A mother and daughter from the Isle of Wight are the proud owner of a unique set of stamps after winning a ‘name a dinosaur’ competition run the Dinosaur Isle Museum in Sandown.
Late last year, the Royal Mail commissioned renowned Isle of Wight artist John Sibbick to design a set of 10 dinosaur based stamps. These were then released in October. The stamps included many prehistoric creatures that have been found on the Isle of Wight, such as the Iguanodon and the largest meat eating dinosaur known to have roamed the Island, the Baryonyx.
Dinosaur Isle Museum has been hosting an exhibition of the stamps, including some of the original artwork, and also ran a competition to win a signed set of the stamps from John Sibbick himself.
To enter, visitors to the museum were asked to imagine that they discovered a new species of dinosaur and had to create their own new and original dinosaur name. From the entries, the suggested name from Sue and Rebecca Irons was chosen by staff at the museum. Their suggested name was the imposing-sounding ‘Vectiridiananasaur’.
Mum Sue said:
“We recently saw the animated Walking With Dinosaurs movie and my daughter Rebecca really wanted to return to the museum as she has a great interest in dinosaurs. She wasn’t disappointed, as we had a wonderful day and decided to enter the competition.
“We chose the Vectiridiananasaur name because ‘Vecti’ represents the Isle of Wight and ‘ridian’ represents the south as in ‘Meridian’. Given it was a spontaneous creation, I was delighted it was chosen, but no more so than my nine year old daughter who will treasure the signed book of stamps.
“All we need to do now is discover a new species of dinosaur so we can give it the name, but that’s easier said than done!”
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Sue and Rebecca were also given free entry to the museum and had the honour of receiving the signed set of stamps from John Sibbick himself.
