In 1871, vandals with sledgehammers destroyed skeletons and models intended for display in New York's first dinosaur museum before the building was even completed.
Hilton was the vice-president and treasurer of Central Park, where the Paleozoic Museum was to be erected to provide education and entertainment for the public. But records show he favored a competing project to develop the American Museum of Natural History, which may have partly motivated the destruction of artifacts intended for the Paleozoic Museum, researchers wrote in a study published May 10 in the journal Proceedings of the Geologists' Association .
Commissioners developing Central Park were inspired by a display in England called the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs and enlisted the help of its creator, a natural history artist named Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. Hawkins arrived in America in 1868 and began collecting dinosaur and other prehistoric fossils, which he stored in a workshop near the park.
"Previous accounts of the incident had always reported that this was done under the personal instructions of 'Boss' Tweed himself, for various motives from raging that the display would be blasphemous, to vengeance for a perceived criticism of him in a New York Times report of the project's cancellation," co-author Mike Benton , a professor of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Bristol in England, said in the statement.
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