John Lanzendorf, a hairdresser from Chicago, was six or seven years old when he saw a box of cereal with a little green toy dinosaur inside. “I hated cereal but I saw a dinosaur and badgered my mother to buy the box. I would then force myself to eat four or five bowls a day so she would keep buying all the boxes so that I could collect all twelve of (the dinosaurs).”

Over many years, Lanzendorf’s love of dinosaurs resulted in a collection of 262 pieces of dinosaur art recognized as the finest collection of dinosaur art in the nation.

“When you love something, you become knowledgeable…’

As a child, John read everything he could find about dinosaurs. “As a kid I read everything. I still have tyrannosaurus comic books. Anything with dinosaurs!” stated John. “I must have had two or three hundred books.”

Not only did John do a significant amount of reading, he also attended dinosaur lectures. “I would sit eight hours a day at lectures” said John. “At one time I could name over seven hundred dinosaurs. A lot of …kids (today) at five years old can name them all.”

A magazine ignited John’s interest in collecting. “…I saw this one magazine – you know how on the back they have these little tiny ads…? There was a bronze sculpture of a T-Rex so I called them, and I got excited. They sent me a picture and I bought that” explained Lanzendorf. “Next thing you know I bought another one, and then I bought a painting. Then all of a sudden I started calling up artists at galleries, and then within a year I knew everybody in paleontology. I volunteered every Monday for six years at the University of Chicago and then I became a volunteer at the Field Museum. The next thing you know, I tried to collect every major artist.”

As John got older, he became a more knowledgeable and skillful collector. He began to notice that not all of the pieces in his collection were as scientifically accurate as others. “After a while you just look at it and can tell if the arm is too long or whatever. You get an eye, I can’t explain it. You can tell by looking at it. When you love something you become knowledgeable because it’s not work and if you don’t like something it is work to learn it.” John continues, “I just became a fanatic about dinosaurs. I got to a point to where when people would draw, even if it was beautiful, if it wasn’t right I wouldn’t put it in the house.”

John Lanzendorf’s collection has been acquired by the museum. Artwork from the collection is displayed on a rotating basis in the Gallery of Dinosaur Imagery featuring the John Lanzendorf Collection in Dinosphere.