Like many parents, I try to avoid contributing to the plastic deluge. I often give my daughter, now 16 months old, second-hand gifts and toys. But I find it harder gifting hand-me-downs to others so I’m at Hamleys, the world’s first toyshop, on London’s Regent Street, in search of a dinosaur for my six-year-old nephew. An attendant sends me to the fourth floor—where “toys for boys” are located, although the areas aren’t officially gendered. I take the escalators up past a charm bracelet stand, through a floor packed with pink.
I find them on the top floor: rows of model dinosaurs—green, red, blue and orange, with spiked backs, long necks, with and without teeth. I wish I knew as many dinosaur names as my nephew but I can only tell you what they look like and that they’re made by Schleich, a German toy company that was responsible for the first collection of Smurf figurines in the 1960s. Along the shelves to one side is another set of model creatures, which my nephew is less enthusiastic about. Made by the same company but in different colours, some with rainbow tails or wings, they have a single horn on their foreheads, unmistakeably marking them out as unicorns.
It takes me a moment to adjust to seeing these seemingly incongruous creatures together, but once I notice them, I realise they’re everywhere, together but markedly separate. There are glow-in-the-dark unicorns and dinosaurs, activity books about unicorns and dinosaurs and bedtime stories about, yes, unicorns and dinosaurs—glitter and sparkle on the one hand, ferocity on the other, one creature grounded in reality and the other the object of fantasy. There’s a clear sense that these are gendered options, the mythical creature for girls, the prehistoric one for boys. But beyond this you can see why they would be positioned together. Unicorns and dinosaurs align with adults’ desires for children to be able to engage with the real world and also their imaginations. The juxtaposition reflects the way we see progress: dinosaurs as symbols of evolution, unicorns as embodiments of optimism. And the fact that neither creature actually exists today allows us (adults and children) to find some escapism.
At Christmas, the ubiquity of dinosaurs and unicorns comes to a head, children’s stockings filled with one or the other. At home, I search the website of the Entertainer, a toy shop, where I find sections dedicated specifically, and separately, to unicorns and to dinosaurs. Their head of buying, Steve Pearson, tells me that both are “consistent best-sellers”. Karen Dennett, senior buyer at Hamleys, concurs. The Entertainer’s most popular dinosaur line is based on Jurassic World, the second trilogy in the Jurassic Park film series, of which they stock more than 100 products. Unicorn Academy, meanwhile, an animated TV series about a boarding school on Unicorn Island, has become the most popular brand for unicorn-themed merchandise. The variety of products themed around these two franchises alone is dizzying: dolls, figures, playsets, books, games, jigsaws, action figures.
The endless variations on this theme are indicative of the sheer demand for children’s toys and gifts. In the UK alone, nearly £12.9bn was spent on toys last year, a figure that has nearly doubled since 2005. And even though we’re supposed to be throwing away less plastic, the United Nations Environment Programme reports that the toy industry is the most plastic intensive industry on Earth.
Unicorn and dinosaur merch is inescapable. What explains the pervasiveness? In part, the current obsession with dinosaur toys is tied to the first Jurassic Park film in 1993 and its subsequent franchise, but it also goes back further. Richard Fallon, a researcher at the Natural History Museum, says that interest grew as a result of archaeological digs in the early 19th century—but dinosaurs become known when the word was coined in 1842. “Colonial expansion meant more geological areas were being surveyed, and fossils started being discovered in the 1820s. Then, in the 1830s we get the birth of popular science and there is a literary boom, which means ideas about dinosaurs start to be more available,” he tells me. Children’s books about dinosaurs became popular in the late 19th century, though, he adds, “dinosaurs weren’t exactly the kind of creatures you’d stick on a lunch box at the time.”
The nonfiction book Extinct Monsters (1892), by Henry Hutchinson, is one example of that era’s popular science. Aimed at both adults and children, it explains everything from different species of dinosaur to how they could be identified. This excitement was channelled through fiction, too. In 1914, the popular novel Wonders in Monsterland by ED Cuming described dinosaurs as the kind of thing that made “prehistory just as exciting as Lewis Carroll”. After the artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins displayed sculptures of three dozen prehistoric creatures at his home on New Year’s Eve in 1853, they went on permanent display in Crystal Palace Park months later. Crowds thronged to see them, suggesting that the fascination for these creatures had spawned an obsession with trying to reconstruct them.
In 1905, the unveiling of Dippy the Diplodocus at London’s Natural History Museum was a major PR moment. A gift from the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, it was a life-size replica based on the remains of a giant dinosaur discovered in Wyoming and subsequently housed in Carnegie’s own Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. Further copies were later given to museums in Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Bologna, Saint Petersburg, Madrid and La Plata.
