Over 40 members attended this year’s AGM, which is is an excellent turn-out. The day followed the now traditional format with the AGM being followed by an interesting and lively talk and then a very good dinner at the Pasta Sugo restaurant. The die-hards then rounded off the evening at the Hoop and Toy public house.

The main points emerging from the AGM are these:

The renovated dinosaurs and geological trail are not yet open to the public, but permission had been gained from Bromley Leisure and Community Services by our leader, Austin Lockwood of the Ravensbourne Geological Society. Additional information was provided by Di Clements, based on The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, McCarthy and Gilbert 1994, published by The Crystal Palace Foundation.

The ‘antediluvian reptiles’ were constructed between 1850 and 1854 by Waterhouse Hawkins in his ‘extinct animals studio’ at the Crystal Palace, where an enlarged version of the glass and steel structure built in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851 was erected in 1852.

The dinosaurs are arranged on and around islands in an artificial lake, originally Paxton’s ‘Lake of Extinct Animals’, which was tidal because the level of the water rose and fell according to the requirements of the fountains higher up the park. The islands were grouped in primary, secondary and tertiary zones, and this arrangement has been preserved, though there has had to be some reconstruction, in particular the pterodactyls, which had been broken and lost. No effort has been made to alter the lifesize models according to more recent ideas, so they remain a monument to the skill and imagination of the scientists of the time. From Paxton’s Bridge you can see a ‘cliff’ of 300 million year old limestone, faulted Coal Measures from Derbyshire, and you could once have visited a lead mine, complete with stalactites and stalagmites. The islands have been planted with tree ferns and other plants, so that the iguanodons and megalosaurus seem to roam through their natural habitat.

On New Year’s Eve 1853, a dinner was held in the cast of the lower half of the Iguanodon for the scientists involved and the Directors of the Crystal Palace Company, washed down with copious supplies of champagne, prompting a journalist to report: ‘After several appropriate toasts, this agreeable party of philosophers returned to London by rail, evidently well-pleased with the modern hospitality of the iguanodon, whose ancient sides there is no reason to suppose had ever before been shaken with philosophic mirth.’

Hungry after their wanderings amongst prehistoric monsters, the intrepid LOUGS party repaired to the heights of Chislehurst to emulate the agreeable party of philosophers at the Tiger’s Head, and afterwards to Bromley High School where Wilf Walker gave us a fascinating talk with slides on his experiences in Antarctica in the 1970s, looking for the position of the ridge just after the idea of plate tectonics had become accepted, with a primitive computer, using dead reckoning when the satellite guidance was insufficient. An exploit rather more heroic than our adventures among the dinosaurs!