ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“A New Companion for the Iguanodon”: Constructing Iguanodon and Mosasaur in Belgium (1880s)

• In Event: Late Nineteenth-century Sciences

English Abstract

In the nineteenth century, images of prehistoric animals increasingly appeared in the public sphere. In Belgium, visitors of the Brussels Natural History Museum could, from the 1880s on, admire not only a mammoth, but also Sauria like iguanodons and mosasaurs. Yet, no one has ever seen these prehistoric reptiles alive. How, then, do people (re)present the unknown? Scholarship has shown that representations of Sauria are not solely scientifically informed. Images of these animals, both textual and visual, are human constructs relying on paleontological understanding of fossils, but also on cultural ideas, personal convictions or on the context these images functioned in.

In this paper, I explore images of dinosaurs as acts of communication, demonstrating how the channels through which they circulated shaped the way these prehistoric creatures were constructed. To do so, I examine the (re)presentation of Iguanodon and Mosasaur in Belgium (1880s) in different environments, including scientifically authored texts, newspaper articles, and the museum space. Scrutinising how these Sauria were constructed through textual and visual discourse, I particularly zoom in on how the nature of the medium and the target audience influenced (re)presentations of these prehistoric reptiles.

By localising imagery – in specific publications, lectures, and so on – representations of Sauria can be analysed at a more concrete and diversified level. This approach makes it possible to go from the singular to the particular, highlighting how Sauria are actively constructed, time and again, and not mere givens that are only reproduced. It allows us to understand imagery of Sauria not merely as a chain of re-presentations, but as a multitude of presentations, shaped by more than interpretation of the fossil record alone.

Author

• Tine De Keyser