From the Collection: Double Entendres & Dinosaurs

In the fall of 1976, subway riders along the west side of Manhattan began to notice curious specimens in the posters lining the walls of the West 81st Street station. At first glance, the creatures appeared to be like any of the many dinosaur fossils on display at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) just outside the station. A closer look, however, revealed that these were no ordinary dinosaurs.

The Thesaurus Rex, a dinosaur “with a vocabulary of a thousand words,” the Pencilaurus No. 2 (which became extinct after it was inserted into a pencil sharpener by a fourth grade teacher on Eastern Parkway), the Immobilius Rex (incapable of movement and “bored to extinction”), and other such cleverly conceived creatures were the brainchildren of Robert Mayers and John Schiff, founders of the architectural firm Mayers & Schiff. The AMNH commissioned Mayers and Schiff to create the campaign to attract visitors from the subway and publicize the museum’s holdings; it was funded by a small grant of $5,000 from Exxon Mobil as part of a larger subway beautification project, with similar design campaigns at the Bronx Zoo, Brooklyn Borough Hall, and 53rd St.

Mayers and Schiff were no strangers to New York City landmarks. In 1973, the pair had designed the original TKTS ticket booth in Times Square with funding from Theatre Development Fund, part of a scheme to revitalize the struggling theater district. With another budget of only $5,000, they designed a network of red scaffolding that was intended to be flexible and temporary but that would ultimately remain a centerpiece of the area for 35 years until a redesign in 2008. 

The posters for the AMNH not only advertised the museum but also served as an inexpensive and temporary means of decoration, much like the TKTS booth. Mayers and Schiff incorporated a subtle grid into each of the designs, effectively breaking up each dinosaur into constituent parts that are repeated across the posters and mimic the lines of the subway tiles on either side of them as though the station itself had been dressed up like these fantastical creatures. (The current design of the station, updated as part of a renovation between 1998 and 2000, now features dinosaurs made of actual tiles on the walls).

Early comments on the newly installed posters suggest that they were quite successful, although possibly more with the parents of the museum’s intended visitors than their children. “They’re on the level of sophistication of a Steinberg cartoon, which is not of the same caliber as the people who use the museum—mostly school classes. The style might be better for the Museum of Modern Art,” observed Joseph Sedacca, then manager of the museum’s Graphics Division in a March 1977 interview with the New York Times. Viewers with a developed tolerance for wordplay could enjoy the small witticisms hidden in the lines of dense text: “Equipped with only semi‐colon, Thesaurus Rex experienced severe difficulty with its vowels and ate itself into extinction” while the Railosaurus was “the worst eater of the Jurassic period… this creature was often referred to in the expression ‘thin as a Railosaurus,’ later changed to ‘thin as a rail.” Details about the 37-mile-long Elongatomus stretch across two posters.

Straphangers responded to the posters with graffiti wordplay of their own, the Times noted. One rider marked a poster of the Railosaurus with the words “It was put on the endangered species list under its official name, Amtrakus Americanus.” And on the coast of Massachusetts, in a map showing the space occupied by the fossilized remains of a single Elongatomus, someone else drew several oil tankers, perhaps a nod to the sponsorship of Exxon Mobil or to the ultimate destination of many dinosaur bones. 

Designer John Schiff responded, “We aimed high. Maybe some went in and asked to see the Thesaurus. And some people said we shouldn’t write sophisticated humor for subway riders. But we wanted copy that would be more interesting than an ad prodding someone to buy an electrical appliance.”

You can view these posters by Mayers and Schiff and many more in the Poster House Online Collection, now available for viewing.