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It was a DINO-mite idea that captured the attention of people around the world.

When descended on the Ģ����Ƶ campus for Community Day to celebrate the school’s 60th anniversary earlier this spring, it shattered a Guinness World Record.

It also continued a tradition of UCalgary students, faculty, staff and alumni trying (and sometimes failing) to do some out-of-the-ordinary things.

From fundraisers and advocacy work to following fads and setting records, here’s a look back at six other quirky things that we have seen on campus over the last 60 years, showing how UCalgary has always taken the motif quite literally.

1. Filling up a phone booth

Every generation has had its fad and students at what was then the University of Alberta in Calgary (UAC) answered the call in 1959.

In honour of togetherness, a craze was started in England around filling up telephone booths with as many people as possible.

The challenge was determining how a Guinness World Record would be set because of the different sizes of telephone booths.

That March, a group of UAC students thought it would be fun to find out.

According to a Calgary Herald article, 35 managed to cram themselves into a booth that measured four feet square by 10 feet tall, or the equivalent of one person per 5.44 cubic feet.

They believed they had set the international record claimed by University of British Columbia students, who packed 26 students into a 4.5 feet square by seven feet tall booth, or one student per 4.44 cubic feet.

The world record for phone-booth stuffing belongs to a group in South Africa, who put 25 people into a standard box (smaller than the one used by the UAC team). The story is famous as the phone rang but no one could answer it.

2. Bed pushers

Bed pushing was a massive fad at early 1960s post-secondaries, with several world-record attempts in 1961 while raising money for charity. 

They even had rules, including that it must be equipped with wheels, be pushed by people and nothing else, and the bed must carry a passenger.

On Feb. 24, 1961, the group of University of Alberta in Edmonton-based students departed Calgary on their own and spent 20 hours on the road.

Unfortunately, the wheels gave out just a few kilometres from their home campus, so they had to carry the bed the rest of the way.

A week later, it became a competition between the University of Alberta’s Calgary and Edmonton campuses as they looked to push their beds to each other’s cities (a distance of about 300 km from downtown to downtown).

They were joined by a team from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in setting out on their respective journeys.

The UAC team’s bed broke down just 44 miles into the race with one of the organizers, Morris Bleviss, telling the Herald that “it became difficult to steer the wheel-mounted bed.”

The Edmonton team made it all the way down to Lacombe before having to call it a day, while the SAIT squad was the only one to be successful, making it to Edmonton 22 hours.

Bed racing became a fixture with the university over the years with several held through the 1980s.

3. A wacky scavenger hunt

It’s amazing to think what students would have done for $200 in 1985.

The Ģ����Ƶ Students’ Union Scavenger Hunt helped wind down classes that year. Competitors were given a list of 100 to track down, with some items worth more than others. An important rule: nothing could be stolen.

“The actual items submitted are not as important as the amount of imagination put into the various items,” said the advertisement in The Gauntlet.

The items ranged from common items like a frisbee or sticker from campus radio station CJSW, to specific things like a ticket stub from the 1983 David Bowie concert in Edmonton.

Some challenges were downright strange, such as bringing in one pound of belly button lint and a curly chest hair signed by then-SU VP Finance-elect Don Letterio.

While it wasn’t the first and far from last time a scavenger hunt was held on the campus, this particular list showcases just how imaginative organizers can get.

4. Not all things were innocent

Not all fads and stunts were as innocent as they were meant to be, nor ended as they were expected.

A group of engineering students decided it would be fun to “block the Rock” by encasing it in concrete in September 1985.

During the late-night stunt, they used plywood forms to surround the Quad’s iconic Rock, and then a cement mixer was rolled in to pour the concrete.

Campus security officials told The Gauntlet their officers used discretion and didn’t make any arrests but gathered information on the culprits.

Buildings and Grounds Manager Gord Morrison said UCalgary would be sending the clean-up bill to the trucking company that brought in the mix, and that it would be up to them to track down the pranksters.

Some stunts were dangerous. Two students were injured during the end-of-semester celebrations in 1987 in two unrelated incidents involving giant slingshots made of surgical tubing.

One was hurt when the slingshot he was preparing snapped and hit him in the eye, while the other victim was hit in the eye by a water balloon while he was walking through a crowd of students.

The university suspended one student, and the use of water balloons was banned on campus.

5. Playing cards

When Karina Hussein, Alykhan Kassam, Rizwan Shajani and Irfanali Moledina first sat down to play cards in Mac Hall on Jan. 2, 2006, they were determined to do more than just break a world record.

Armed with plenty of coffee and music, the quartet wanted to play for 100 straight hours to break the existing record of 72 hours and nine minutes.

However, they started scaling back their goals by hour 55 as fatigue started to set in.

The idea started off as a joke that became more serious as time went on and became more of a reality when they worked in a fundraising effort with Focus Humanitarian Assistance to help people recover from the devastation caused by natural disasters.

The four played hokm — a trick-taking game from Iran — for a total of 75 hours and two minutes to set the record, while Kassam and Moledina came away with the most points.

6. Red Light, Green Light

Creating a “culture of consent” was the name of the game in setting a record in the McMahon Stadium parking lot in September 2016.

As part of Ģ����Ƶ Orientation Week and Kickoff celebrations, the Women’s Resource Centre (WRC) rolled out its “Ask First: Creating a Culture of Consent” campaign with a massive game of “Red Light, Green Light.”

The goal was to set a Guinness World Record while spreading a serious message by using a traffic light as a metaphor for sexual consent.

“Not all students are willing or interested in attending a session around consent or a film screening around sexual assault,” WRC coordinator Nanako Furuyama told . “We’ve been wondering what would be the best way to reach out to the wider campus community.”

The final count saw 1,365 people taking part, beating the old record by more than 150.