The Sinclair Dinogirls

Flickr user jeffs46h3 has shared a batch of found photos from the sixties depicting the Sinclair "Dinogirls." After the 1964 World's Fair, Sinclair took the dinosaur models on a promotional tour. At some point in 1967, they stopped in Paramus, NJ, and locals had the chance to see them on flatbed trucks in the Garden State Plaza shopping mall parking lot. Someone with shaky photographic skills was on hand to document the raging fun that was had, and we're the beneficiaries!









I'd imagine that the models were hired locally, as I haven't found any mention of them elsewhere, and Jeff is the only one to use the term "dinogirl" to describe them. If you have any more details (or were a "dinogirl" yourself), feel free to let me know!

The Flying Ankylosaur

As the Houston Museum of Natural Science undergoes a major expansion, including a new Paleontology Hall, things naturally need to be moved about. Some of these things are quite large, such as the Ankylosaurus created by Louis Paul Jonas for the 1964 World's Fair and extracted from the museum last Friday, January 21. More photos of the museum's expansion are available here, with more Ankylosaurus photos here.

Uncle Beazley

As another winter storm bears down on Indiana, I feel for poor old Uncle Beazley, the subject in this 1977 photograph shared by the Smithsonian Institution on their Flickr photostream.


Image courtesy the Smithsonian Institution, via flickr.

Uncle Beazley has led quite the picaresque life for a fiberglass archosaur. He's even been an actor. In 1968, NBC aired an episode of "NBC's Children's Theater" called The Enormous Egg. It was an adaptation of Oliver Butterworth's 1956 children's story, in which a 12 year old farm boy's life is made a bit more interesting when one of his chickens lays a Triceratops egg. The dinosaur is played by Uncle Beazley, and as F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre writes in a wonderfully thorough review,

The most interesting thing in this TV adaptation is, of course, the triceratops. 'The Enormous Egg' could be sub-titled 'The Microscopic Production Budget'. I think they spent about 29 cents on the dinosaur ... and yet all of the dinosaur sequences are very impressively done. The triceratops in this film is 'played' by a huge dinosaur-shaped piece of moulded fibreglass which does NOT have articulated limbs, so the individual portions of the triceratops cannot move separately. The thing is like a child's toy plastic dinosaur (all in one piece) except that it's life-size.

I haven't found any video of it, unfortunately. The review also mentions that Uncle Beazley is one of the Sinclair dinosaurs from the New York World's fair.


Image from Jordan Smith, via Flickr. There's Uncle Beazley in the center of the exhibit.

Garland Pollard of BrandLandUSA confirms that he is indeed from the World's Fair. The fate of the dinosaur models from the various world's fairs is something I'm pretty interested in, and it's really cool that Uncle Beazley has survived, now residing at the National Zoo, while his brethren enjoy a Texas retirement.


Uncle Beazley at the National Zoo. Photo by Mo Kaiwen, via flickr.

Put a Titanosaur in our Tank

If you're ever tooling down Route 19 in Spring Hill, Florida, make sure to pause to admire this old Sinclair station.


Photo by Rusty Boxcars, via flickr.

I can't get enough old Sinclair stuff. More here and here.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: More From Sinclair Oil

It's not technically accurate to use a dinosaur as an oil company's logo. But a logo of a plant probably wouldn't scream "fossil fuel" to most people, so it's understandable why the company would draw inspiration from the most iconic fossils of all. Here are a selection of cool Sinclair promotional materials from the mid 20th century. This stuff combines two of my big passions: dinosaurs and mid-century design. I love the simple sauropod icon and stark red and green color scheme.

Here's the cover for their Dinoland brochure from the New York World's Fair, provided by What Makes the Pie Shops Tick? More photos from the Dinoland exhibit here.



The next two, from Neato Coolville, feature Sinclair's cartoon mascot, Dino.





This one, provided by Baltimore Bob, features a photo of the Sinclair Dinosaur Exhibit at the 1933 Century of Progress World's Fair. Probably my favorite piece of vintage Sinclair memorabilia.



Want more Sinclair? Check out the Vintage Sinclair flickr pool, or my earlier post on Sinclair's dinosaur stamp sets.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Sinclair Dinosaur Stamps

Sinclair Oil, the petroleum company with the sauropod as its logo, used to give out sets of dinosaur stamps as a promotional gimmick. I scored four sets of three recently, in really good condition. Sinclair did many series of these; this set was apparently from 1959. Despite being labeled as "Dinosaur Stamps," they do feature other prehistoric critters such as the Permian beasts Dimetrodon and Lycaenops. I have not yet been able to figure out who the artist is.

Set 1


Set 2


Set 3


Set 4


These, and most of my other VDA images, are hosted on my Flickr account. Feel free to poke around there, as I tend to add them in batches prior to featuring them here. And some of the publications and collections have additional images I don't post here - for instance, for the sake of space, I didn't include my scan of the covers of these stamp books in this post.

I've also been doing a bit of house cleaning, and have reorganized my blogroll and links, separating them to hopefully make the lists more relevant. The links will continue to grow as I find new sites and remember old ones. If there are any that you feel should be represented here at LITC, please let me know by posting a comment or emailing me at chasmosaurs(at)gmail(dot)com.