Cod and oyster sauce, white fillets, pigeon pie, boiled chicken flavored with celery sauce, and for dessert, bavarroise were included in the generous list of dishes served on the night of December 31, 1853, to twenty men of knowledge seated at table in Sydenham Hill Gardens, south London. In eight moments, washed down with sherry and port wine, served in fine china and silverware and by candlelight, is worthy of news in the Gazette of January 7th, 1854. Illustrated London News. Weeks earlier, a group of notables, including paleontologist Richard Owen, naturalist Edward Forbes, ornithologist John Gould and geologist Joseph Prestwich, received a unique invitation. By way of recall, he asked to draw a pterodactyl, a prehistoric aerial creature, “as an iguanodont’s dinner companion.” Call something unusual about it. Measuring nine meters in length and weighing nearly five tons, the dinosaur inhabited, approximately 126 million years ago, a wide area corresponding to Western Europe and the Americas.

Nearly 30 years before the end of the year at dinner in London, it was up to the English gynecologist and geologist Gideon Mantell, on the basis of fossil specimens, to complete the trinity of prehistoric creatures identified at that time: Megalosaurus, Helosaurus and Iguanodon. In 1853, participants in a prehistoric feast suppressed their appetites inside an iguanodont. “Exchanged for children,” diners sat “aboard” the massive piece that served as a template for the reconstruction of the iguanodont, one of 15 iron, cement, and brick structures to imitate prehistoric animals that will soon illustrate the second life of the Palácio de Cristal, the exhibition’s largest building. The Great of 1851. The dinner was a prelude to the opening scheduled for the summer of the following year.