About This Stamp
Tyrannosaurus rex dominated the tail end of the dinosaur age. A recent surge in discoveries has revolutionized our understanding of the fierce carnivore. With this pane of 16 stamps in four designs, the U.S. Postal Service® brings the latest findings to light.
Some 66 million years after its demise, two of the stamp designs vividly portray “the Nation’s T. rex.” One illustrates a face-to-face encounter with the fierce carnivore as it approaches through a forest clearing; another shows the same young adult in its fossil form, posed with the skeleton of a juvenile Triceratops. The other two stamps depict a newly hatched T. rex covered with downy feathers and a bare-skinned juvenile chasing a primitive mammal.
At the bottom-left or -right of each stamp, the term “T. rex” is printed in bold white italics. Reading vertically upwards, “Forever USA” appears at top-left or -right, in smaller capitalized type, also in white.
Due to its ferocity and immensity, T. rex lives on in the imagination like no other dinosaur. With powerful jaws packed in its four-foot-long skull and banana-sized teeth serrated like steak knives, T. rex could bite easily through the flesh and hefty bones of even large dinosaur prey. Its full-grown weight was six to ten tons. Its maximum length was about 40 feet.
The fossil of the young adult portrayed on two of the stamps — in skeletal and fleshed-out renderings — was discovered on federal land in Montana. It has become one of the most studied and important tyrannosaur specimens ever found. The awe-inspiring remains are on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, for the wonderment of millions of visitors each year.
Art director Greg Breeding designed the pane with original artwork by scientist and paleoartist Julius T. Csotonyi.
Tyrannosaurus Rex stamps were issued as Forever® stamps. These Forever stamps are always equal in value to the current First-Class Mail® one-ounce price.
Stamp Art Director, Designer, and Typographer
Greg Breeding
Greg Breeding is a graphic designer and principal of Journey Group, a design company he co-founded in 1992, located in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was creative director until 2013, at which time he began serving as president and continued in that role through 2023.
Breeding’s fascination with modernism began while studying design at Virginia Commonwealth University. His affinity with the movement continues and motivates his ongoing advanced studies at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland most every summer.
As an art director for postage stamp design since 2012, Breeding has designed more than 100 stamps covering a diverse array of subjects, from Star Wars droids and Batman to Harlem Renaissance writers and the transcontinental railroad.
His work has been recognized in annual design competitions held by Graphis, AIGA, PRINT magazine, and Communication Arts.
Breeding lives in North Garden, Virginia, with his wife and enjoys nothing so much as frolicking on the floor with his grandchildren.
Stamp Artist
Julius Csotonyi
Julius Csotonyi was born in Hungary and immigrated to Canada as a young boy. His childhood art revealed budding interests; his mother saved his first drawing, which he says was of a dinosaur. A chicken, he specifies — so technically a theropod dinosaur.
A paleoartist and scientist, Csotonyi combines his scientific discipline with lifelong interests in art and prehistoric life. His depictions are both scientifically meticulous and vividly photorealistic, bringing life to dinosaurs and their environs. His works also portray extant animal life such as sharks, and realms of science fiction and fantasy.
For his dinosaur renderings, Csotonyi relies on his academic background — degrees in ecology and environmental biology and a doctorate in microbiology — basing depictions on the latest scientific findings. His approach involves diverse media, depending on the project at hand. He works in pencil and ink line drawing, watercolor, acrylic, and pastel. He also paints digitally to produce two-dimensional images and three-dimensional models, and his works sometimes include photo-compositing.
His dinosaur depictions have ranged from colossal life-size murals at prominent U.S. and Canadian museums, to the significantly smaller scale of coins issued by the Royal Canadian Mint. National Geographic and many other publishers seek his work, which has been compiled in a 2014 volume, The Paleoart of Julius Csotonyi, edited by Steve White and published by Titan Books. Csotonyi is a three-time winner of the Lanzendorf PaleoArt Prize.
His first U.S. Postal Service® project was the 2019 issuance, Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Csotonyi lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, with his wife, also an accomplished scientific artist and scientist.