Crystal Palace Park Dinosaurs

Crystal Palace Park dinosaur lake, 12 August 2016.  Spare head in the foreground.

I used to live near Crystal Palace Park, and we sometimes walked past the childrens' zoo and sat on a bench to read newspapers and try to stop the goats from eating them.  Goats and zoo are now long gone.  Around that time, parts of the park were refurbished, particularly the Victorian attraction that is the dinosaur lake.  The origin and much of the history of these dinosaurs is covered in Wikipedia, so I won't repeat it, but the repainting of the dinosaurs at that time does not seem to get a mention.

Since then it has been refurbished yet again.  I wonder how many spare dinosaur heads they have?  When I went back there this August I thought this (above) was the same head I remembered being put near an information point at the time of the repainting, but the details are different.

Crystal Palace Park, 1990s.  Spare dinosaur head.

Here's the earlier head.  The old photos in this post are internally dated February 1998, but that's when the negatives were scanned; the photos will have been taken earlier in the 1990s.  These days I make the date part of the filename.

Crystal Palace Park dinosaur lake, 12 August 2016.

The lake with its big models is really quite eye-catching. 

Iguanodons at Crystal Palace Park dinosaur lake, 12 August 2016.

These are the most spectacular models.  Those nose horns are now known to actually have been spiky thumbs, but they did the best with what they knew at the time.  That rather puny tree fern trunk under the Iguanodon's foot is a recent addition.

Iguanodons at Crystal Palace Park dinosaur lake, 1990s.

The original tree had died and shrunk away at this point, so a replacement is fair enough, but I don't think that tree fern would have stood up to the dinosaur.  They've also changed the colour scheme, and planted a much more appropriate, less Wordsworthian array of flora. 

I'll post some more about Crystal Palace Park - strictly speaking it's not natural history, but it is at least a park.