The Dinosaur Toy Blog

Carnegie has to keep up with the dinosaur market, which was gotten really competitive lately, with near-perfect accurate sculpts, and amazing paintjobs, from lines like Kaiyodo, Kinto, and so on. For the last 4 years, Carnegie has been making some nice new molds. In 2006, they released a new Amargasaurus sculpt, along with an updated feathered Oviraptor.

The Amargasaurus itself is simply one of the best Amargasaurus sculpts since Battat’s Amargasaurus. It’s done in the Carnegie style, of course, with the wrinkly skin. He’s colored in an apple green, with the sail being yellow and red. This Amargasaurus, unlike the Battat version, follows a more modern reconstruction, with the spines not supporting a full sail, having the naked spines near the top.

At about 22 cm long, this is one of the best sauropods you can buy, but it’s a rather small one, since he is in scale with the others. Amargasaurus was a 9 meter long sauropod, which is considerably smaller than other sauropods.

One drawback to this particular dinosaur figure is that he is rare. I don’t know whether this is just my case, but I had to buy mine online, after hunting for it for almost two years in stores. Another problem with it is that the spines may be bent in some specimens.

 Available here

The distinctive sail-back ‘mammal-like reptile’ or basal synapsid, has always been a favorite for dinosaur toy companies, even though its certainly no dino. I wrote a very brief blog on this figure back in July 2007 but I have since managed to acquire a figure for myself and can thus indulge you in some of the details.

This 18cm long model is one of the best Dimetrodon figures.  Like most of the Carnegie collection figures, the head suffers from a little deformation and a scruffy paint job, but the. overall shape is good: the deep short skull, highly situated eyes, and premaxilla notch, all contribute to the accuracy of this figure. The mouth is open and there has been some attempt to sculpt some of the larger teeth separately. The lips on the left hand side or contracted into a sort of grimace, but whether this is intentional or accidental is not clear.

There is a dangly pouch, or perhaps it should be called a wattle or a dewlap on the neck, which I think is a nice touch; too often sculptors stretch the skin around the skeleton with little though or the flippy-flappy soft anatomy typically present in living organisms. The tail is held off of the ground, I’m not sure how accurate this is – I would have thought that the tail dragged in this species, and the creature is striding forwards with purpose.

The overall colour scheme is pleasing, being made up of natural shades of tan and yellow but the painters have done a messy job with some of the highlight, which are quite obviously crude brush strokes. Maybe my figure was produced at the end of a long working day ? The eyes on the other hand are a work of art – extremely precise. The claws are not painted separately.

This toy review was sponsored by Dinosaurs at Atomic Elephant

It is available here

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The Great Dinosaurs collection is a series of large hollow figures produced by Safari Ltd. They are cheap for their size and overall the sculpting is of a high standard, in fact, most of the figures are superior in terms of posture to their more expensive Carnegie Collection museum range counterparts (also by Safari Ltd), at least the older Carnigie moulds anyway.

The 29cm long Stegosaurus presents many nice features. The mouth is wide open, as if the animal is roaring, and a tongue can be seen prodruding from deep inside the gullet. Stegosaur heads ae very small, which is perhaps the reason why most Stegosaurus figures have a simple sculpt with the mouth closed. The surface detail is nice: there is a row of bumps on each side of the back running from head to tail. The skin is generally very wrinkled, and there is no indication of scales as there should be. The lower surface of the neck is covered by a packed array of ossicles, a detail frequently overlooked in other Stegosaurus toys.

The colour scheme is vivid, mostly yellow with a deep red back and plates with more yellow decoration. The toe claws are highlighted in grey, the eyes in black. There are only 13 plates (Stegosaurus actually has 17), but their shape is accurate – all of the plates are completely vertical so they do not form a ‘V’ shape when seen from the front.

The posture is dynamic, the animal is facing to the right and the tail is swinging to the left – the forelegs are striding but the hind legs are not so the creature looks a bit uncomfortable, like it is defending itself rather than taking a stroll.

All of the figures in the Great Dinosaurs Collection have an unsightly join where the two hollow segments have been joined together. Despite the very wrinkled surface, this is still visible in the Stegosaurus. These figures are light and cheap, making them perfect for kids play, but they also present enough detail and accuracy to warrant shelf-space in any serious collection too.

This toy review was sponsored by, and is available from Atomic Elephant

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