Apatosaurus (1992 large)(UKRD)

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Other reviewers seem to have stopped covering UKRD figures years ago, but there are still a lot of them left to go, so I guess that’s my lot in life. While they may seem like mass-produced dreck to most people, I find them interesting and charming because they often reflect outdated or downright bizarre ideas and vintage palaoart, usually (with some notable exceptions) based on John Sibbick’s paintings from the 1985 book Enyclopaedia of Dinosaurs by David Norman.

The latter seems to be the case for the large UKRD Apatosaurus figure, which is distinctly Sibbickian, including having the, by the time the figure was released in 1991, correct, low and elongated head of a diplodocoid, as well a distinct neck-wattle. But UKRD dinosaurs seem to have come in three sizes: large, medium, and small (not to mention bendable and skeletal versions), and, until now, I assumed they were just all based on the same designs, but, boy, was I wrong…

While for example the Pachycephalosaurus of all size-classes look similar, the medium UKRD Apatosaurus from 1992 probably couldn’t be more different from the large one. First of all, it has the classic, outdated boxy skull, as was reconstructed for various Brontosaurus museum mounts back in the early 20th century, like the ones in the American Museum of Natural History and the Yale Peabody Museum. But the figure is labelled as Apatosaurus on its belly, so it would seem that this is an odd case where UKRD was up to date with the taxonomy, but not so much with the anatomy of the dinosaur.

The genus Brontosaurus was of course famously synonymised with Apatosaurus at the time (though its type species, B. excelsus, was kept as a valid species of Apatosaurus), but as Brontosaurus has since been revived, that means this figure could potentially depict Brontosaurus rather than Apatosaurus… That is of course difficult to determine, because Apatosaurus itself was also reconstructed with a Camarasaurus-like boxy skull in the early 20th century, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the UKRD sculptor didn’t really know the intricacies of Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus taxonomy, and by extension what exactly they were sculpting.

With that out of the way, we can move on to other differences with the large figure, including that the tail is surprisingly not dragging across the ground in the small one, but is raised a bit, and its skin seems much more wrinkly and saggy, especially along the flanks. Its colour-pattern is also extremely different from the yellow and black-striped large figure; its upper sides are painted sky blue, while the underside is grey, seemingly the colour of the rubber. The eyes are splashed with yellow that far exceeds the size of the eye itself, and bleeds onto the surrounding skin, while the pupils are black.

The figure is about 15 cm from the tail-tip to the front of the snout, and it stands almost 8 cm at the top of the head. Not much more to say about this figure than get it for its nostalgic value if nothing else. But hey, I just noticed the nostrils on the old Yale Brontosaurus mount are at the front of the snout, just like in this figure, so could that mean it depicts Brontosaurus after all? And the bendable version of the figure was apparently re-labelled as Camarasaurus? That’s part of what makes the UKRD figures “mysterious”, as Marc Vincent put it in his review of the large version, and adds to their charm. They seem to be based on pretty specific references, and it’s fun to try to identify them in these reviews.