A new avatar joins the Dawn Kingdoms range!
With spring starting to make its presence known in the northern hemisphere, the Dawn Kingdoms is teeming with new life. And there’s a new migrant to this strange land, too… Iguanodon!
Meet a true original
Iguanodon was one of the first dinosaurs ever discovered, and there have been some incredibly strange ideas about what it might have looked like in the flesh.
One of the three “original dinosaurs” that Victorian biologist Richard Owen used to describe the order (now the clade) Dinosauria, Iguanodon has been subjected to every misinformed portrayal imaginable as our understanding of dinosaurs has developed.
The chunky quadrupedal version above is famous from the 1850s statues that still stand at Crystal Palace, but scientific ideas quickly moved on.
This German illustration to the left shows a head and neck that couldn’t be more different from the first imaginings, separated fingers… and a splayed pose that it couldn’t possibly have had.
This version of the Iguanodon looks more like a Plesiosaur or a crocodile… nothing like the early sculptures, and nothing like our understanding today!
Around the turn of the century, a more upright Iguanodon became the standard. Most 20th century depictions show the Iguanodon walking on two legs and a tail, in a “tripod” pose that is the hallmark of early rubber puppet dinosaur movies.
This extract from The Lost World (1912) helped popularise the “tripod” look for Iguanodon:
“All five were sitting up, balancing themselves upon their broad, powerful tails and their huge three-toed hind-feet, while with their small five-fingered front-feet they pulled down the branches upon which they browsed . . . they looked like monstrous kangaroos, twenty feet in length . . .”
Unfortunately, we now know that this pose would have dislocated Iguanodon’s hips and fractured its vertebrae! Yikes.
This wasn’t scientific knowledge until the 1970s, however, and it took educational books and popular culture a while to catch up.
Many of us will have visited museums where the Iguanodon retained its iconic “postcard” look, had dinosaur toys giving the classic “thumbs up”, or read books from the library where the Iguanodon illustrations looked a little like this…
And the developments didn’t stop there! Even 2000s kids are old enough to have seen a couple of versions of Iguanodon.
The then-recent Walking with Dinosaurs series gave its Iguanodons a strikingly curved back and a real crick in the neck, while Disney’s Dinosaur shows Aladar with backwards-facing “palms”.
With Iguanodon’s long history and iconic place in the dinosaur line-up, most of us have seen at least one version of this creature before. And it might not have looked anything like the new Dawn Kingdoms avatar!
Working from the latest paleo-art, with the current understanding of Iguanodon’s musculature, the weight distribution through its joints, and other scientific developments, this new avatar is simultaneously a classic, and contemporary cutting edge.
As strange as it sounds, the new Dawn Kingdoms Iguanodon Avatar is a thoroughly modern dinosaur.
See more of the new Iguanodon in-world!
If you’re lucky, you might spot a herd of Animesh Iguanodon roaming the prehistoric plains on the SIM, and you can view the museum-style in-store diorama at any time!
Be sure to check out the avatar on Marketplace, too. There’s plenty of information there about what comes in the box, and you can try the Demo for free!
The bakes-on-mesh pack is out too! This is the first avatar to have the option of adding official bakes-on-mesh, so I’m excited to see how you guys like it!
Layer patterns as you please, tint layers separately, and even add wounds or battle scars for role-play – perfect for adding even more realism to Primal Life!
This add-on gives you even more user-friendly customizability, so you can make a unique dinosaur in which to roam the grid. After all, we don’t know what colour Iguanodon were, so any look you create is plausible… right?
Check out the bakes-on-mesh pack on Marketplace:
That’s it for now, I hope you all enjoy your new avatars!
