News / dinosaurs
This is how a dead dinosaur ended up on a south Bristol roof
There was only going to be one winner between a tyrannosaurus rex and an ankylosaurus.
The defeated dinosaur is now on the roof of a workshop in south Bristol.
Measuring six metres long, the prop was created by specialist model and prop makers Mangostone on South Liberty Lane to be used in the new Netflix documentary, The Dinosaurs.
The Ashton Vale business worked with another Bristol firm, Silverback Films in St Augustine’s Yard, on the show in conjunction with Industrial Light & Magic and Amblin Entertainment.
“Impressive though computer generated creatures are, if there’s a point where they need to interact with a real location, such as travelling through water, hatching from an egg, or in this case being dragged through streams and forests, then there’s no substitute for a practical prop,” said Mangostone director, Laurens Nockels.
To create the ankylosaurus – an armoured herbivore who lived in the late Cretaceous period around 66m years ago – Mangostone creature lead sculptor, Matthew Healey started with a scale model made from plasticine.
The team at Mangostone compared the sculpted version with the digital creature created by Industrial Light & Magic and followed it closely.
The team at Mangostone in Ashton Vale worked closely with some of the biggest players in Hollywood – photo: Mangostone
The early stage was a steel armature and a carved polystyrene core, with the steel supporting the weight of the pose while the polystyrene reducing the weight of the clay which ended up being almost a tonne.
Nockels explained: “While Matthew worked on the sculpt, we shared images with Silverback and ILM, and they visited us regularly to guide us on the details and make sure the sculpt and the digital creature were as close a match as possible.”
The ankylosaurus on location for filming – photo: Mangostone
Main photo: Mangostone
Read next:
Our newsletters emailed directly to you
