Triceratops (Animal World Dinosaurs by Bullyland)

Review and photographs by Funk, edited by Suspsy

This blog is increasingly focused on newer products, which makes sense since the pool of charming retro-dinosaurs to review can only decrease, but there are still notable omissions, so I’ve made it my mission to break the endless combo of Jurassic World toys and hyper realistic figures. I hereby present you with the Bullyland mini Triceratops.

The German company Bullyland released various prehistoric animal figures, with each species sometimes having versions of different sizes. Triceratops, probably in the top five of most famous dinosaurs, had at least two sizes, and the subject of this review is the smaller one. Unlike some of their other figures that appear to be from the same era, there is no year marked on its belly, but my Bullyland Plesiosaurus is marked 1986, so I assume it might also be from around there due to the similar style.

The figure is about 8 cm long and 4 cm tall, and while it’s in the typical tail-dragging posture of the time, it is unusual in some other ways. My particular figure is tilted somewhat to the right, but I don’t know if this is somehow deformation due to age or if it was simply made this way, because other photos of the toy don’t seem to show the tilt.

The most striking thing about this figure is that it’s very dark, a sort of bluish-black plastic with some green paint splashed onto the flanks and neck frill. Some other Bullyland figures are also unusually dark for dinosaur figures of the time. The eyes are yellow with black pupils, and oddly, both eyes seem to look backwards, giving it a thoughtful expression when viewed from the side, but making it look quite derpy from the front. The paint is very crudely applied, and it appears that the postioning of the pupils varies a lot from figure to figure, with some looking towards the front and other directly to the sides.

The head is instantly recognisable as Triceratops, though the proportions are off, with the brow horns too far behind the eyes, for example. One detail where it holds up–because palaeontology seems to have come around to it again–is that it doesn’t have fleshy cheeks, and the corners of the mouth stretch far back, which also seemed to be the norm back in the day, whereas ornithischians were mostly depicted with extensive cheeks from between then and until a few years ago. It also seems to have a dewlap, which is kind of modern as well.

While those features are rather reptile-like, some of the smaller Bullyland figures have something mammalian about them that is hard to describe, with quite expressive eyes and fleshy faces and limbs. This figure has rather long limbs, with the right arm looking many times bulkier than the left one, the left one far outstretched, and with the usual elephantine feet of the time. The skin texture is unmistakably reptilian, though, very coarse and with what looks like large osteoderms covering it.

Overall, though of course an old and anatomically inaccurate figure, there’s something charmingly odd about this one, which also applies to the other Bullyland figures of the time, something melancholic and almost frightening about it. Maybe they knew they were soon going to be obsolete? Either way, they don’t seem to be that hard to find, and are nice and durable little pieces of nostalgia from a simpler time.