Allen A. Debus sculpted this model of the way the duckbilled dinosaur Hadrosaurus foulkii was believed to have looked back in the 19th Century, based upon vintage life restorations by sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins.
Hawkins’ original restoration of this dinosaur is shown in this ca. 1870 drawing by him.
Although Hadrosaurus was known only from a partial skeleton, Hawkins made a hypothetical reconstruction of the skeleton in plaster, copies of which were exhibited at various museums and exhibitions. This “plasterothere” (photo below, left) was displayed in Chicago’s old Field Columbian Museum (site of the current Museum of Science and Industry), coinciding with the Columbian Exposition of 1893. (Courtesy The Field Museum, negative number 3813.)
To see this skeleton in three dimensions, CLICK HERE.
Ca. 1893, Charles R. Knight attempted his more accurate (but still rather hypothetical) life restoration of Hadrosaurus, first as a sculpture and then a painting, the latter of which was later reproduced by the American Museum of Natural History as a souvenir postcard (below).
In 1956, the Marx toy company issued this plastic Hadrosaurus figure based upon the Knight painting.
