Jurassic Park delivered plenty of toys for kids of the 1990s but not every dinosaur had its time to shine on shelves with many designs remaining one-off prototypes that would never be released. However, as Michael Crichton’s sequel The Lost World said, something has survived as many canceled designs from the Jurassic Park toy lines were made and stored away to become collectors holy grails of the future. One such piece is the Ultimasaurus, a figure that was to be introduced as part of the Jurassic Park: Chaos Effect follow-up toy line just after the arrival of Jurassic Park: The Lost World in 1997. Almost 30 years later, this lost relic has found a way back into the world just like the dinosaurs of Spielberg’s groundbreaking movies, and Heritage Auctions have added it to their Preproduction and Prototypes Toy Auction with a reasonable starting price that will surely skyrocket by the end of the auction.
Jurassic Park was one of the biggest movies of the early 90s, the first movie to truly bring dinosaurs to life on screen in a way that had never been seen before. Prehistoric monsters have always been popular and the franchise tapped into that via the power of Spielberg’s movie magic and Kenner/Hasbro’s epic range of toys that allowed kids to cause dino carnage right in their own homes. However, the limited number of dinosaurs in the movie and its sequel meant that the toy line had to do what toy lines do best and expand into the realm of crossovers and gimmicks. Long before the franchise introduced its hybrid Indominus Rex and others in Jurassic World, the Jurassic Park: Chaos Effect line had the idea of cross-engineering dinosaurs to come up with new predators with unique appearances. This is where the Ultimasaurus was born.
The idea of generically bringing dinosaurs back to life was the scientific premise of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park novel. Both the book and first movie explained that John Hammond and INGEN were able to create their dinosaurs by taking DNA of each breed and filling in the gaps with amphibian DNA, something that explained their non-scientific appearance (no feathers, for example) and breeding capabilities. However the Chaos Effect toy line was all about what would happen if the gaps were instead filled with the DNA of other dinosaurs. The Ultimasaurus, as its name suggests, was set to be a vision of the ultimate predator and was designed to be part of the Night Hunter wave of toys before they were canceled. This beast combined parts of the Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, Ankylosaurus, and Stegosaurus and was originally set to be released in a pack containing the dinosaur, a Roland Tembo figure (Pete Postlethwaite’s The Lost World character), a hatchling version of the dinosaur, and a Gatling missile launcher.
While Hasbro did release its initial wave of Chaos Effect toys, the line suffered from retailer cancellations, and the Night Hunter line was meant to be a follow on wave that would have salvaged some of the planned new additions. However, despite making it to the Final Engineering Pilot stage – the last stage before being mass-produced – the line was shut down just before moving forward. That means that the prototypes created were the only examples ever made. This auction includes several of those from the personal collection of Brian Wilk, former VP of Product Development at Hasbro and veteran toy creator, who has had these figures in storage for the last three decades. Coming to auction for the first time – and possibly the last for a long time to come – one thing for certain is that there is little chance of the bidding being declared extinct when the auction nears its end on November 22, 2026.
Would you have wanted to own this hybrid dinosaur and others, or could they never compete with the classic Jurassic Park beasts? Let us know what you think in the comments.
