Sinclair Oil

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Sinclair Oil Corporation <tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align:center; padding:16px 0 16px 0;"> Image:Sinclairlogo.jpg </td></tr>
Type	Public until 1969 </br > Private since 1976
Founded	1916
Headquarters	Salt Lake City, Utah, USA <tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Key people</th><td>Earl Holding </br> Stephen Holding </br> Peter M. Johnson, President</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Industry</th><td>Oil and Gasoline</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Website</th><td>www.sinclairoil.com</td></tr>

Sinclair Oil is an American petroleum corporation, founded by Harry F. Sinclair on May 1, 1916 by combining the assets of eleven small petroleum companies. Originally a New York corporation, Sinclair Oil was reincorporated in Utah in 1976. The corporation's logo features the silhouette of a large green dinosaur.

Sinclair Oil has a long history of being a fixture on American roads (and briefly in other countries) with its dinosaur logo and mascot, an apatosaurus (brontosaurus). At the Chicago World's Fair of 1933-34, Sinclair sponsored a dinosaur exhibit meant to point out the correlation between the formation of petroleum deposits and the Age of Dinosaurs, and included a two-ton animated model of a brontosaur. The exhibit proved so popular it inspired a promotional line of rubber brontosaurs at Sinclair stations, complete with wiggling heads and tails, and the eventual inclusion of the brontosaur logo. Later, inflatable dinosaurs were given as promotional items and an anthropomorphic version appeared as a station attendant in advertisements.

In 1969, Sinclair Oil was acquired by the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO). Federal anti-trust provisions required the new entity to divest itself of certain of the Sinclair assets, and as a result, the East Coast operations of Sinclair were sold to BP. (Ironically, BP has since purchased ARCO.) After the acquisition by ARCO, the dinosaur was phased out, but at least one service station, in Winona, Minnesota, retained the original look through the 1980s. Many stations along Interstate 80 still have the dinosaur logo.

In 1976, ARCO spun-off Sinclair by selling certain assets to Earl Holding. Assets divested in the spin-off included ARCO's retail operations from the region between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, and the rights to the Sinclair brand and logo.

Sinclair has been owned by the Holdings since 1976. Earl Holding also owns Sun Valley Resort in Idaho, Snowbasin Resort in Utah, the Little America hotels, The Westgate Hotel in San Diego, California, and the Grand America Hotel, a five-diamond hotel and member of the Leading Hotels of the World, in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Today, Sinclair's corporate offices are in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. There are 2,607 Sinclair gas stations in 20 states in the western U.S. and the Midwest. The corporation operates three refineries: one in Casper, Wyoming, one in Sinclair, Wyoming (near Rawlins), and another in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Other operations include 1,000 miles of pipeline.

Sinclair continues to use the green dinosaur, affectionately called "Dino", and markets all its products under the logo. Sinclair patented the gasoline additive SG-2000. The high-octane fuel blend is called "Dino Supreme".

The animatronic family of the TV series Dinosaurs was given the surname "Sinclair" after the oil company. A number of other characters on the show also had names that were petroleum-related references.

[edit] References to Sinclair in popular culture

In the TV series Dinosaurs, the last name of Earl and his family is "Sinclair".

In the 2006 movie Cars, Sinclair and Sunoco were parodied: the main sponsorship for the winning car was from a company called "Dinoco", using a similar logo to Sinclair's brontosaurus and name to that of Sunoco. Dinoco was earlier the name of the gas station in Toy Story, another Pixar production.

In the computer game Interstate '76, one of the fictitious gas station chain was named "Sincere" and feature a armadillo on his logo instead of the dinosaur.