The real culprit in a 19th century dinosaur whodunit is finally revealed

A sledgehammer dealt the final blow to New York City’s dream of a paleontology museum.

On May 3, 1871, workers broke into the workshop of famed British artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. Inside, they came upon a plaster skeleton of a towering duck-billed dinosaur — modeled after the first dinosaur fossil unearthed in New Jersey 13 years earlier — alongside a statue of the beast as it would have appeared in life.

These were the first 3-D renderings of any North American dinosaur, a testament to the continent’s geologic past that scientists were only just beginning to understand. But the public would never see the skeleton or the statute.

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