Description

Remember Dinosaur Vending Machine Stamps? 🦕 A random mix of little dinosaur stamps

Size: 1 1/2" x 1" ~ New old stock, never inked, with clean stamp faces.

Choose a lot of 5, 10 or 15. Each piece is a small sculpted dinosaur standing on a round base, and the flat face of that base carries a raised outline of the same animal, so the toy prints its own portrait when pressed to an ink pad. The mix runs plated Stegosaurus, horned Triceratops, armored ankylosaurs, upright tyrannosaurs, long-necked sauropods, winged pterosaur-type flyers, and a sail-backed Dimetrodon, in orange, rust red, tan and cream, brown, dark green, sage green and near-black, many with a darker wash over a lighter base that picks out the scales and ridges.

🦴 The name on the long neck

Othniel Charles Marsh, the Yale paleontologist, named Apatosaurus, the "deceptive lizard," in 1877, and Brontosaurus, the "thunder lizard," in 1879, in the middle of the late-1800s Bone Wars - his bitter race with Edward Drinker Cope to out-discover each other, which filled American museums with dinosaurs. In 1903 Elmer Riggs concluded the two were the same animal, and under the rules of zoological naming the older name won — Brontosaurus became Apatosaurus in the scientific literature, and stayed Brontosaurus everywhere else. The public never let go of it. On October 1, 1989, the Postal Service issued a block of four 25-cent Prehistoric Animals stamps in Orlando, Florida, painted by the illustrator John Gurche - Tyrannosaurus, Pteranodon, Stegosaurus and Brontosaurus - and put Brontosaurus on one of them anyway, over paleontologists' objections, because it was the name people knew. Then in 2015 a team led by Emanuel Tschopp published a study concluding Brontosaurus really was different enough from Apatosaurus to stand as its own genus after all — the name came back from extinction.

⛽ How dinosaurs got onto America's roadsides

Sinclair Oil started putting dinosaurs into its advertising in 1930, and the Brontosaurus became its registered trademark in 1932, soon a familiar green shape at service stations everywhere. The company built a dinosaur exhibit at the 1933-34 Century of Progress fair in Chicago, then went bigger at the 1964-65 New York World's Fair: its Dinoland held nine fiberglass dinosaurs sculpted by Louis Paul Jonas, built with advice from fossil hunter Barnum Brown and paleontologist John Ostrom over about two years at the Jonas Studios in Hudson, New York, and seen by some 50 million fairgoers. Hollywood had already done its part: King Kong's prehistoric beasts in 1933, Godzilla in 1954, and a whole run of stop-motion dinosaur pictures after them, so a kid in front of a vending machine knew exactly which one he wanted.

🔬 The old dinosaur, and the toys that still show it

That same John Ostrom found a fossil in 1964, Deinonychus, a small fast-moving predator that convinced him dinosaurs weren't the sluggish tail-draggers everyone assumed. His student Robert Bakker carried the case to the public in "Dinosaur Renaissance," published in Scientific American in 1975, and over the following years the standard picture of a dinosaur changed for good — backs held level, tails lifted off the ground. The tyrannosaurs in this lot still stand the old way, bolt upright with their tails resting on the ground, the pose that was standard before that shift took hold — a small window into how dinosaurs were pictured before the science moved on.

The sail-backed Dimetrodon in the mix isn't actually a dinosaur, though toy sets have grouped it with them for generations. It lived in the Early Permian, tens of millions of years before the first dinosaurs, and belongs to the synapsids — the line more closely related to mammals than to reptiles.

🪙 The coin machines

Prizes like these came out of bulk vending machines, the glass-globe dispensers that used to stand by store entrances everywhere. Northwestern Corporation, one of the leading machine makers, was founded in Morris, Illinois, in 1909 by Emerson A. Bolen (old-timers in the hobby still rattle off the names on those glass-globe machines like ballplayers' stats: Northwestern, Oak Manufacturing, Victor Vending, Silver King) — its very first machines dispensed matches and stamps before the company moved into gumball-style bulk vending, with its Model 33 of 1933 helping make that kind of machine an American fixture. Machine manufacturing in Morris ran until 2017, when the company was sold to National Entertainment Network.