Tyrant king of the bookshelves

The geek in me has wanted a replica fossil for a very long time. Unfortunately, nice ones are very expensive. Recently though, the spendthrift in me combined with the DIY enthusiast in me hit upon the idea of a project.

I decided to buy an inexpensive educational model of a T Rex skeleton and do it up; the model itself is fairly accurate and just needs some work to make it into a grown-up display piece.

You can find the original skeleton here on Amazon.co.uk - it was made by a company called Edu Toys and cost £39.99. It comes in 50 parts and is made of a sturdy, slightly flexible plastic. The vertebrae are threaded along an aluminium rod which supports the whole thing. The model is very well balanced, and can stand without its base (it will fall over easily though).

The paint job on the thing was rather crude so that had to change, and the jaws were fixed together. Also the arms and the breast bones were molded as one piece. I started by taking a coping saw to the extra plastic where the jaws pegged in to each other, then sanded this and rebuilt it with Milliput. As soon as this was done and the jaw was fixed with wire, the model looked like a more expensive one.

After that, I painted the skull. This involved priming, spraying with matt black, dry-brushing with a tan colour, then a wash of dark maroon, then more drybrushing. It took ages, but I think he’s looking OK:

I’m currently in the process of sorting out the arms - I’ve separated them from the breast bones, rebuilt the top of them and wired them in place. They just need painting now. The model is a massive 36” long in total, so it’s going to take a while to finish. I’ll post some updates later.