Don Featherstone did not invent Phoenicopterus ruber: Nature took care of that eons ago. But what Mr. Featherstone did nearly six decades ago — in the process indelibly altering the landscape of midcentury America — was to cast the creature in plastic and attach slender, rodlike legs for planting it in the ground.

Mr. Featherstone, a sculptor who died on Monday at 79, was the inventor of the pink plastic flamingo, that flagrant totem of suburban satisfaction and, in later years, postmodern irony.

He named it Phoenicopterus ruber plasticus.

Less hideous than a garden gnome, more diplomatic than a lawn jockey, the plastic flamingo has been flaunted in front yards by the millions; feted in films, on television and in song; and held up as an object of impassioned pride and equally impassioned prejudice.

Mr. Featherstone had not contemplated creating an enduring emblem of kitsch in 1957, when his first flamingo sailed off the assembly line, or the next year, when the bird was brought to market. A recent art-school graduate, he was simply heeding career advice that would become a sardonic watchword for young people:

Plastics.

Donald Featherstone was born on Jan. 25, 1936, in Worcester, Mass. He graduated from the school of the Worcester Art Museum in 1957, and that year, to the chagrin of his professors and the gratification of his creditors, he took a job with Union Products, a maker of plastic lawn ornaments in Leominster, Mass.