Bromley beasts back to their best

For nearly 150 years, the dinosaurs and beasts of Bromley have stood sentinel over Crystal Palace Park. Now they have been restored to their full glory in a £3.6 million programme.

The 29 life-sized statues were built in 1854, part of the setting of the relocated Crystal Palace, and pre-dated Darwin's Origin Of Species by five years.

The world's first geological theme park crumbled and lay largely neglected for decades but thanks to grants from the National Lottery and Bromley council, even the beasts' original colour has been restored, while prehistoric trees and ferns are being planted for a realistic backdrop.

The work is part of Bromley council's restoration of the park, and the dinosaur section is due to open later this year. The statues illustrate a billion years of Earth's geological history, and the original site included life-sized cliffs of Jurassic sandstone and fossils as its creator, Benjamin Waterhouse Williams, attempted to show Victorians the latest theories of evolution.

"The park contains the first accurate reconstructions of the three dinosaur species known to the scientific world by the 1850s," said Professor Peter Doyle, University of Greenwich palaeontologist and principal scientific adviser to the restoration.