Vintage 1970s Dinosaur Rubber Vending Machine Stamps NOS Mini Figure Stamp Toy Prize Collectible Lot Token 🧸

Size: 1.5 x 1 inches

🦕 Rubber dinosaurs from the decade the dinosaurs changed

Every kid in the 1970s knew the long-necked giant was a Brontosaurus. Science had quietly erased that name in 1903. Gas stations still flew it on Sinclair's green dinosaur, the U.S. Postal Service would print it on a stamp in 1989 over the protests of paleontologists, and in 2015 researchers brought it back. Meanwhile, in the same years these little stamp toys were made, scientists were tearing up the old picture of dinosaurs as slow, tail-dragging lizards. These coin-machine prizes, each a tiny rubber dinosaur standing on its own ink stamp, caught the old picture just before it disappeared.

What you get

A random mix of 1970s dinosaur rubber stamps, new old stock, never inked. Choose a lot of 5, 10 or 15. Each piece is a small sculpted animal 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 photographs show the range of animals in this stock: plated Stegosaurus, frilled and horned Triceratops, armored ankylosaurs with pebbled backs, upright tyrannosaurs, long-necked sauropods, winged pterosaur-type flyers, and a sail-backed Dimetrodon. Colors run through orange, rust red, tan and cream, brown, dark green, sage green and near-black, and many carry a darker wash over a lighter base that picks out the scales and ridges. Each measures 1.5 x 1 inches.

🦴 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 1903 Elmer Riggs concluded the two were the same animal, and under the rules of zoological naming the older name wins. Brontosaurus became Apatosaurus excelsus 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, designed by illustrator John Gurche: Tyrannosaurus, Pteranodon, Stegosaurus and Brontosaurus. Paleontologists protested the last one. The Postal Service answered that it knew the proper name and chose Brontosaurus because it was the one people recognized. Then, in 2015, a British-Portuguese team led by Emanuel Tschopp published a study of sauropod fossils concluding that Brontosaurus was different enough from Apatosaurus to be its own genus after all. The name came back from extinction.

⛽ How dinosaurs got onto America's roadsides

Sinclair Oil began putting dinosaurs into its advertising, sales promotions and product labels in 1930, starting with a dozen different species. The Brontosaurus won the public over and in 1932 became Sinclair's registered trademark, soon a familiar green shape at hundreds of service stations. The company built a dinosaur park at the 1933-34 Century of Progress fair in Chicago, Illinois, with life-sized dinosaurs, two of them staged in a mock battle with sound effects.

Sinclair went bigger at the 1964-65 New York World's Fair. Its Dinoland exhibit held nine fiberglass dinosaurs sculpted by Louis Paul Jonas, a wildlife artist who had trained under the naturalist Carl Akeley. They took two months and $250,000 to finish. Jonas worked with Barnum Brown, the fossil hunter who had discovered Tyrannosaurus rex at the turn of the 20th century; Brown died shortly before the fair opened on April 22, 1964. About 50 million people came through the fair, and Dinoland was among its most popular stops.

🔬 The dinosaur renaissance, and the toys that missed it

The turning point came from a single fossil. In 1964 John Ostrom of Yale found Deinonychus, a small two-legged meat-eater with a stiffened tail built as a counterbalance, and argued that it had been fast, active and probably warm-blooded — nothing like a sluggish lizard. His student Robert Bakker carried the case to the public in "Dinosaur Renaissance," published in the April 1975 issue of Scientific American. Over the following years the picture changed: backbones held level with the ground, tails lifted clear of it.

Look at the tyrannosaurs in this lot. They stand bolt upright with their tails resting on the ground, the pose museums and toymakers had used for decades. That is the old dinosaur, made in the very years science was replacing it.

The sail-backed Dimetrodon in the mix carries a myth of its own. It has been a fixture of dinosaur books and toy sets for generations, but it is not a dinosaur. Dimetrodon lived in the Early Permian, around 290 million years ago, tens of millions of years before the first dinosaurs, and it 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 and gumball-style dispensers that stood in store entrances across the country. A leading maker of the machines was Northwestern Corporation: Emerson A. Bolen founded it in Morris, Illinois, in 1909, and its first machines dispensed matches and stamps. Northwestern moved into bulk vending in the following decades, and its Model 33 of 1933 is credited with making the gumball machine an American fixture, followed by the Model 49, the Model 60 and the Model 80. Machine manufacturing in Morris ended in 2017, when the company was sold to National Entertainment Network.

Condition

New old stock: never inked, with clean stamp faces and crisp sculpting.

Questions People Ask

Do they really work as stamps? Yes. The round base of each figure has a raised outline of the animal that prints when pressed onto an ink pad.

How many do I get, and which ones? Choose 5, 10 or 15. Each lot is a random mix of animals and colors from this stock.

How big are they? 1.5 x 1 inches.

Are they used? No. They are new old stock and have never been inked.

Is Dimetrodon a dinosaur? No. It is an older, sail-backed synapsid, closer to mammals, though toy sets have included it with dinosaurs for generations.

Was Brontosaurus ever a real name? Yes. Marsh named it in 1879, science folded it into Apatosaurus in 1903, and a 2015 study restored it.

Who are they for? Vending-machine and toy collectors, dinosaur lovers of every age, rubber stamp crafters, teachers stocking a prize box, and anyone who remembers turning a crank for a dinosaur.