Utahceratops (1:35 Science and Art Model by Haolonggood)

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Before I start this review, I would like to thank our generous friends at Happy Hen Toys for providing this review sample. Of all of Haolonggood’s 2024 releases, this is the one I was most excited for, so I am honored to have been able to receive it as a gift.

Since moving to Utah in 2016 and collecting dinosaurs in 2019, I have become increasingly fascinated with the prehistoric fauna of my current home. Utahceratops gettyi was described from fossils discovered at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Kane and Garfield Counties in southwestern Utah. The area has produced other amazing dinosaurs, including Diabloceratops eatoni, Gryposaurus monumentensis, and Lythronax argestes. The holotype specimen UMNG VP 16784, which consists of a partial skull, is deposited at the Utah Museum of Natural History, a short walk from my job in the University of Utah Research Park in Salt Lake City! Utahceratops lived in the Late Cretaceous of Laramidia, probably in riparian areas consisting of lowland humid woodlands, peat swamps, and lakes that bordered the Western Interior Seaway. Today the region is extremely variable, ranging from lowland Great Basin Desert to montane coniferous forests. Utahceratops, which was only described on 2010, has not received a lot of attention in the toy/figure realm. I know of a few, including those by CollectA (2012), Creative Beast Studio (2021), and the focus of today’s review, the 2024 models by Haolonggood.

Utahceratops was a hefty animal, believed to average 6-7 meters in length. The neutral posture of this Haolonggood model comes to about 17.5 cm in length, giving it a scale of 1:35-1:40. However, using the skull length as a metric (n=9.0 cm), the scale comes to 1:26 based on the skull reconstruction in the original description by Sampson et al., thus scaling larger than the advertised 1:35. Given that only about 70% of post-cranial material is known, I am likely to side with the scale based on skull metrics (I included both in the Blog tags, above).

As mentioned above, the animal is sculpted in a relatively neutral pose. The texture is very nice, with ample wrinkles over the body. A few rows of osteoderms run down the back. To me the most impressive part of the sculpt is the pebbled scale texture covering the frill. All horns appear to be present, including the 10 running down each side of the frill. One thing I noticed, is that the gap in the center of the top of the frill looks much more narrow that all other reconstructions I have seen. I am not sure if this is just Haolonggood’s style, or it reflects recent discovery I have not been able to come across.

Like other Haolonggood figures, the Utahceratops comes in two colors, ‘orange’ (Gong Wang) and ‘green’ (Ding De Sun); we are only looking at the former here. Generally, I don’t have a strong preference for color with Haolonggood’s figures, but this time I specifically went for Gong Wang as I liked the coloration of the frill more. The body is painted with alternating wavy lines which, honestly, look a lot like the current geology of where Utahceratops was discovered! You might notice a little nick in the paint on the right side (the animal’s right) of my figure. It came that way, and I can only assume it was a random blemish that happened somewhere along the way and that it shouldn’t be expected in other figures.

This is a really nice figure of an interesting species, and my excitement for it was justified. In hand it doesn’t disappoint. Comes recommended to collectors of interesting taxa. It’s a marked improvement of the CollectA model, and lacks the articulations of the Creative Beast Studio model. Available from Happy Hen Toys in the United States or wherever Haolonggood figures are sold.