This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures. This lecture in the series Managing Monsters,

given by Marina Warner, was originally broadcast in 1994. In 1852 at Sydenham in South London,

Queen Victoria opened the first dinosaur theme park. She presided over the unveiling of 29 full-scale models made by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins,

who was the draftsman Darwin himself had employed to depict the animals he found on his voyage in the beagle.

The word dinosaur, dread lizard, had been coined in 1841 by the leading paleontologist of the time, Richard Owen,

and Hawkins made his dinosaurs to Owen's state-of-the-art specifications.

They're still there.

Spick and span signs in gold and scarlet paint,

direct visitors to the farmyard, boats, and monsters.

Monsters, not dinosaurs.

The distinction between natural history and myth wasn't drawn then.

There on an island in a lake, crouching under mixed plantings of large trees, the concrete creatures come into view. The pterodactyl spreads its wings like a large heron. The snout of the mosasaurus

emerges from the water like the toothy moor of Jonah's

whale in a medieval illumination. Ictosaurus with daisy-wheel eyes seems to waddle on fins as comfortably

as a walrus. Their inertia in the suburban London park is pastoral, reassuring, dinosaurs,

spending the afternoon at their club in St. James's.

140 years on in a much more famous park, the dinosaurs are living, moving, crying, talking, almost.

The simulations and models in Jurassic Park give a glow of genuine wonder to the film.

The dinosaurs are presented as authentic forerunners in time scientifically accurate,

but at the same time their character has evolved to embody contemporary fantasies.

The velociraptors, as they hop and scurry and pounce and give chase, suspend disbelief even in the most cynical of viewers.

Small, mobile, quick on their feet, hunting in pairs and even articulate, they represent rather a change from the lumbering dinosaurs of Sydenham Park.

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