Stegosaurus (2019)(Wild Safari by Safari Ltd)

Review and images by Patrx, edited by Gwangi

Stegosaurus is one of those prehistoric creatures that just seems to have always been there, in the public consciousness. However, like most other dinosaurs, its known remains are never complete enough to assemble a reconstruction without combining several skeletons and trying to adjust them to suit one another. Or rather, almost never. “Sophie”, a subadult Stegosaurus stenops uncovered in 2003 and described in 2015, is relatively complete, allowing us to better understand how the genus really looked. This new figure from Safari, sculpted by Doug Watson, very clearly incorporates what we’ve been able to learn from Sophie, extrapolating its proportions and details into a hypothetical adult Stegosaurus stenops at 1/35 scale.

So, what makes this Stegosaurus so different from what we’ve seen before? It’s certainly recognizable as Stegosaurus, with its massive plates and distinctive thagomizer (tail-spikes), but its back isn’t as sharply arched as you may be used to. The back legs are closer in length to the front legs, and while the torso itself is a little shorter, the neck and  tail are slightly longer, with the dorsal plates less crowded together overall. The result is a Stegosaurus that looks less like a bizarre outlier next to other stegosaurids like Kentrosaurus or Miragaia. A little more ordinary, a little more streamlined, but no less iconic than it has ever been.

In addition to Sophie-specific updates, this figure has a few more advantages over the previous Safari Stegosaurus. The structure and appearance of the hands has been corrected, the musculature at the base of the tail has been bulked up, the tail spikes are pointed more outward than upward, the skull is the right size, and an array of tiny subdermal ossicles adorns the throat, down to the base of the neck.

The animal’s tail and head are both posed in an arc to its left, with the right hand lifted slightly. The end of the tail is pointed somewhat downward, another detail inferred from Sophie, and one that implies that those tail spikes were not mere decorations. This pose can be interpreted a number of ways; the animal could be defending itself or its kin, or it could simply be turning around, maybe just looking for predators or uneaten foliage. Personally, I am pleased to see that the mouth is closed as well.

Of course, even if we’d had a complete Stegosaurus skeleton to work with from the beginning, any reconstruction of a fossil animal will require speculation when it comes to some things, usually including soft-tissue anatomy and colouration. The keratin coverings on this Stegosaurus‘ plates and spikes are fairly conservative, and certainly reasonable. The spikes are a bit rounded for the sake of safety, unsurprisingly—this is a toy, after all. The incorporation of other soft tissues is nicely generous, avoiding shrink-wrapping problems entirely. The jaws feature fleshy, superficially “mammalian” cheek-like structures behind the beak, a detail which is the subject of ongoing debate and conversation. Presumably something covered the teeth and kept food inside the mouth, but just what that something looked like or how it was constructed is quite uncertain at this time, making this element of the reconstruction plausible by my estimation.

The figure’s colours are simple, a fairly smooth gradient from a dark, mossy brown dorsally to a pale yellow ventrally, with some shades of beige in-between. The dark brown extends to the ends of the limbs and the tip of the tail, even to the spikes. It might have been neat to have had them delineated somehow from the tail itself; maybe painted black, like the nails. Thankfully, the plates are lovely–vibrant orange with dark triangular markings. On the edges, the dark brown reappears in a nice gradient, so that the plates blend elegantly into the main body without any paint splatter. Unlike its thagomizer, Stegosaurus‘ array of plates most likely did serve a primarily ornamental function, so the bright colours are appreciated here.

Usually, when I say I recommend a figure, I feel obligated to include some kind of qualifier—”pick this one up if you’re especially fond of x clade,” or similar. But on this occasion, it occurs to me that no dinosaur toy collection is complete without a Stegosaurus. And this, folks, really is the toy Stegosaurus for the time! Elegant, up-to-date, and readily-available. I bought mine from Dan’s Dinosaurs.