The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: Arcade prize dinos!

 

As I write this, I'm 2 days past the deadline for my weekend post, and I still don't have a dino blog for this month. To get in one more thing, I literally dug through storage for something I could use, which brought me to a trio of dinos I had considered on and off for a while. Behold the glory of the megalosaur when I got it, ca 2017!

Now, as always, there's backstory, in this case involving some people I've been out of touch with. The upshot is that for a while, I was going to an old-fashioned-ish arcade/ restaurant/ general purpose rec center on the far end of the metro area where I live. Of course, they had impressive collection of junk prizes, of which these were in fact the most conceivably valuable. So, of course, I collected quite a lot of other stuff before I gave a thought to saving up points for these. Here's the pair of dinos I got on The Couch Mark 2.

"Grr. Raarr... Come on, this only works if you get into it."

As it happens, in years since, I've seen the predator of this pair listed as the "worst" dino, presumably by people who have had the good fortune never to encounter the Hideous Abomination in the wild. I have to say I like it. Obviously, it's bad, but it has a charming kind of obsolescence. In many ways, it feels like something out of the Crystal Palace, if anything a little more accurate than many of that time. It falls into the description of a megalosaur, especially for the time frame when that was a semi-generic designation for a therepod. The prey is harder to classify. It also would look at home in the Victorian era, even somewhat forward-thinking for the time. It isn't an iguanodon or a hadrosaur. In most respects, it looks like a hypsylophodont, which was presumably what the crew was going for whether they knew it or not. What's startling is how meek and seemingly terrified it is in both form and posture. It's the perfect prey. But then there was something else in the bin that took a little more digging to find for this post. Here's a pic.

It might look like a missing link between a pig and a walrus, but it took only a little inspection to be sure that this was indeed a dicynodont, one of the many creatures that is not only not a dinosaur but more closely related to us than the dinosaurs (see my zombie synapsid post, and for that matter the adventures of Chelsea the (bad) social worker). It's not great, but it's a rare enough thing to find a synapsid other than Dimetrodon in a prize bin, so I snapped it up. Here's a couple more pics.

So beautiful, and so hideous...

And that's just enough to fill out a dino blog for the month. What I like about doing this feature is that I always have flexibility whether to go long or short. While I'm at it, here's one more completely ridiculous thing I fished out... Yes, that is a friction toy.

Oh, and that would be a velociraptor skull in the background; that is quite good.

That's all for now, more to come!