Future Fossils presents Dinosaurs Are Forever, a major new exhibition created in partnership with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and Blenheim Palace.
Open to the public everyday from 10am to 5:30pm and is included with an Annual Pass or Park & Gardens ticket.
The exhibition draws directly on Oxfordshire’s unique place in the history of palaeontology.
It was here, in 1824, just outside Blenheim Palace, in the village of Stonesfield that the first named dinosaur, Megalosaurus, was discovered. Eighteen years later, it was grouped with two other discoveries and collectively named ‘Dinosaurs’. By 1852, dino-mania had swept the globe.
In the early 19th century, quarrymen in the small Oxfordshire village of Stonesfield close to Blenheim Palace, unearthed part of a large fossilised jawbone, and unknowingly discovered the world’s first named dinosaur.
The bones found around Stonesfield were passed to academics in Oxford, who struggled to explain what kind of creature they could have come from. Strange fossil bones had been discovered before, but were often attributed to elephants, giants, dragons and other mysterious beasts.
In 1824, geologist William Buckland studied the Stonesfield fossils and concluded that they belonged to a giant extinct reptile. He named it Megalosaurus meaning “great lizard” the first dinosaur ever to be scientifically named.
Eighteen years later, in 1842, Megalosaurus was grouped with two other giant extinct reptiles discovered by geologist Gideon Mantell, Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus. Together, Sir Richard Owen gave them a new name: Dinosauria meaning “terrible Lizards'“.
But dinosaurs did not truly capture the public imagination until artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins created the world’s first life-size dinosaur sculptures at Crystal Palace in London. For the first time, people could stand beside these extraordinary creatures and begin to comprehend their scale.
These sculptures still stand today and are a great example of how far our understanding of dinosaurs has evolved.
I knew none of this when I moved from London to Oxfordshire and took on a large workshop in Stonesfield to build Dinosaurs for an exhibition in Los Angeles.
Adidas Trainersaur
Jay Jay Burridge
2015
It was only two years later, while working with Jamie Oliver on a dinosaur themed diner in London, and, by coincidence, building a life-size Megalosaurus that I discovered the extraordinary connection.
My workshop was in the very village where, almost two centuries earlier, the dinosaur I was building had first been discovered.
Ten years later I created Future Fossils, an art and innovation studio creating full-size dinosaur sculptures, and what better dinosaur to start with than the world’s first that lived exactly where I do.
