You’ve been waiting all week, and so have I! With no further ado, here are the contents of the dinosaur stamp envelope:
The bag was supposed to contain fifty but had Eighty-two unique stamps (and one double)! In total 13 countries are represented (the number of stamps are listed after): Bulgaria (1), USSR (4), Republic of Congo (5), Hungary (5), Laos (4), Mali (7), Azerbaijan (6), Guyana (9), Romania (6), Tanzania (12), São Tomé (6), Western Sahara (11), Madagascar (6).
The above nine are very large and were issued by the South American country of Guyana in the early 1990s. Apparently they show ‘prehistoric creatures’ that once lived in the country… but isn’t that a koala?!?
Here’s some (presumably?) extinct birds on a series from Laos from 1994. The art on these is very pretty.
And here are seven dinosaur stamps from Mali, from 1984. Curiously most of the art is reused on different-denomination stamps.
One thing every one of these stamps has in common is that they are unused. And yet you’ll notice almost all of them are canceled with postmarks. This is because these are all CTO (cancel-to-order) stamps, which are topical stamps printed for the collectors market. The stamps are canceled (by machine) at the printers and then sold in bulk to resellers as a way to raise revenue for the countries that print them. CTOs like these are apparently much more common in countries without robust postal services, and still exist today.
Researching these I learned that dinosaurs are a very popular theme within stamp collecting with almost 4000 stamps issued across the years by almost every country. The first stamp showing an actual dinosaur was released by China in 1958, and they continue to be popular today with an example being the recent lenticular T-Rex set issued in the USA. I even already had a few myself, that I blogged about a few years ago.
All these stamps – and all the other loose ones that were in the bag or that I already owned – are now in a fancy new binder I bought myself since last weekend. It’s a good way to store them, and there’s loads of empty space left if I ever happen to get my hands on more stamps in the future…
To end this two-part series, I have to say that this bag of stamps that I thought was a risky buy even at $8 ended up being a lot of fun to sort through and research! I hope you enjoyed looking through them with me 🙂