Posters
Safari and the Carnegie Museum created several dinosaur posters during the early days of the Carnegie Collection's run featuring the series' model designs.
And, honestly, the Invicta poster is way better. Still, there are a few things to like about this poster. The colorful info boxes stacked on the right-hand side are a nice addition vs. the little silhouettes along the bottom of the Invicta one. However, this necessitates that the animals illustrated in the poster need to be crammed closer together into a square area. The faithful reproduction of the timeline, up to and including the Ice Age, doesn't quite make sense for the Carnegie poster, as neither Smilodon nor Australopithecus lived in that kind of snowy environment. Note that there seems to have been an alternate version of this poster which lacked the colorful name boxes and title on the bottom, and so was more square in shape. This one also had a yellow square in the top left corner next to the Brachiosaurus' head that contained the Carnegie logo and some other text. The earliest I have found either version is 1993 product guides and catalogs, so I'm not sure which version is earlier. Confusingly, both have the same product number: POS-30.
The worst thing about this poster though, is that the dinosaurs don't even look like the Carnegie models. They look like the Invicta models! Except of course for the models that were never produced by Invicta, which just look copied from other pieces of paleoart.
Despite having a higher model number in most Carnegie collector's guides, it seems like the "250MY" poster came before "Carnegie's Dinosaurs". This first try at a Carnegie Collection poster by Safari probably dates to the very beginning of the line (possibly to before the model designs had all been completed, based on the non-resemblance of the illustrations). It does not include any species that were sculpted after 1988. Needless to say, the "Carnegie's Dinosaurs" poster was a big improvement.
The second Carnegie poster, painted by Forest Rogers, is arranged chronologically from bottom to top - the oldest (Permian) creatures are at the bottom while the youngest (Quaternary) are at the top. The different species are arranged on cliff platforms that may have influenced the development of the Dinosaur Mountain display stand. All of the animals are drawn to scale, with several inset human figures for reference.
There were at least three versions of this poster. The original was titled "The Carnegie's Dinosaurs", and many of the species were illustrated with generic flat gray color schemes. This earliest one had to have been made in 1990 or before, because the designs of the Spinosaurus and Iguanodon are notably different than their actual models, the poster does not include any post-1992 dinosaurs, and none of the 1990s era color patterns are present (in fact, several of the dinosaurs look closer to their original dull gray colors with yellow highlights, notably the Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, and Brachiosaurus). The silhouettes of Iguanodon and Spinosaurus found on the 1990 fold-out leaflet also match the images on the poster, but this is not true for the other species (so the poster must post-date the earlier leaflet but can't be from later than 1990).
The second version, re-titled "Age of the Giants", has given most of the dinosaurs their standard 1990s color schemes. This poster dates to 1991.
The last one has the blue exclamation point adopted as The Carnegie's logo in the 2000s, and was re-titled "Dawn of the Dinosaurs".
250 Million Years of Prehistoric Life
The original Carnegie Collection dinosaur poster was adapted from the illustration done for the 1988 original Point of Purchase Display stand. It was about as blatant a ripoff of the earlier Invicta British Museum poster as you can get. The background is pretty much the same, down to the red/blue contrasted sky divided by a volcano. The similarities are obvious when you see the two posters side by side, as in the photo from Playful International's 1993 Science and Nature catalog below:
And, honestly, the Invicta poster is way better. Still, there are a few things to like about this poster. The colorful info boxes stacked on the right-hand side are a nice addition vs. the little silhouettes along the bottom of the Invicta one. However, this necessitates that the animals illustrated in the poster need to be crammed closer together into a square area. The faithful reproduction of the timeline, up to and including the Ice Age, doesn't quite make sense for the Carnegie poster, as neither Smilodon nor Australopithecus lived in that kind of snowy environment. Note that there seems to have been an alternate version of this poster which lacked the colorful name boxes and title on the bottom, and so was more square in shape. This one also had a yellow square in the top left corner next to the Brachiosaurus' head that contained the Carnegie logo and some other text. The earliest I have found either version is 1993 product guides and catalogs, so I'm not sure which version is earlier. Confusingly, both have the same product number: POS-30.
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| Alternate, earlier version of the first Carnegie dinosaur poster as pictured in a 1993 brochure. |
Despite having a higher model number in most Carnegie collector's guides, it seems like the "250MY" poster came before "Carnegie's Dinosaurs". This first try at a Carnegie Collection poster by Safari probably dates to the very beginning of the line (possibly to before the model designs had all been completed, based on the non-resemblance of the illustrations). It does not include any species that were sculpted after 1988. Needless to say, the "Carnegie's Dinosaurs" poster was a big improvement.
The Carnegie's Dinosaurs
There were at least three versions of this poster. The original was titled "The Carnegie's Dinosaurs", and many of the species were illustrated with generic flat gray color schemes. This earliest one had to have been made in 1990 or before, because the designs of the Spinosaurus and Iguanodon are notably different than their actual models, the poster does not include any post-1992 dinosaurs, and none of the 1990s era color patterns are present (in fact, several of the dinosaurs look closer to their original dull gray colors with yellow highlights, notably the Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, and Brachiosaurus). The silhouettes of Iguanodon and Spinosaurus found on the 1990 fold-out leaflet also match the images on the poster, but this is not true for the other species (so the poster must post-date the earlier leaflet but can't be from later than 1990).
The second version, re-titled "Age of the Giants", has given most of the dinosaurs their standard 1990s color schemes. This poster dates to 1991.
The last one has the blue exclamation point adopted as The Carnegie's logo in the 2000s, and was re-titled "Dawn of the Dinosaurs".
Carnegie's Dinosaurs Pennant
From 1991, this pennant was sold at the Carnegie Museum and featured some of the Carnegie Collection dinosaur designs. Notably, it replaces Parasaurolophus with Corythosaurus - the latter had a mounted skeleton on display at the Carnegie while the former did not. The Stegosaurus is also decked out in it's classic red and green colors rather than colors based on any Carnegie models at the time, though the 2007 repaint would feature a similar color pattern.
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