For more than a century, historians believed William “Boss” Tweed, New York’s most powerful political figure at the time, was to blame. But now researchers have revisited the crime — and point to a new suspect in what they call the “greatest act of vandalism in the history of dinosaur study.”

In 1871, paleontology was in its infancy, and interest in the gigantic extinct creatures was fanned by new discoveries around the world. The Paleozoic Museum was to feature the work of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, an English natural history artist who galvanized interest in dinosaurs in the United States with the display of the world’s first mounted dinosaur skeleton in Philadelphia in 1868.

In preparation for the New York museum, Hawkins used fossil evidence to create full-sized models destined for elaborate dioramas. But the Tweed-controlled Central Park board canceled the museum in 1870. A few months later, vandals destroyed all of Hawkins’s models, casts and studio.

Previous histories claimed Tweed, who controlled the vast Tammany Hall Democratic machine, ordered the destruction for reasons ranging from religious objections to a vendetta against Hawkins. Primary sources, however, point to Henry Hilton, a powerful attorney and public parks commissioner who personally ordered that the models be destroyed, researchers write.

In a study published in the Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, the researchers found Hilton not only was committed to a competing project, the American Museum of Natural History, but also “evidently had a strange relationship with art, heritage and artefacts [sic].” They uncovered other evidence of Hilton’s museum meddling, including ordering that multiple historical and natural history artifacts be painted white and disputing the authority of museum officials.

Why bother resurrecting a long-forgotten piece of museum history?

“This might seem like a local act of thuggery, but correcting the record is hugely important in our understanding of the history of paleontology. We show it wasn’t blasphemy, or an act of petty vengeance by William Tweed,” says Michael Benton, a professor in the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences and a co-author of the paper, in a news release.

The tussle to control the dinosaur models reveals past debates about how dinosaurs actually looked and lived, the researchers write — adding that the misrepresentation of the event in history books is worth correcting.