Two Teleosaurus (meaning 'perfect lizard') are shown at the water's edge. They grew up to three metres long. Although the animals look a lot like the crocodiles we know today, they are in fact not in the same evolutionary lineage. The Crystal Palace lake statues collectively show several species of extinct mammals, amphibians, therapsids, marine reptiles, pterosaurs and dinosaurs. They represent the first attempt to accurately reconstruct the three dinosaur species known to the scientific world by the 1850s within their geological environment and the sculptures and associated geological strata form a unique display of the state of palaeological understanding in the 1850s, opened five years before the publication of Darwin's 'Origin of Species'.