The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: Jurassic World Ceratosaurus revised!

 

It's time for the weekend post for the second full week of the month, and by my obsessive-compulsive scheduling, that means it's time for a dino post. As it happens, I had something backlogged that I had already done a video for, which you would think would make this quick. To start things off, here's a pic of my new find just out of the box that I kind of forgot I covered in a previous post.

For the backstory, this is part of a Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous line called Roar Attack, apparently first released around June 2021. I got this when I saw a good deal. It only belatedly crossed my mind that this looked more than a little like the Ceratosaurus I already had. That set off a suspicion that this was a recolor of the earlier one, though this was dispelled as soon as I got a look at it. Here's a couple more pics of the thing right out of the package, obviously before assembly was completed.

Now to back things up, since childhood, Ceratosaurus has been my favorite carnosaur (maybe tied with Dilophosaurus). It usually gets portrayed as just a second banana to Tyrannosaurus and/ or Allosaurus, and the latter has some truth since it was a smaller and far less common contemporary of A. fragilis. On more careful consideration, however, Ceratosaurus was really a very unique dinosaur that was probably far more common than the known fossil record would indicate. (In fact, the main reason we have so many allosaur specimens is a few sites where they outnumber even the herbivorous dinosaurs, which clearly could not represent a "normal" ecology.) Among other things, it had unusually large teeth, proportionately if not absolutely larger than Allosaurus. Certain arguments have been made that ceratosaurs were faster and more agile than allosaurs. Their comparative rarity is in itself a plausible indication that they were at least less prone to getting stuck when on muddy ground. Despite their third-class status, they are very frequently represented in movies and paleo art, even if they often are secondary or "background" dinosaurs.

Returning to the present dino, the big surprise was that, while the new ceratosaur is definitely heavier than the one I had before, they are about the same length. Unfortunately, this also means there's a big difference in stability. I've gotten the "old" ceratosaur to stand up before (even with the Truckstop Queen on his back), but I had absolutely no luck this time. The new one, on the other hand, has been surprisingly easy to work with. Here's one more pic of the pair together, I'm sure with my hand propping it up.

And a pic of the old one.

That leaves the big gimmick. Instead of just snapping the jaws and making noise, the new dino has a kind of  ratchet deal. If you push a slide above the hips, the jaws open and then lock in place. If you keep pushing, the jaws open wider, until they reach maximum gape at the third spot. Each time, there's a different roar sound effect. (See my Valley of Gwangi review for my rant on why we know dinos didn't roar...) It's an interesting idea that doesn't work quite as well in execution. It's definitely handy to take pics without using one hand to keep the mouth open. However, having the jaws open all the way just doesn't look right, I'm sure in part because it "should" be held only briefly by an animal in motion, a problem that has cropped up with "action" poses since the days of the Marx dinosaurs. Either of the intermediate poses do look quite a bit better. Here's a sequence of the gimmick in action.

And one more...

"You can tell me, doc; do I need the root canal?"

All in all, both of these dinos are what they should be, good representations of a very cool dinosaur. If it comes to that, it's the kind of thing that just might raise the profile of a species. And how about one more with the Truckstop Queen/ Kate?

That's all for now: more to come!