Masiakasaurus (Jurassic World Dino Escape Fierce Force by Mattel)

My heart jumped in excitement when Mattel announced in 2021 that they were going to make one of my favorite dinosaurs, Masiakasaurus knopfleri! I finally get to talk about it which is an added bonus. This particular reconstruction is based on the 20 or so years old depiction that has dominated all sorts of media this animal was featured in. We now know it was even more unique than we thought, sharing both advanced and primitive abelisaur traits, and who can forget its funny looking jaws with the procumbent dentaries top and bottom? I suppose I should stick to the time tested Emperor Dinobot review formula of first talking about the figure, and then talking about the animal. Maybe we’ll even have some fun seeing double!

I have a bit of a past with Masiakasaurus. My Senior Project was about doing a full body reconstruction of the Argentine Noasaurus leali. This was when we knew very little about its appearance, as it us known by a vertebrate, a metatarsal, an ungual with a claw, a quadrate and a curved maxilla. Masiakasaurus would provide most of the comparable material as it was the most complete noasaurid at the time. Needless to say, Noasaurus came out rather well, all done by hand since I was not and still am not a digital artist, so the silhouette is white, reminiscent of a Tracy Ford reconstruction. It was the first full body Noasaurus reconstruction at the time, but other better ones followed very soon after, especially after more remains from the Maeverano Formation were described 4 years later in 2011, so I could not get any more bones to look at. In the end, they were small bodied, long necked animals with relatively small skulls, short but heavily clawed hands, long legs for running, and funny, untraditional jaws, especially on Masiakasaurus, whose dentaries on the lower end of the jaw faced outwards. The diversity of this family is astounding.

The interesting thing about this figure is that it got a repaint, which was released at the same exact time, at the tail-end of the Dino-Escape line. The second version was a bit less easy to track down, but these two figures were so incredibly common that they were on clearance for the absolute longest time, and they STILL did not move. I made the mistake of acquiring 2-3 cases of the green figure, and I sold them at a loss for $4.50 each, shipping being only a dime less.

As I explained beforehand, this figure is based on the popular depiction of Masiakasaurus that has haunted us since 2000. The figure’s business end has those funny procumbent jaws that make this animal so bizarrely famous! Each figure measures 6 inches long, 3 inches tall, and have the standard 5-8 points of articulation: the awkward hips, ball jointed elbows, rotating tail, neck, and jaws. The neck itself has two points of articulation relating to its action function. The details are very nicely done, with pebbly skin, and three rows of osteoderms running on its back all the way to the tail. The green one is cast in olive green, and has grass green stripes running along the sides of the neck, torso, and tail, which is not very common, as Mattel famously skimps out on coloring the tail. The claws are unpainted on both, though. The green one’s lower jaw is apple green, and the inside of the mouth is all pink, which is also true for the burgundy colored one. The teeth are white on both. The maroon-burgundy colored one has a canary yellow spray painted tummy which looks as if it had been lying on top of a ton of pollen, light yellow-cream spots all over the body, and the lower jaw is eggshell-cream colored. I love both color schemes, which makes them stand out among the other basic sized dinosaurs in my JW collection.

The action feature here works by simply pushing the neck down, causing the head to move up, like the original Velociraptor from Kenner, except that the jaw does not open. The jaw opens manually, which is a bit baffling, and not as interesting as having it open the mouth as well. This, of all dinosaurs, is most deserving of having such an action figure. I suppose being able to open the lower jaw to the angle one prefers is better in the long run.

Masiakasaurus is known in popular media as the dinosaur with the outwards facing teeth, perfect for fishing, but the reality is that the top jaw, while presenting some gnarly teeth, were more typical, leaving the lower jaw as the funny looking one with the stronger procumbent dentaries. As such, this reconstruction is obsolete, not just for the animal’s cranial anatomy, but for the body as well. Strangely enough, we cannot seem to get Masiakasaurus right despite the amount of remains associated with it, and despite the increasing number of noasaurids being described in recent years. This may be because the species is not only funny looking (a rule of thumb concerning noasaurids is that they are all very unique, departing from our usual ideas about what theropods ought to look like), but because the remains found are from differently aged individuals. That is why we get models such as Safari Ltd.’s Masiakasaurus, which is also outdated due to the outdated jaws, and the long, tubby body, referring to a more recent and already obsolete reconstruction. We do have 65% of the skeleton, though. The cranial remains show that the upper premaxilla was curved towards the neck, flexing slightly backwards, and it is possible that Noasaurus leali’s missing premax had an even more pronounced curvature, as evidenced by the curved maxilla. Masiakasaurus’ was straighter. The researchers were right about these animals loving fish though, as their jaws and claws were perfect for that function. What Mattel did get right was the s-shaped neck, but it should be longer, and the body less large. One weird feature about Masiakasaurus is that it had 4 digits on every hand, a feature shared with abelisaurs and with its ancestors within ceratosauria. Lips also covered the teeth, giving it a less monstruous appearance. To the untrained eye, it probably looked like another run of the mill coelurosaur. The figure also has spiky scutes, which I mentioned above, running across the back. This feature also appears on popular media, as noasaurids are small abelisaurs, but as of this writing, these scutes remain somewhat speculative, though it makes the creature look fiercer. It is unknown if noasaurs had protofeathers. We have Carnotaurus‘ mummified skin as evidence to make the case for featherless noasaurs for the time being.

I would love it if Mattel took another stab at Masiakasaurus, and did other noasaurs, such as Noasaurus itself, or the recently described Vespersaurus. which might as well be a stand-in for the upcoming Fawlowichnus figure, which is based an ichnogenus (an organism known by traces other than skeletal material, such as footprints, bits of feathers, etc.) described as a “small cursorial theropod”. It has been speculated that those footprints were made by a noasaurid, and it is said that Vespersaurus may fit the bill due to the similar age, and because the tracks were made by a monodactylus animal (3 digits are present in the Farlowichnus‘ footprint), which was Vespersaurus‘ claim to fame. They all need to be smaller than 6 inches long, though, closer in size to the Guanlong and Eoraptor figures from the 2-packs, as these supposedly 1/18 scale animals measure around 3-4 meters in length when compared to a 3.75-4in. human figure. They were way smaller than that, and the size class for the two-packs offer the possibility of including a large range of animals that are 1.5-2.5 meters long.

Don’t forget to scan them for your app! It will go into a sort of “past collections” area, Also, I wanted to warn you all that whenever the app does an update, past collections get wiped out, causing the collector to re-scan every animal. It is so tedious, which is why I stopped doing it. Oh well!

I have not checked the availability for these figures, but I am sure they won’t cost an arm and a leg to acquire. Happy New Year! May this year bring us lots of unique and interesting dinosaur toys!