If you browse my shop, it doesn’t take long to notice a recurring theme: I put Stegosauruses into famous works of art.
People often assume the idea started with a clever design brainstorm—a fun visual contrast between classical masterpieces and prehistoric creatures. In reality, the seeds for those designs were planted more than sixty years ago, somewhere between a black-and-white television in a Long Beach kitchen, the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and a fourth-grade Scholastic book order.
Gus Grissom and a Sick Day in 1965
Like a lot of kids growing up in the late fifties and early sixties, my earliest brush with big ideas came from the space program. Born in May 1957, I was only four when Gus Grissom made his Project Mercury flight in July 1961, so most of the mission details blurred together. What stuck with me was Gus Grissom’s name—I loved simply saying it out loud, probably hooked by the crisp alliteration.
Fast forward to March 23, 1965. I happened to be home sick from school on the exact day of the first manned Gemini launch—and sitting right there in the capsule was Gus Grissom. My mom and I sat in our kitchen watching the entire three-orbit flight unfold on our little black-and-white TV. From that afternoon on, I was completely hooked on the space program and finally old enough to actually pay attention to it.
Naturally, that obsession branched out into astronomy and the physical sciences in general. Between stacks of The Hardy Boys, roughly half of everything I read in 1965 was devoted to space and the planets—with Jupiter and Mars topping my list.
Dinoland at the World’s Fair
So what does any of this have to do with dinosaurs? Nothing at all, actually, except that both were competing for shelf space in my imagination at the exact same time. Growing up in Long Beach, New York, dinosaurs were practically part of the local scenery. Sinclair gas stations were everywhere, each one flying its green “Brontosaurus” sign (yes, back then we still called it a Brontosaurus), and The Flintstones was in heavy rotation on our TV.
Best of all, we lived just a short drive from Flushing Meadows, which meant multiple trips to the 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair. I still vividly remember the rotating theater at General Electric’s Carousel of Progress, though two exhibits towered above everything else for a science-obsessed kid: the towering NASA rockets at the Space Park, and Sinclair’s Dinoland, filled with life-size fiberglass dinosaurs.
Around 1965, my sibling and I were given a set of small, remarkably realistic plastic dinosaurs that we played with constantly. I didn’t have a single favorite just yet, though even then I bypassed the usual headliners—the Tyrannosaurus rex and Brontosaurus—in favor of the armored, unusual silhouettes: the Triceratops, the Ankylosaurus, and the Stegosaurus.
Fourth Grade and The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek
The tiebreaker arrived in fourth grade through the Scholastic Book Program (or whatever it was officially called back then). One of the paperbacks I checked off on that thin newsprint order form was Evelyn Sibley Lampman’s The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek—a story about one lone, gentle Stegosaurus discovered and befriended by two kids in Oregon.
Once I finished that book, the contest was over. The Stegosaurus became my absolute favorite dinosaur, a loyalty that has stuck with me for sixty-some years. Unlike the fierce predators that dominated most dinosaur stories, the Stegosaurus felt quiet, misunderstood, and endearingly out of time.
From Outer Space to Evolution—and Back to the Canvas
By the time I was finishing junior high, my scientific curiosity had undergone a quiet migration—shifting from the vast scale of rockets and planets to the intricate world of biological science. (I eventually went on to earn a BS in Biological Science at Cornell and a PhD in Human Genetics at Yale, so it’s safe to say the shift stuck.) Whether dinosaurs sparked that transition or it came from paging repeatedly through the Evolution volume of our family’s Time-Life nature book set—a hardcover I still own today—I’m not entirely sure. Both, however, shared the same core appeal: tracing how life changes over deep time and how creatures adapt to the world around them.
Decades later, when I began creating fine-art parodies, that fourth-grade loyalty came right back to the surface. Placing a gentle Stegosaurus beneath Van Gogh’s swirling Starry Night or inside a sunlit Renoir grove feels like a natural extension of Cricket Creek—a quiet, prehistoric traveler wandering through places you’d never expect to find him.
Leave a Reply