The 19th century American paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh had named and first described Stegosaurus in 1877, originally interpreted from incomplete fossil remains as an aquatic reptile with turtle-like armor plates that lay flat on its back. Later discoveries allowed Marsh to restore Stegosaurus more accurately as a terrestrial plant-eating dinosaur, initially restored with a single row of plates aligned vertically along its back with eight pairs of spikes on the end of its tail. By the end of the 19th century, Stegosaurus had emerged as one of the most notable American dinosaur discoveries and had passed from the realm of scientific research into the popular imagination, sparked by its strange appearance. In 1893, the British paleontologist Richard Lydekker had reacted with astonishment at Marsh's 1891 illustrations of the skeletons of Stegosaurus and Triceratops: "Prof. Marsh published restorations of two forms, which for strangeness and uncouthness exceed the wildest flights of the imagination."
Stegosaurus would become one of the most recognizable of all dinosaurs, appearing early on in popular books and articles about prehistoric animals, and, starting in the first decades of the 20th century, taking a prominent place among the mounted dinosaur skeletons featured in major museums. Stegosaurus has been depicted on film, in cartoons and comics, and as children's toys.
Among its claims to fame, Stegosaurus was made the official state fossil for Colorado on April 28, 1982, after a two-year campaign begun by a class of 4th graders and their teacher Ruth Sawdo at McElwain Elementary School in Thornton, Colorado. The first fossils of Stegosaurus were discovered in Colorado in 1877, a year after the state entered the Union (1876).Stegosaurus: Colorado’s State Fossil https://coloradoearthscience.blogspot.com/2016/11/stegosaurus-colorados-state-fossil.html
The famous 20th century American sculptor Alexander Calder designed a 50-foot-tall by 32-foot-wide abstract metal sculpture in 1972 known as "Stegosaurus".Explore Stegosaurus, 1973 https://www.publicartct.org/artwork/stegosaurus-1973/ Fabricated by the Segre Iron Works and constructed out 45 steel plates bolted together, the monumental piece, painted a bright orange-red, was installed in Burr Mall in Hartford, Connecticut in 1973, placed near a fountain as if to suggest an animal approaching for a drink.Calder's Stegosaurus Dedicated October 10, 1973 https://connecticuthistory.org/calders-stegosaurus-dedicated-today-in-history/ The work was commissioned as a memorial to Alfred E. Burr, who founded the Hartford Times newspaper in the 19th century. The British botanist and writer Nicholas Guppy reportedly saw the planned abstract sculpture with enlarged triangular projections at an early development stage and observed that it "looked like a prehistoric monster", a comparison that inspired the name "Stegosaurus". A small-scale maquette version of the steel sculpture, measuring 13-feet-tall and 14-feet-wide, now stands outside the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.Stegosaurus sculpture at Toledo Museum of Art https://emuseum.toledomuseum.org/objects/58493/stegosaurus-intermediate-maquette Also called "Stegosaurus" and painted bright orange-red, the preparatory stage work had been installed at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington in 1975, but was sold at auction in 2000 for $4.1 million to the Toledo Museum of Art.Bid wins sculpture for Toledo Art Museum in 2000 https://www.toledoblade.com/frontpage/2000/11/23/4-1M-bid-wins-sculpture-for-Toledo.html Artistic representations
Due to the fragmentary nature of most early Stegosaurus fossil finds, it took many years before reasonably accurate restorations of this dinosaur could be produced. The earliest popular image of Stegosaurus was an engraving produced by the French science illustrator Auguste-Michel Jobin, which appeared in the November 1884 issue of Scientific American and elsewhere, and which depicted the dinosaur amid a speculative Morrison age Jurassic landscape. Jobin restored the Stegosaurus as bipedal and long-necked, with the plates arranged along the tail and the back covered in spikes. This covering of spikes might have been based on a misinterpretation of long, cylindrical teeth in rows found with the fossils bones, distinct from the compressed teeth found in a jaw fragment, as noted by Marsh in his initial 1877 description of Stegosaurus armatus. Marsh thought the apparent cylindrical teeth might turn out to be small dermal spines, similar to those of some types of fishes. In 1884, however, he reidentified the cylindrical teeth found with the first Stegosaurus bones as those of the sauropod dinosaur Diplodocus, later given the species name Diplodocus lacustris.Debus, A. A. (2009). Prehistoric Monsters: The Real and Imagined Creatures of the Past That We Love to Fear. McFarland. Work at the original fossil site in 2013 revealed that the teeth in fact came from part of an Apatosaurus skull, missed by the original 1877 excavation of the Quarry 5 site."Diplodocus" teeth found to belong to Apatosaurus https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2013AM/webprogram/Paper231547.html
Marsh published his more accurate skeletal reconstruction of Stegosaurus in 1891, and within a decade Stegosaurus had become among the most-illustrated types of dinosaur. Nevertheless, scientifically inaccurate, sometimes fanciful, reconstructions of Stegosaurus appeared in different books and publications in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some imposing a crawling lizard-like posture or creating odd arrangements of the plates and spikes.
