June 24, 2009
A Triceratops at the National Zoo
Uncle Beazley on display at the National Zoo. From Flickr user Mo Kaiwen.
When I visited the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. earlier this year, I was a bit surprised to see a large Triceratops statue next to the giant anteater enclosure. There are a few dinosaurs at the zoo, like the Tyrannosaurus skull sculpture near the big cats exhibit, but the Triceratops seemed out of place. Why was it there?
I didn’t know it at the time, but this Triceratops was a minor celebrity. In 1956, Oliver Butterworth published a children’s book called The Enormous Egg in which a young boy discovers a large dinosaur egg. It hatches, and the boy names the young Triceratops “Uncle Beazley.” The dinosaur quickly becomes too large to handle, though, so the boy gives it to the “National Museum” in Washington, D.C.
A made-for-TV film adaptation of the story aired in 1968, and a life-sized Triceratops sculpture was created for the story. It was soon after donated to the Smithsonian by the Sinclair Oil Company, which was famous for its dinosaur logo. Uncle Beazley has been moved around a bit since that time, but today he can be seen in a special “prehistoric” garden right across from the lemur exhibit at the National Zoo.
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I’ve been to the national zoo many times, and just noticed this last weekend. For those of you who haven’t been there, it’s right across from a turtle pond, not too far away from the prairie dogs.
I love The Enormous Egg! Ooo, where’s that old copy…one to read to my nephew!
Many zoos have these special dinosaur exhibits at times, which are great for kids — especially boys.
I love the National Zoo! It has so much to see, including the famous giant pandas, great birdhouse, reptiles, small mammals, and so much more.
Allen Nyhuis
Coauthor, America’s Best Zoos
I am reading the Enormous Egg to my kids right now and wanted to find out if there was a sculpture of it in DC. I had Oliver Butterworth as my freshman English professor in college- What an amazing man and what a treat to be in his class.
Doesn’t The Enormous Egg say at one point that birds and dinosaurs might be related? If so, this might be the oldest reference to that in popular culture there is!
That triceratops was part of my childhood… A trip into the city was never complete without stopping in front of the Natural History Museum. My siblings and cousins and I spent so many happy hours riding on the dinosaur’s back, or between the horns, and sliding down the tail… The funny thing, though, is that although we’d all read The Enormous Egg, none of us made the connection; nothing at the time (in the 1970s) announced that this was Uncle Beazley. It was just a life-size, very accurate-seeming model of a triceratops. I had no idea it had been moved until about 1990-91, when I visited the Zoo for the first time in ages and saw it in, I think, an enclosure near the hippos. It was inaccessible to visitors, which made me sort of sad; although I don’t know how well Uncle Beazley would hold up under a few more generations of children sliding down his tail (his outer surface was already beginning to rub off in spots when I was a kid), a life-size dinosaur replica really seems to be made for children to play with. It’s a pity they only made one.
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Uncle Beazley is a celebrity for anyone who grew up in the DC area and regularly visited the Mall. He sat in the Mall under some trees right in front of the Museum of Natural History when I was a kid in the late 60s-early 70s. It was immense then and the challenge was to climb onto his back before a cop told you to get down. I was crushed when I came back years later and he was gone. Uncle Beazley has a twin – or at least did 20 years ago – outside a museum in Niagra Falls, Canada. I climbed onto that one, too, just as an adult. No cops in sight.