Fossils from the polar regions are a rarity, and it often boggles the mind to think of dinosaurs in the ice and snow of places like Antarctica. During the Late Jurassic, Antarctica was part of Gondwanaland, so was warmer and host to a large number of dinosaurs, such as the theropod Cryolophosaurus, nicknamed “Elvisaurus” for its phenomenal crest. Several toy companies have recreated this dinosaur, including Geoworld in their first expedition, the subject of this review.
As with all my reviews of Geoworld, I will start with the fact card, as this often sees the worst of Geoworld’s largest problem: plagiarism. While I can’t find any art that precisely matches, the older style to the piece does make me suspicious.
Onto the figure itself! This figure boasts a 1:30 scale, resulting in a length of 7.2” and a height of 4.5” (5” with the rock). The paint is patchy purple on a greyish-green body, which isn’t as terrible as the colour scheme of other Geoworld figures, but the application is awful. They put eye spots on the crest as a display feature, like a peacock. This would be great, but they took no care in placing them, as one is lower down the crest than the other. The pose is dynamic, roaring into the sky. This would be great… if it wasn’t a pose Geoworld uses a lot for its theropods.
Now for accuracy. While the proportions of the limbs, tail and body are pretty good, there are a lot of faults. The skull is completely wrong, the lower jaw to slim and the upper too rounded, leading to an oversized crest, exaggerating this feature too far. The figure also features an annoying half pronation of the wrists, with one correct, the other wrong. I don’t know if that makes it half right or just doubly annoying. I also feel the neck is too short on this figure.
This figure shows a lot of classic flaws from the early sets of Geoworld, from inaccuracies to a general cheap feel of its plastic. While Cryolophosaurus doesn’t have a huge number of releases, you can find much better ones than this.
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Funnily enough 2 Cryolophosaurus figures will be released in 2020; Mattel’s Cryolophosaurus figure and Schleich’s. But the pre-release image for Schleich’s Cryolophosaurus is quite disappointing.
Therefore Cryolophosaurus is no longer that obscure! I hope CollectA and Safari Ltd will release a new and revised version in the future.
Muy mucho barfo.