Discovered in the Woburn Sands Formation in England and formally described in 1874, Craterosaurus was a relatively small stegosaur that lived during the Early Cretaceous some 113-112 million years ago.
Mattel released the first and so far only Craterosaurus toy in 2024 as part of their Danger Pack series. It is sculpted in an alert pose with its legs bent and its tail curling downward and slightly to the left. From nose to tail tip, it measures about 17.5 cm long and stands 9 cm tall at the points of its back plates.
The main colours are gold and very pale beige with dark brown for the beak and the ten large plates on its back and yellow for the eyes. It is a colour scheme that is neither remarkable nor repulsive to the eye, but it does make the animal stand out among the other Mattel stegosaurs.
The Craterosaurus’ neck is hinged at the base, allowing it to move up or down. The legs rotate at the shoulders and hips and the tail rotates at the base, but as always, what’s the point in doing so? Pulling up on the fourth plate on the right hand side reveals the scan code. The Jurassic World logo is sculpted into the sole of the right hind foot.
Save for a few small osteoderms around the shoulders, this stegosaur’s skin texture consists of small rounded scales all over, along with a few wrinkles here and there. The Craterosaurus is unmistakably a stegosaur, with a small head, large body, and a tail held well off the ground. There are ten pairs of plates altogether, and six pairs of increasingly long spikes on the tail, the longest being near the tip. Not surprisingly, the feet have the wrong number of digits. Stegosaurs are known to have had five and three digits on their front and hind feet respectively, but on this toy, there are four digits on all the feet.
Assessing the accuracy of the rest of this stegosaur is practically impossible due to the fact that Craterosaurus is only known from just one single small bone. Originally it was thought to be a fragment of cranium, but the legendary paleozoologist Franz Nopcsa correctly determined it to be part of the neural arch of a vertebra in 1912. We have no idea about the actual shape and arrangements of its plates and spikes, we don’t know how big it grew to be, and indeed, it may well be a junior synonym of Regnosaurus, another Early Cretaceous stegosaur currently known only from a jaw fragment. Therefore, the most anyone can really say about Mattel’s reconstruction is that it is plausible. That’s it.
Overall, the Jurassic World Craterosaurus is not a spectacular toy, but it certainly is a unique one, and like the other Mattel toys I’ve reviewed here, I cannot conceive of a child not deriving enjoyment from playing with it.
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