The first postage stamp featuring a prehistoric beast was a stamp from India (1951), celebrating the centenary of the Geological Survey of India it showed the reconstruction of the fossil elephant species Stegodon ganesca. Cuba released a stamp in 1958. Dedicated to the naturalist Carlos de la Torre y Huerta (1858 ? 1950) it shows the giant sloth Megalocnus rodens.
In the same year China issued the very first stamp showing a dinosaur ? the Chinese prosauropod Lufengosaurus. Belgium followed with the more prominent Iguanodon. From there dinosaurs will appear on postage stamps from Poland and San Marino (1965), Congo (1975), Germany (1977), Mongolia and Nicaragua (1987). The U.S. will dedicate four values to Pteranodon, Tyrannosaurus, Brontosaurus and Stegosaurus in 1989.
Fig.1.The small republic of San Marino issued a series of nine values, showing a Brontosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Pteranodon, Elasmosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus, Thaumatosaurus, Iguanodon and Triceratops -mostly in dull colors (all images ? as images from government documents ? are in public domain).
Fig.2. An interesting series of psychedelic postage stamps from Tanzania (1991), presenting the first (very) colorful dinosaurs.
Fig.3. Many editions of stamps with dinosaurs are intended for the market and collectors ? therefore often more aesthetic appealing than scientific accurate. Sometimes the motif is even simply copied from other artists or publications, like these two specimens, copies from the Saltopus by Jane Burton and the Tyrannosaurus by Doug Henderson.
Fig.4. The first postage stamps showing tracks of dinosaurs were released in Lesotho in 1984.
Fig.5. Evolutionary ladder in a Polish edition, illustrations by artist Andrzej Heidrich (he designed also advertising posters and Polish banknotes).
Fig.6. Not only ?living dinosaurs?? ? a German series (1990) celebrates with dinosaur-skeletons 100 years Museum for Natural History in Berlin.
Fig.7. The Great End?
Bibliography:
THENIUS, E. & VAVRA, N. (1996): Fossilien im Volksglauben und im Alltag ? Bedeutung und Verwendung vorzeitlicher Tier- und Pflanzenreste von der Steinzeit bis heute. Senckenberg-Buch 71, Waldemar Kramer Verlag ? Frankfurt am Main: 179
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While America’s political and business elite are pressing Congress to ease high-skilled immigration laws, a new study argues that foreign workers aren’t necessarily better or brighter. “The immigrant workers, especially those who first came to the United States as foreign students, are in general of no higher talent than the Americans, as measured by salary, patent filings, dissertation awards, and quality of academic program,” writes University Of California-Davis professor, Norman Matloff. While technology leaders, such as Bill Gates, often complain that they must bait the best foreign workers with luxurious salaries, Matloff says that data doesn’t back this up. To illustrate just how little big tech companies actually value foreign workers, he presents a graph of the share of percentage of foreign workers that make substantially more than their native colleagues. At Google, for instance, only 12% of foreign workers are making 1.45 times the average worker in their field. Matloff, a noted critic of high-skilled H1-B visa reform, finds that because there is no statistical difference in economic output between foreign and native workers, the idea of a shortage of high-skilled workers is a myth. “One of the industry?s most effective public relations tacks has been to claim that too few Americans major in STEM fields in college,” he argues. Instead, foreign immigrants have saturated the market, pushing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics students onto other career paths. Quoting a study by a team of Berkeley economists, “?high-tech engineers and managers have experienced lower wage growth than their counterparts nationally. ?Why hasn?t the growth of high-tech wages kept up??Foreign students are an important part of the story.” Posh Wall Street jobs for American STEM students are fueling the so-called “diversion” of STEM students away from technology careers. Between 2003 and 2006, the share of MIT grads going into financial services nearly doubled, from 13% to 25%. “If you?re a high math student in America, from a purely economic point of view, it?s crazy to go into STEM,” said Georgetown University researcher Anthony Carnevale. As a result of the overwhelming influx, Matloff argues that foreign immigrants became a kind of “indentured servant,” forced to work for lower pay and less legal protections (a concern also expressed by industry unions). Matloff’s study is sure to take a lot of heat, especially because he doesn’t take into account foreign entrepreneurs, who founded a huge chunk of influential technology corporation, from Google to