Whimsy: May 2020 Archives

Dinosaur Fever - Sinclair's Icon - American Oil & Gas Historical Society

Sinclair began marketing under the symbol of the brontosaurus (as it was then called) in 1930. The company displayed life-size dinosaur models at the World's Fairs in Chicago (1933), Texas (1936), New York (1939). Sinclair stations gave away dinosaur stamp collecting books.

A new set of models was created for the 1964 New York World's Fair. It was shipped down the Hudson River by barge to New York City, and after the fair, the models toured shopping centers across the country. Visitors to Dinoland at the fair and to the traveling exhibit could use the Mold-A-Rama to make their own plastic dinosaurs for a quarter each. The exhibit visited the west parking lot of Tulsa's Southland Shopping Center in 1966. (Southland was enclosed and renamed Promenade Mall in the 1980s.) I vaguely remember visiting a Sinclair dinosaur exhibit in a rail car and getting plastic dinosaurs when the exhibit stopped either in Nowata or Coffeyville around the same period.

Where are they now? The corythosaurus is on permanent display in Riverside Park, in Harry Sinclair's hometown of Independence, Kansas. The apatosaurus and tyrannosaurus are at Dinosaur State Park in Glen Rose, Texas, triceratops at the Museum of Science & Industry in Louisville, KY, stegosaurus at Dinosaur National Monument in Jensen, UT; ankylosaurus at Houston Museum of Natural Science, struthiomimus at the Milwaukee Public Museum, and trachodon at the Brookfield, Zoo near Chicago. "Sadly, Ornitholestes was stolen and never recovered."