Toys R Us Dunkleosteus Review

Dunkleosteus Toy, Toys R Us™

Review by Matt Bille

I ordered this toy secondhand – it usually comes with a (modern day!) sea exploration playset. It is what you’d expect, a hard plastic toy with a lot of shortcomings in the realism department, but there are a couple of cool things about it anyway. 

It’s big, about 28cm.  It’s clearly modeled on the Schleich Dunk (shown below with it for comparison.)  It looks like a tank. The front armor is really impressive, like something Jaws’ Chief Brody could shoot at all day with his .357 without being more than a nuisance. There are armor plates (or platelike markings) all over the body, like a swimming ankylosaur. This certainly isn’t right, although this design would explain the Dunk’s disappearance from the fossil record: it couldn’t move. I assume the body armor is there just to keep the skin from looking flat and boring, There are scutes here and there, down the sides but also, weirdly, on the leading edges of the pectoral fins.     The choppers on the business end are appropriately scary-looking. The eyes are yellow with a small pupil (jaundice, or just the age of the toy?) The anal fin was not modeled, presumably to save a couple of cents in production.

Anyway, things I like.  I like the tail: the strong upper lobe indicates development in the direction of a full heteroceral tail, which I think is what they were, at the least, evolving toward. The coolest thing, though, is the action. The toy comes with the jaws wide open (of course), but if you press down on the dorsal fin, the cheek armor swings outward, creating a suction while the jaws close. We know the Dunk did feed this way, at least much of the time (some prey might have been too big), and kudos to the toymaker for including here.

So there we have it. It’s an interesting toy, not accurate but with some redeeming features. I would have LOVED this as a kid.