A humid spring morning finds Costa browsing placidly on succulent berries. An abrupt noise in the surrounding brush causes him to turn his head and twitch his tail sharply, but it is just a harmless dryosaur also in the midst of browsing. Reassured, Costa returns to the glade where his mate is watching over their clutch. As he approaches, he notices that one of the eggs is beginning to crack open . . .
The long-necked European stegosaur known as Miragaia has already been beautifully rendered in toy form by CollectA and Safari Ltd.. Now let’s examine Costa, the 2016 miniature from PNSO. As you can see, he’s strutting along proudly with his spiky tail swaying to the right and his head held high like a prize-winning Percheron. It even looks as though he has a little smile on his lips. His length is about 9 cm long.
Costa’s skin has a wrinkled texture and there are grooves running through most of his plates and spikes. His main colours are beige and grass green with muddy brown for his plates and spikes, dark green spots, and black eyes. Sadly, the paint for the eyes on mine has been badly misapplied. Also, the last set of spikes on the tail has not been painted brown like the rest. Other than that, however, I rather like this colour scheme. It would certainly come in useful in for forest camouflage.
As you can see from the comparison image below, Costa boasts shoulder spikes and a tail just like the CollectA version as opposed to the more Stegosaurus-like Carnegie one. As I noted way back in my review of the former, nobody currently knows what a Miragaia’s rear end looked like, so either restoration is acceptable. More importantly, Costa’s neck is noticeably long, longer than that of the other PNSO stegosaurs that have been reviewed here. On the minus side, his front feet have three toes each instead of the correct four.
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Overall, Costa the Miragaia is yet another nice miniature from PNSO. Certainly a worthy addition to anyone’s stegosaur collection. I eagerly look forward to acquiring more of these little toys this year!
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Why did you call this dinosaur Costa?
That’s the name PNSO gave it.
Fortunately PNSO makes figures of the family of the famous stegosaurus quite bright. The PNSO miragaia is a pretty decent figure, I just hope that PNSO over the years if it continues to be commercialized in the online stores, make a bigger and more detailed figure of the tire with the artistic imprint of the great Zhao Chuang, the success will be assured in advance.