Allosaurus (Carnegie Collection by Safari ltd.)

Buy on

Buy on

Allosaurus is one of the most well known meat-eating dinosaurs.  Its fossils date back to the late Jurassic and have been found in both Portugal and the United States.  It is characterized by wicked three-clawed hands and a skull that could have been utilized like a hatchet to slice off chunks of meat from carcasses.  When it was alive it would have co-existed with and most likely hunted other dinosaurs such as Stegosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Apatosaurus, Camarasaurus and Diplodocus.

This model is Carnegie’s second attempt at Allosaurus.  The first looked basically like a shrunken, three-fingered version of their other outdated Tyrannosaurus model.  This figure is no doubt much better but still not perfect.  Its head doesn’t seem capture the look of the real animal’s skull.  To me, the model’s snout appears to be a little too narrow and skinny.  Other than that Carnegie pretty much covered all the bases.  It does has the little eye crests and the three-fingered hands.  Another fault, however, is the fact that it’s in that annoying tripod pose with its tail, which in reality would have been held up in the air, being used as a third leg to allow the figure to stand on its own.  Most of the Carnegie biped models fall victim to this.

The pose is really dynamic.  Its standing with its legs wide apart and its arms spread and claws drawn ready to go.  Its head is aggressively turned to the side and its mouth is wide open with the tongue curling out ever so slightly.  I feel I should point out that at least to me, this guy is exceptionally expressive.  The wide eyes and that almost smiling jaw combined with the rest of the pose bring across the impression of a total psyco killer.  It’s really quite threatening looking.  Many of Carnegie’s other therapod models that would be released years later like the Giganotosaurus and Cryolophosaurus adopted this same pose pretty much but none have as much of the crazy eyes as Big Al.

The sculpt is decent.  It has plenty of little wrinkles all over but the teeth could probably afford to have a little more definition.  My least favorite thing about this model, however, is by far the paint application.  I see this in a lot of older Carnegie models, unfortunately.  The claws are painted gray with dark gray tips but the coloration fails to actually cover the whole claw (at least this is the case with my individual model).  Then there is the head.  The eyes are sloppily painted orange with a big dollop that also encompasses the surrounding area of the eye as well.  The teeth are painted with one slab of off-white instead of being individually painted.  I think that if more detailed painting was performed on this model’s head, it would be leagues better in my eyes.

The actual color scheme of the model is light green with slightly brighter green in other places and finally a dark green on the back.  This alone is fine but I am not a fan of the random perfectly round polka dots that were placed on the figure’s back.  The inside of the mouth and nostrils are painted dull pink and the tongue is painted a slightly different orange-pink color.

This is not really the best Allosaurus figure out there but it is in 1:40 scale so that’s a plus for me.  It’s also relatively inexpensive and can be found at most any toy store or gift shop that sells Carnegie models.  Note that the newest version of this model has since received a new paintjob of gray instead of this one’s green.

Gray version available from Safari.com (here) and Amazon.com (here)