As knowledge of natural history grew, the spread of ideas led to increasing interest in these prehistoric creatures, although the reality was markedly different to the popular imagination. “Dinosaurs were seen as silly, fun and non-adaptive, stupid, oversized and poorly evolved, which is why they were thought to have gone extinct,” says Fallon. “A key transition was the 1960s to the 1970s, when palaeontologists started suspecting they evolved into birds, which means they were intelligent and had speed. Before that they were considered unintelligent and slow.”
In the early 1900s, dinosaur toys started to be sold on a small scale, but after the First World War they really took off amid a burgeoning market for plastic toys. Sinclair Oil, a US petrol company that used dinosaurs in their marketing in the 1930s, helped translate the dinosaur craze into something appealing for kids. Sinclair claimed there was a connection between dinosaurs and oil, based on the fact that oil derives from the remains of animals and plants, trnsformed under heat and pressure from layers of rocks over millions of years. Originally, the campaign involved a dozen dinosaurs made of rubber being given out at petrol stations—of which an Apatosaurus called Dino became so popular that the company registered it as a trademark. At Chicago’s World Fair, from 1933 to 1934, Sinclair Oil exhibited a life-size Dino, alongside several other dinosaurs. It caught the eye of the millions of adults and children who attended the fair.
In the 1930s, a US oil firm helped make dinosaurs appealing for kids
Today, there are regulations against petrol advertising targeted at children. But in the 1930s, kids were an audience for Big Oil. Alison Laurence, an academic who has researched the emergence of dinosaurs in popular culture, explains that children weren’t the target at first, even though they became an avid audience for the display. “Companies treated kids as future consumers but also recognised they were consumers in the present, because they could shape their families’ consumption habits,” she tells me. “I think Sinclair fell into it and, when they started their dinosaur advertising, I don’t think they had kids in mind.”
Modelmakers Messmore & Damon also exhibited dinosaurs at the Chicago World Fair at that time. Their ambitious exhibit, “The World a Million Years Ago”, comprised a huge domed area 100 feet in diameter filled with models and dioramas depicting the stages of dinosaur evolution. Consciously marketed at children, the display sold toy dinosaur figures alongside guidebooks and souvenirs; the point of this and other displays like it was to create spectacle as well as inform. They showed “in microcosm how -palaeontology spread through US culture in the 1920s and 1930s, as it moved across a range of media and genres, including department store displays, parade floats, expositions, merchandising, theatre shows, and even projected film scripts,” wrote Christopher Manias, a historian of science at King’s College London, in a 2016 paper.
“The World a Million Years Ago” was so popular it was taken on tour, accompanied by the sale of two sets of prehistoric toys, reptiles and mammals. Both Sinclair Oil and Messmore & Damon kept investing in dinosaur advertising after the success of the Chicago World Fair. Dino went on to appear at events such as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, this time as an inflatable sculpture, and then at the New York World Fair in 1964. Dino proved so popular, in fact, that it and the company that spawned it continue to reappear in different contexts to this day. The family central to 1990s Disney TV series Dinosaurs, for instance, is called Sinclair, while Dino is alluded to in the fictional Dinoco petrol brand seen in multiple Pixar movies, including Toy Story and Cars. It seems Big Oil left a legacy in the dinosaur toys we see everywhere today.
Unicorns have had a very different trajectory, starting out closer to monsters than the glittery rainbow-clad toys of today might suggest. While dinosaurs predate us, the first known depictions of unicorns date back to the Indus Valley civilisation in the 4th century BC. The idea of them was introduced to Ancient Greece in 398BC by the physician and historian Ctesias of Cnidus, who wrote, “there are in India certain wild asses which are as large as horses, and larger. Their bodies are white, their heads dark red, and their eyes dark blue. They have a horn on the forehead which is about a foot and a half in length.” Historians speculate that Ctesias made this up or mistook a rhinoceros for a unicorn, but we’ll never know for sure.
In classical antiquity, unicorns were described by Pliny as “a very fierce animal called the monoceros which has the head of a stag, the feet of the elephant, and the tail of the boar, while the rest of the body is like that of the horse. It makes a deep lowing noise, and has a single black horn, projecting from the middle of its forehead, and two cubits in length.” Descriptions like this were published as natural history, because writers were so convinced that unicorns were real.
These ancient descriptions typify the changeable semblance of unicorns. According to Tanaya Basu De Sarkar, assistant curator at Young V&A museum in London, “unicorns have changed their appearance and meaning in popular culture over time. Dinosaurs have been more stable visually as they have always been popular, but unicorns have changed a lot.” During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the unicorn became symbolic of chaste love. In Triumph of Chastity, one of a series of tapestries made in the 1500s inspired by Petrarch’s poem I Trionfi (“The Triumphs”), Cupid is pulled down from his chariot by Chastity riding a unicorn with a long, twisting horn that cuts across the scene. A set of tapestries woven in around 1500 called The Lady and the Unicorn included in each of its six parts a unicorn surrounded by intricately woven flora and fauna.