The renowned artist Charles R. Knight specialized in science-based reconstructions of prehistoric animals, often developed under the direction or with the advice of paleontologists. His depictions of Stegosaurus over the decades reflected shifting scientific ideas about the dinosaur’s anatomy and appearance. Knight published his first illustrations of Stegosaurus ungulatus in 1897, both depicted with a single row of plates and eight tail spikes based on Marsh's 1891 skeletal reconstruction. The painting of Stegosaurus that appeared in the May 1897 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine (page 916) restored the armored dinosaur with rows of rectangular crocodile-like scutes along its upper body and horizontal scale bands on its belly.Heavily armored Stegosaurus depicted by Charles R. Knight in Harper’s Magazine in May 1897 https://books.google.com/books?id=R287AQAAMAAJ&pg=P916#v=onepage&q&f=false A different ink rendering of Stegosaurus published in the November 1897 issue of The Century Magazine (page 22) covered the dinosaur’s body in round, pebbly scales, more like those in some types of lizards.Stegosaurus as depicted by Charles R. Knight in Century Magazine in 1897 https://books.google.com/books?id=_l0iAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA22#v=onepage&q&f=false Knight's next used a double row for his more well-known 1901 painting, produced under the direction of the zoologist Frederic Augustus Lucas, then with the National Museum of Natural History. This illustration would later be the basis of the stop-motion Stegosaurus puppet used in the 1933 film King Kong. Again under Lucas, Knight revised his version of Stegosaurus two years later, producing a model with a staggered double row of plates. Knight would go on to paint Stegosaurus with a staggered double plate row in 1927, updated to have only four tail spikes, for the Field Museum of Natural History as part of a series of murals depicting prehistoric life.Charles R. Knight Murals: Field Museum Photo Archives:
Two decades later, artist Rudolph F. Zallinger painted a lumbering Stegosaurus with staggered plates in his The Age of Reptiles mural at the Peabody Museum in 1947.Moore, R. (2014). Dinosaurs by the Decades: A Chronology of the Dinosaur in Science and Popular Culture. ABC-CLIO. Stegosaurus appeared on the cover of Life magazine in September 1953 based on Zallinger's mural.Zallinger's Stegosaurus on the front cover of Life magazine in September 1953 https://books.google.com/books?id=GEgEAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Life-size models
Stegosaurus made its major public debut as a paper mache model commissioned by the U.S. National Museum of Natural History for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. The model was based on Knight's latest miniature with the double row of staggered plates, and was exhibited in the United States Government Building at the exposition in St. Louis before being relocated to Portland, Oregon for the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in 1905. The model was moved to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (now the Arts and Industries Building) in Washington, D.C. along with other prehistory displays, and to the current National Museum of Natural History building in 1911. Following renovations to the museum in the 2010s, the model was moved once again for display at the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, New York. The model was given the nickname "Steggy".
Probably the best-known life-size models of Stegosaurus on display at museums and parks are based on a model created by sculptor Louis Paul Jonas for the Sinclair Oil Corporation as part of their Dinoland exhibit at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. The Sinclair Oil Corporation had adopted a Brontosaurus as its emblem in the early 1930s, alluding to the prehistoric source of underground petroleum (actually formed from marine microorganisms, not terrestrial dinosaurs).The tie-in inspired the company to commission life-size dinosaur models for public display and publicity. The first set of models appeared at the Chicago "Century of Progress" World's Fair in 1933 to 1934, including a Stegosaurus. Sinclair Oil in the 1930s https://www.sinclairoil.com/history/1930.html A new set of updated and improved dinosaur models appeared at the 1939 New York World's Fair (1939 to 1940), again including a Stegosaurus. Sinclair Oil's most famous set of dinosaur models was created for the 1964 New York World's Fair (1964 to 1965). Louis Paul Jonas and his studio crew constructed nine life-size dinosaurs out of painted fiberglass over a supporting steel internal structure, working with paleontologists Barnum Brown, Edwin H. Colbert and John Ostrom to reflect the scientific ideas of the early 1960s (including inaccurate upright, tail-dragging postures for Tyrannosaurus and "Trachodon" [Edmontosaurus] and a wrong head for Brontosaurus).Barnum Brown's role in Dinoland models https://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/dinoland-pavilion-1964-worlds-fair After the World's Fair ended, the dinosaur models went on a national tour and were seen by millions of Americans in 37 cities in 25 states. The original models were then donated to different public museums and parks in the United States after the Smithsonian Institution reportedly declined to take them.Sinclair Oil in the 1960s https://www.sinclairoil.com/history/1960.htmlNational Park Service Sinclair Oil dinosaurs https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/tourism-and-dinosaurs.htm The original 25-foot Stegosaurus model went to Dinosaur National Monument in Utah in 1970, where it is on display outside the Quarry Visitor Center, with the original 1964 colors restored since 2016.