Review and photographs by Funk, edited by Suspsy.
As most dinosaur fans that grew up in the 1990s know, Primal Rage from 1994 was a fighting game pitting stop motion animated dinosaurs and apes against each other, with very violent and sometimes bizarre attacks that inevitably led to parental outrage.
Would you like a side of miniatures with your rubber monsters?
Not every dinosaur toy is equal. Not every absence of inaccuracy means inaccuracies are absent. Dilophosaurus is frequently plagued by imaginary features ingrained into pop culture due to a certain Universal/Spielberg blockbuster; but just because a toy of the two-crested reptile eschews the frills doesn’t mean the rest of the design gets a free pass.
Sometimes there’s no avoiding bad timing. Since paleontology is an ever-shifting field of scientific understanding, any artistic or commercial renditions of prehistoric life risk becoming obsolete at the drop of a new find. Such was the case for Safari Ltd., who announced the release of a new Dilophosaurus model for 2020 to replace the previous Wild Safari version – only for a brand-new paper to drop later that same year, providing a new, thorough analysis of all known Dilophosaurus fossils and providing new insight into the Early Jurassic predator’s life appearance.
Thanks to its appearance in Jurassic Park, Dilophosaurus is, in the words of one paleontologist, “pretty much the best, worst-known dinosaur.” Even if you’re well aware that it wasn’t small and didn’t spit venom and didn’t have a frill around its neck, you probably grew up reading about how fragile its twin crests were and how relatively weak its bite was.
Greetings DinoWaurriors! While being a great medium to introduce the masses to dinosaurs, films can have an awful effect on people by presenting inaccuracies and people drinking them in as fact. Such is the case with Dilophosaurus in Jurassic Park. In the film, it was presented as a small predator, venom spitting with a frill, when in fact it had no frill, no venom sacs and was seven meters in length.
It was a truly sad day for the entire dinosaur toy community when Battat Terra sculptor Dan LoRusso passed away in 2015. He was immensely talented, meticulous in his research, and most importantly of all, friendly and kind. At the time of his death, he had begun working on sculpts of Majungasaurus, Plateosaurus, and Yutyrannus for the Terra line.
Although I grew up with dinosaur toys around me for as long as I can remember, there was one dinosaur missing from my collection as a small child. This dinosaur, which I desired more than almost any other, was the “two-crested reptile”, Dilophosaurus. With its elaborate head crests and fierce-looking notched jaws, Dilophosaurus was an early favorite of mine.