With the rise of the secular associations that came with humanism, the unicorn became a symbol of healing. The 1673 Nuremberg dolls’ house, on display at the Young V&A, has the head of a unicorn attached to one of its doors, which would have meant the house belonged to an apothecary (narwhal tusk was often used to represent the horn of a creature that didn’t actually exist). “That’s what the unicorn horn used to signify: purity, virginity, medicinal qualities,” De Sarkar explains. By the 18th century, belief in unicorns had started to wane when it was discovered they might, shock horror, not actually be real.
It wasn’t until the Victorian era, when The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries were rediscovered and acquired by the Cluny Museum in Paris, that this mythical creature started to re-emerge in popular culture. Then, unicorns became more romanticised, morphing into a plaything for children, at a time when references to rainbows and butterflies were increasingly prominent in literature.
Today the unicorn is everywhere, and not just in toys. It perhaps owes its ubiquity to its connection with the LGBT+ movement. There is no agreement on how the unicorn became a gay icon but, given that we know the playfulness of rainbows and unicorns date all the way back to Victorian times, it’s possible to see why it became associated with the community when the rainbow flag was created by Gilbert Baker in 1978.
The following decade, My Little Pony solidified the image of the unicorn as we know it now, a decidedly cutesy creature inhabiting a rainbow world. Some 150m of these toy ponies were sold in the 1980s, followed by a TV franchise and film.
Nowadays the unicorn permeates popular culture beyond children’s toys, clothes and merch. In 2017, Moschino’s My Little Pony capsule collection was unveiled at Milan Fashion Week. In 2024, there are AI unicorn babies, which challenge the boundaries between the virtual and real. “The girl is AI. The unicorn is real”, one user comments on such a video, summing up the disbelief. And in another twist, the bestselling Skander series of kids’ books by AF Steadman paint unicorns as dark and bloodthirsty, not so far from the contemporary monstrosity of dinosaurs.
The fascination isn’t only cultural, though. In an age of endless stuff, dinosaurs and unicorns are the perfect commodity. Why? Because they’re so straightforward to reproduce and are immediately recognisable. Further, toy manufacturers can leverage the popularity of known dinosaur and unicorn-themed brands by merely featuring these creatures, so long as specific brand names aren’t cited. Shameel Ahmad, an economist and assistant professor at Rhode College in the US, tells me that consumption tends to pivot around focal or “Schelling” points, as they’re known by economists, which are norms on which we can all broadly agree. “There are centralising ideas around which some kinds of consumption want to go, so for instance if I wanted to go out for dinner, it would be easy to go to a chain restaurant because it’s safe and there are affordable options,” he explains. “I think dinosaurs and unicorns serve that role in the toy sector because they’re familiar to everyone, and they can be mass produced cheaply without any trademark costs.”
I’m puzzled as to why unicorns and dinosaur toys so overtly play up to gender divides: pink, glittery, lilac and pastel unicorns for girls and blue, green or red dinosaurs for boys. It seems to be a symptom of a bigger problem, namely that toys are just as gendered as they were a decade ago. While some shops have responded to pressure groups by ceasing to have sections marked by gender, there’s been little suggestion that toymakers themselves are changing course in the way they design and market their products. Analysis by the Geena Davis Institute found that, in the US, toys marketed to girls are 18 times more likely to be promoted showing “nurturing or domestic skills” than those aimed at boys.
Toy companies are still making unicorns for girls and dinosaurs for boys, despite the fact that their history shows there’s little that’s inherently gendered about either of them—and that the unicorn alone is an LGBT+ icon.
By limiting which of these creatures boys and girls can play with, are we depriving our kids of an aspect of themselves? Psychologist Tovah Klein, an academic at Barnard College in New York, doesn’t think the gender divide is good for kids’ development. “The thing we do the most is we deny girls the ability to own their aggression,” she explains. “We make them into princesses and fairies and we say don’t be mad, don’t be upset, don’t have strength or any aggression, while boys have many more outlets to be aggressive that are acceptable, like superheroes and dinosaurs.”
Surely the least we can do is let kids choose for themselves, instead of pigeon-holing them so early in life. We can also try to be more pragmatic—by gifting and consuming consciously—while leaving it to children to throw themselves with abandon into their imaginations. Maybe they’ll channel it into making a world that’s less messed-up, but also less rigid, less divided, less dinosaur or unicorn.
