Eustreptospondylus (Procon)

Those who know me on the forum have noticed that I dislike Procon very much and I wanted to show everybody why I do. Some had even suggested that I’d like them if I happened to acquire at least one. Let me tell you, not even the gratitude I feel for having received this figure as a donation makes me tolerate it more (I also received the Hydrotherosaurus but unfortunately I found it rather crude too). It’s ugly and it’s cartoonish. I can’t believe this is the stuff that is competing with other companies that have at least tried to improve the quality of their products.

I for one would have appreciated a well-done Eustreptospondylus, it was a medium-sized Jurassic theropod very similar to Megalosaurus (the size, less than 5 meters or 15 feet, is debatable though, it appears that the specimen described by none other than Sir Richard Owen was not a fully grown individual). The only specimen available today is not even complete, it was found near Oxford in marine sediments (no wonder a Liopleurodon eats one in Walking with Dinosaurs!). It’s rather depressing that we have no passable megalosaur replicas.

It would be ridiculous to compare the real skeleton with this parody of a dinosaur. Procon tends to prey on other paleoartists. In this case they took the image from the Dougal Dixon Encyclopaedia (I have seen it and truth be told, it’s a painting that doesn’t even favor this dinosaur). After getting acquainted with Procon’s misshapen ‘dinosaurs’ I can tell you for sure that the makers don’t even bother to check online sources for their reconstructions, let alone serious publications, they just rip off whatever source they see fit. One clear example: the ‘Polacanthus’ was copied off a illustration in which the perspective hid the hip shield. That’s why the Procon ‘Polacanthus’ has no hip shield. In the case of the Procon ‘Eustrepto’ the weird (and not very accurate) ornamentations of the head that appear in the original were copied indiscriminately.  Every collector knows that practically every company uses paleoart as inspiration, but every company I can think of knows how to copy when it decides to. This thing is an amateurish vulgarity, unprofessional hands have clumsily molded it. Even with the disadvantage of having undergone such a ‘creative’ process, I will concede that the overall shape is close to that of a megalosaur of some sort (thanks no doubt to the original illustration) but that hardly compensates the enormous flaws that plague poor ‘Eustreptospondylus’: the legs and the feet are horribly deformed and disproportionate, the hallux is crudely sculpted, the neck is  too long and the head doesn’t have an ounce of realism.

Everybody talks about how cheap Procon figures are, but the way I see it these are just expensive chinasaurs. Unfortunately every year Procon butchers more prehistoric animals, many theropods and sauropods like Shunosaurus or Becklespinax have been ravaged beyond recognition. Taking other companies into account, especially Safari, I can only conclude that this is a retrograde line. Procon should slow down, hire more competitive artists and release fewer figures that are better done.

Available from Amazon.com (here)