Dinosaurs

One of my (Dan’s) childhood memories is of a family road trip from Illinois (where Mom and Dad were in grad school) to Pennsylvania (where Dad’s parents lived). I looked forward to stopping at Sinclair gas stations because of Dino (a.k.a. Bronty), their green Brontosaurus mascot.

I even got a small plastic Dino once, which looked something like this:

We’ve never seen a Sinclair gas stations on the East Coast, but now, here in Wyoming and Utah, 50 years later, they are all over the place! Who knew?

The deal with Dino is that thousands of years ago, as we know from “The Flintstones” (who coincidentally had a pet named Dino), dinosaurs and people happily coexisted. For some reason the dinosaurs died out, their bodies piled up and turned to oil, we pump the oil out of the ground, and turn it into gasoline to fuel our SUVs. All just as God intended.

Upon visiting Dinosaur National Monument (days 16-18) we learned that this whole Sinclair/Flintstones story is a total fabrication. Sinclair’s motivation in this fiction was clearly to sell gasoline. I don’t know what the creators of the Flintstones were thinking. Here’s what really happened:

• 4,500,000,000 years ago: Earth formed.
• 3,000,000,000 years ago: Dead bacteria and plankton start piling up on the bottom of the ocean floor, and eventually turn into oil. (The whole dinosaur/oil thing was a Sinclair marketing fabrication.)
• 66,000,000 years ago: The dinosaur extinction.
• 300,000 years ago: Humans first showed up on Earth. Missed seeing the dinosaurs by quite a bit.
• “Brontosaurus” wasn’t even a kind of dinosaur at the time of the Sinclair marketing campaign. But people liked the name and Fred liked his brontosaurus burgers, so it kind of stuck as a synonym for Apatosaurus.
• Brontosaurus had a long snout. The Sinclair version of the Brontosaurus has the wrong kind of head.

As if all this wasn’t enough to burst my bubble, Sinclair gas stations now sell cute fluffy stuffed dinosaurs, rather than the iconic plastic Dinos.