Would you ever call dinosaurs beautiful?

Few of us would, but dinosaur aesthetics is actually a hot field right now in paleontology.

In this two-part episode, we're going to examine how the artistic portrayal of dinosaurs has shifted over time.

It's a story of princes and goons with sledgehammers, of palaces, and drunken parties held inside dinosaur statues.

We'll also examine how those shifts in dinosaur aesthetics have affected

and even distorted our view of what dinosaurs were really like.

It's undeniably thrilling to take flat lifeless bones and

resurrect them to make creatures run and jump and snap and growl for the first time

in millions of years.

Paleontology is a real creative act.

But there's a risk there as well.

Art can overpower us, and some early blunders in dinosaur art still taint how we view dinosaurs to this day.

Dinosaur art can be seductive certainly, but there's never a seduction without a little bit

of danger. Hi, I'm Sam Keene, and you're listening to the disappearing spoon, a topsy-turvy sciencey history podcast, where

footnotes become the real story. Fittingly enough, the story of dinosaur beauty began in a rather stunning place, a palace.

The Crystal Palace in London astounded the world when it opened in 1851 as part of a world's failure. All the walls and ceilings were made of

pristine glass. People felt like they were walking around inside dinnerware crystal.

It was a brilliant fusion of art and engineering and over six

million people paid a penny a piece to wander around inside and gape. When the

fair ended, the government couldn't bear to tear the palace down.

It was too gorgeous.

So it was dismantled pain by pain and reconstructed in another park five miles south.

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