Literary precedent for the dinosaur in the metropolis can be found
in the famous opening paragraph of Dickens Bleak House ( March,
1852):

As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from
the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a
Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up
Holborn Hill.

Fossil remains of the megalosaurus, 'Big Lizard', had been ex-
cavated and described in the 1820s, fuelling--along with other new-
found monsters such as ichthyosaurus and iguanodon--the heroic
age of British palaeontology. In 1842 the great comparative anatomist
Richard Owen had classified the creature as belonging to a new zoo-
logical order, which he named the 'Dinosauria'. Even as Bleak House
was in serialization, life-size iron-and-concrete models of megalo-
saurus and iguanodon (dinosaurs from Oxfordshire and Sussex) were
being built according to Owen's specifications at the new exhibition
park in Sydenham, where the Crystal Palace would be relocated in
1854. Prehistory, so fascinating to the modern imagination, was
as characteristic a Victorian invention as the imperial exhibition.
Vast new deserts of geological time stretched before the human age;
here was the dimension of origins so crucial to the general debate
over what T. H. Huxley would call (foreclosing the question) 'man's
place in nature'. An authoritative account of prehistory would define
our own identity and its consequent histories: whether humans were
the fruit of one great family tree that included apes, reptiles, and
earthworms in its branches, or whether all the species were created
separately according to the archetypes of a divine plan; whether life
evolved through orderly degrees towards some crowning type, or
whether all species were subject to indiscriminate waves of extinc-
tion. Dickens's thoroughly topical megalosaurus, representing the
catastrophic dissolution of the historical present into a chaos of
primeval forms, draws upon the anxieties and ambiguities of the new
cultural theme in the years preceding publication of Darwin Origin
of Species ( 1859).

No scientific field was more fiercely contested than the recently
established one of palaeontology. ² At the peak of its influence in the

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