Steggie Returns to Cleveland with New Look

Steggie has served as the Museum's unofficial greeter for almost 15 years. But the sculpture located outside the Museum today was not the first Stegosaurus to stand watch over Wade Oval.

The Museum’s original Steggie was created by sculptors at Louis Paul Jonas Studios in Hudson, New York. In 1964, artists at Jonas Studios were commissioned to create a group of authentic life-sized dinosaur sculptures to be used at the New York World’s Fair. The studio created a 70-foot-long Brontosaurus, a 19-foot-high T. rex, and a 20-foot-long Stegosaurus, among others. In 1967, then Museum Director William Scheele commissioned Jonas Studios to create another realistic Stegosaurus model for Cleveland. On June 20, 1968, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History Women's Committee hosted an exclusive dinner to welcome the new Stegosaurus to town.

On April 1, 2016, the Museum’s iconic Stegosaurus sculpture—affectionately known to visitors and staff as “Steggie”—was temporarily transferred off-site for refurbishment and to receive a new color scheme more in line with current paleontology research on how dinosaurs were likely to look.

Most groups of dinosaurs had large spikes, plates, frills, domes and crests probably used for communication. The plates and spikes of Stegosaurus were covered in keratin, the same protein covering modern bird beaks, claws and feathers. Because we now know that birds are modern dinosaurs that survived mass extinction 65 million years ago, dinosaurs like Stegosaurus may have evolved to employ similar strategies that we see in birds. Birds are highly visual and social animals, using bright colors and ornamental features to communicate with each other. Therefore, a new, brighter and more colorful Steggie reflects a modern understanding of dinosaur evolutionary relationships and paleobiology: dinosaurs were visual and colorful social animals like their living descendants.

To bring Steggie’s new look to life, the Museum’s vertebrate paleontologists collaborated with its exhibits team to come up with a color palette that would reflect how Stegosaurus might have looked based on these new hypotheses. The exhibits team then orchestrated a removal and transportation plan in conjunction with Wood-Lee International Art Handlers. A boom truck hoisted the massive sculpture onto a flatbed truck. Steggie was then delivered to Creative Mold and Machine in Newbury to receive minor repairs and the new paint job.