For better or worse, Jurassic World toys are upon us. And while most of them, frankly, look worse to me, the iconic Ankylosaurus looked somewhat better.
This “fused lizard” measures 16 cm long and is just under 13 cm tall including the raised tail. Main colours are raw umber and khaki with black and brown eyes, a pink mouth, flat brown for the spots and the JW logo on the left thigh, and red and white for the seemingly obligatory and always silly permanent wound on the left flank. Actually, it wouldn’t look quite as silly if it weren’t for the white streaks. I assume those are supposed to be exposed ribs, but they’re at the wrong angle. Or are they supposed to be nerves? Either way, the toy would have looked better without. But the wound isn’t as ugly as the visible seam running down the toy’s back and the three screw holes on its right side. Ugh. Seriously, Hasbro? You couldn’t afford to cover those up?
The top of the Ankylosaurus is entirely covered in a heavy coat of scutes while the limbs and underside have small scales. The head has the right number and configuration of horns, but the body ought to be greater in length and wider in the midsection. The tail should also be longer, although the club looks nice and deadly. The scutes should be flatter and smoother, and absent is the series of fused scutes that formed a sort of protective collar over the real animal’s shoulders. Finally, the toes are too many. No fossils of Ankylosaurus feet are known, but it probably had three toes on each hind foot just like its better-known relatives.
The Ankylosaurus is sculpted in a battle-ready pose with its limbs crouched and its mighty clubbed tail raised impossibly high. Does that pose look familiar to some of you? Well, that’s because it’s virtually identical to that of the Papo Ankylosaurus. Indeed, this toy looks and feels like a bigger, cheaper version.
The Ankylosaurus is articulated at the shoulders and left hip. Pulling back on the right hind leg causes the tail to swing down to the left in a bashing motion. Pushing the leg forward causes the head to slide forward, just like a turtle coming out of its shell. I wonder if the Hasbro designer mistakenly assumed that Ankylosaurus was related to turtles.
It’s worth noting that this is the first full-sized ankylosaur to be released in any Jurassic Park line. A very cool-looking Euoplocephalus was slated for release in the 1998 Chaos Effect line, but sadly never came to be.
Honestly? Aside from the inaccurate armour, the ugly wound (which can be painted over), the screw holes, and the suspicious resemblance to Papo, this is not a bad toy. The extending neck gimmick is silly, but the bashing tail is simple, solid fun. And compared to the other JW toys I’ve seen, it looks like a museum piece. If you only get one of them, I say get this one.
Available from Amazon.com here and Amazon.co.uk here.
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Man o man… You’re spot on about this being suspiciously similar to Papo’s Anky. …I’m a toy sculptor by trade and would bet that Hasbro scanned the Papo model and used that file to create this sculpt. Once a digital model is in the computer, it would have been easy for them to dull down details. 🙁 …It’s a bad practice but larger companies do this all the time to (obviously) cut back on sculpting time. This trick would have saved multiple days worth of sculpting time which translates to thousands of USDs. …It’s a real shame, Hasbro didn’t create some truly inspired toys off this movie. This is ho hum.
I think this creature has some charm. I guess its expression is very likeable. And thanks to the armour the bullet holes aka screw holes are not too visible:)
I thought the Jurassic Park movies would spawn all kinds of great dinosaur toys but so far I’m still waiting for the first one.
I wouldn’t go that far. The original Jurassic Park and Lost World toys were great for their time. Some of them, like the LW Parasaurolophus, still hold up to this day. You can thank Kenner for that. Hasbro doesn’t hold a candle to them.
I saw this at a local toy store and I really really wanted to like it. But I couldn’t! Those screw holes! The Indominus Rex is most likely the only one worth picking up because it can’t be inaccurate as there’s no such real dinosaur. (Well…it can be movie-inaccurate though.)
I saw this toy at Fred Meyer the other day. Seemed expensive for how gawdawful it is. They also had a toothy Pteranodon (sigh) and an Indominus toy. Ironically, the fake dinosaur gets the best toy. It featured some interesting jaw-snapping action and a “sliding door” over the “Dino Damage” wound so you can actually close the thing up. But it also made me realize that Indominus looks more like a crurotarsian that converged on theropods than any actual theropod.
I’m pretty excited that there are ankylosaurs in Jurassic World – they made a super brief cameo in Jurassic Park III, but it looks like they actually do something here. But from the brief snatches in the trailer, and this toy, it really isn’t a particularly accurate depiction of Ankylosaurus at all.
Head – why don’t people get the head right for Ankylosaurus? It has a great skull that has been photographed tons of times because it’s on display at the AMNH. In this toy, the squamosal horns are wrong, the quadratojugal horns are wrong, the snout ornamentation is wrong, and the nostrils are not quite in the right place.
Body – the osteoderms are clearly modeled off of the NHMUK’s Scolosaurus specimen (as are most ankylosaur toys, really). And I don’t know about any ankylosaurs that have a midline row of osteoderms – they are always paired. I don’t agree with the entirety of Carpenter’s most recent (2004) restoration, but this toy is nothing like what we know about Ankylosaurus osteoderm shapes or arrangements. It looks like a generic ‘Pseudoplocephalus’.
Tail – it’s super duper unlikely that the tail could be raised that high – it just doesn’t look like the vertebrae in the anterior half of the tail could articulate like that. Plus, the back half of the tail is rigidly fused and locked together, and this kind of curvature is completely impossible. There are no scorpion-tailed ankylosaurs, people! At least the tail club knob looks a little bit like what a real Ankylosaurus club looks like.
The Papo Ankylosaurus has these flaws as well, but the detail work is so much better and the figure has such personality that I’m willing to overlook some accuracy in the name of having a nice-looking ankylosaur on my desk. This one is pretty limp in comparison.
Nice blog with very interesting topic.