Dinosaur Sighting: Vintage Stegosaurus

Like many fossils fans, I quite enjoy picking apart bad restorations of dinosaurs, but I must admit that I have a soft spot for the 20th century image of drab, slow, stupid dinosaurs. Those were the dinosaurs I first encountered at museums and school libraries—just before the "Dinosaur Renaissance" hit the mainstream of public consciousness—and so I was delighted when I came across this old photograph of a Stegosaurus created by the Smithsonian Institution.

Printed in a companion volume to the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, the photo shows a vintage dinosaur. Strangely, though, the plaster dinosaur was not mentioned by name in the image caption, which merely described it as "an armored dinosaur, a huge reptilian creature that once roamed the plains of what are now Wyoming, Colorado and Kansas, distinguished among others of its species by a small head, large projecting plates on the back, and stout spines on the tail." Still, any dinosaur aficionado would immediately recognize the creature as Stegosaurus, and the 1904 model looked little different from depictions of the same animal I saw just before images of 20th century dinosaurs were swept away.

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Riley Black | | READ MORE

Riley Black is the author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs and many other books. She is a science correspondent for Smithsonian magazine covering fossils and natural history, and she writes about the prehistoric past for a variety of publications.