Gertie The Dinosaur at The Dinosaur Interplanetary Gazette

Gertie the Dinosaur was the world's first and most important animated dinosaur. Read her story at the Dinosaur Interplanetary Gazette.

The DINSAUR Interplanetary Gazette

www.dinosaur.org - The Ultimate Online Dinosaur Magazine

Celluloid Dinosaurs
History of Dinosaur Movies

Gertie The Dinosaur
1914
Winsor McCay
Does Art imitate Science, or does Science imitate Art?

Winsor McCay, famed cartoonist and inventor of modern animation.

by Edward Summer

Newspaper Cartoonist George McManus, or so the story goes, bet Winsor McCay, another newspaper cartoonist, that McCay could not bring a dinosaur to life. McCay took the bet, and Gertie -- the world's first animated dinosaur -- found her way from McCay's pen to the motion picture screen, and from there into history.

It all started in New York City around 1913.


This scene from a 1914 film shows a group of cartoonists including McManus who was famous for Bringing Up Father, and McCay, who was even more famous for Little Nemo in Slumberland, arriving at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). This entrance is on 77th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue.	The entrance is still there today, although a few trees have grown since 1914. A driveway once ran along the building, but it is no longer there. Third floor windows have also been bricked up. .

Inside the museum, the cartoonists examined what was then called the "brontosaurus," dinosaurus, or simply "the dinosaur." The result of years of painstaking scientific work, it was first put on display in 1903.

The actual brontosaurus at the AMNH in 1913.

That is when McCay and McManus made "the bet."

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