In the middle of the 19th century the English sculptor and natural history artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawinks and the then superintendent of the Natural History Department of the British Museum Richard Owen worked together to create first life-size reconstructions of prehistoric animals. They were commissioned in 1852 and unveiled around 1854 in the Crystal Palace Park were they are still visible today.

Nice table models were prepared from some of the Crystal Palace outdoor sculptures in full-length and sold worldwide in the second half of the 19th century by James Tennant, London, Arthur Éloffe, Paris, and Henry A. Ward, Rochester, USA. Today, these small historic models are very rare and can almost be found only at auctions. With our hand-painted Mastodonsaurus 3D print we thus close a gap by making one of these lovely models again available to all enthusiasts of the prehistoric world and palaeontological research history respectively.

The genus name Mastodonsaurus means «breast tooth lizard» after a tooth which is broken at its tip. Mastodonsaurus was an aquatic amphibian known from Middle and Late Triassic sediments. It was a top predator that fed on fish and other amphibians.

In the historic model Mastodonsaurus is reconstructed as an amphibian with a common batrachian habitus. It was assumed that such monstrous creatures similar to frogs but with vast mouths and dentitions resembling those of lizards and crocodiles once roamed the earth. Moreover, Mastodonsaurus was thought to produce hand-like footprints found in Triassic sandstones (first observed in Saxony, Germany) and described as Chirotherium (meaning «hand beast»), but more recent research found that the tracks belong to pseudosuchian reptiles like, e.g., Ticinosuchus.

Further readings
> Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and the Crystal Palace Prehistoric Animals
> Arthur Éloffe
> Henry A. Ward
> James Tennant
> Early Mastodonsaurus Life Reconstructions