strange and comical to tomorrow's critics come a hundred-or-so years.