How the UCalgary Dinosaurs evolved

We are all Stags and Fawns.

It doesn’t have the same pep as “We are all Dinos,” but in the early years of the University of Calgary, our identity might have been less Jurassic Park and more Disney. 

Our team name, logo and even mascot have changed a handful of times over the last six decades. To celebrate UCalgary’s 60th anniversary, let’s see how we went from Stags and Fawns to the Dinos and Rex.

Options on the table

Back when UCalgary was still the University of Alberta in Calgary (UAC), organized sports officially started to take shape. Students and supporters believed teams needed an identity, like other post-secondary institutions around North America had. In January 1962, the Students’ Union started a UAC Theme Committee to study suggestions.

Particular emphasis was put on paying tribute to the North West Mounted Police (NWMP), with the final list of names including several variations of The Scarlet Riders, in addition to Badgers, Gophers, Larks and Dinosaurs.

An editorial in The Gauntlet on Feb. 23, 1962, painted a picture of the sentiment going into those deliberations.

“Because a team name is generally caricatured and treated lightly, it might be most advisable to choose one not connected with the NWMP,” read the editorial. “‘The Badgers’ and ‘The Gophers’ are the teams of the Universities of Wisconsin and Minnesota, respectively, which are close enough that we may play in a league with them at some time in the future. Thus neither of the latter names is advisable.”

The author then questioned whether “The Larks” felt like a good enough team name, leaving “The Dinosaurs.”

“No other college, to our knowledge, uses this theme,” wrote the author. “As well, it has long been linked with Southern Alberta and Calgary.”

Not a clear-cut winner

The following week, The Gauntlet was already referring to the UAC teams as the “Dinos,” although the decision wasn’t official.

Only a few weeks later, the March 9, 1962, edition of the student paper featured an article entitled, “Dinosaurs to be Stags.”

“The men will be called the Stags, and the women’s teams will bear the name Fawns,” read the story. It then outlined a short debate about the spelling of fawn and whether the men should be called the Bucks instead. That raised concerns over it potentially rhyming with a curse word.

There was no immediate followup article, but an Oct. 23, 1962, Calgary Herald story finally cleared the air.

“Calgary has taken on a team name which it lacked a year ago,” wrote journalist Grant Kerr. “From now on, the club is to be known as the UAC Dinosaurs.” The men’s teams were known as the Dinosaurs, while the women’s teams were called the Dinnies.

While nearly all teams adopted the new monikers, one team didn’t until much later: the rugby teams. The oldest sports club on campus, the Stags first started playing in 1960 and were a dominant force in local and provincial championships through the 1970s before folding.

Rugby returned to the university in 1999 with a new women’s rugby club, following by a men’s team a year later. Both are known as the Dinos, but to honour team history, when players graduate or leave the team, they become Stags.

Making a mark

Once the name was confirmed, the next logical step was to create the brand, starting with a logo.

It started with a red-and-yellow dinosaur that looked like a cross between a tyrannosaurus rex and a brontosaurus, before a more detailed T-rex standing on top of the word Dinosaurs debuted in the 1970s.

To become a little more lovable and family friendly in the 1980s, the logo was updated. Tied to a new publicity campaign called “Roar for the Dinosaur” in September 1983, Dinosaurs football defensive co-ordinator and director of marketing, Cam Innes, unveiled a new logo. A cartoonish-looking dino waving a red flag while wearing a shirt and scarf debuted in hopes of getting more fans out to games.

“The roaring dinosaur emblem has been replaced on promotional material with an alternate pre-historic that is, well, cuddly,” Innes told The Gauntlet. “We’ve been scaring the heck out of people and they won’t come to games.”

The Dinosaurs also made one of their team nicknames, the Dinnies, extinct in August 1984.

“There has been no backlash. If there was, we’d have to think twice about doing this,” Innes said at a news conference announcing the change. 

“The reaction to using just Dinosaurs is positive and all ladies’ coaches and the athletic director have been involved in the decision from the outset. They are in agreement that we had to do it.”

The school reverted back to a more detailed and fearsome dinosaur logo in 1998, finally landing on its current iteration on April 3, 2013.

“It needed to get cleaned up,” athletic director Ron Wuotila, BPE’91, told the Herald. “It’s the rallying point for this campus community, absolutely.”

Wuotila was hopeful the new logo would strengthen the community bond while being a symbol that athletes would be proud to wear for generations to come.

The Dinos’ biggest cheerleader

The logo wasn’t the only thing to undergo an evolution. The Dinos’ mascot has also seen a few versions over the years.

It started in 1982 when the Student’s Union spent $3,000 on a mascot named Dexter.

However, the wear and tear of supporting the team quickly took a toll on the Dinosaurs’ top cheerleader. This included an ill-fated backflip at a football game in 1985 that caused damage to the mascot’s head and arms.

Tragedy struck when the mascot was “critically injured” in a fall from the roof of the newly renovated MacEwan Hall during a photo shoot in 1987. What followed was something straight out of the old sci-fi TV show, The Six Million Dollar Man.

“Fortunately, a group of bionics students from the bioengineering faculty were on the scene,” read the Gauntlet article on the incident. “A team of specialists was at work building a new Dex; a bigger Dex; a better Dex; a stronger Dex; a Dex with fewer cavities.”

The new and improved Dexter made his debut at a Dinosaurs football game on Sept. 4, 1987.

That version of the prehistoric mascot stayed on campus until 1999 when the present-day Rex O’Saurus (yes, Rex has a surname) made his debut to go along with the UCalgary teams’ new shortened brand name — the Dinos.