I first read about the Kasai Rex ‘incident’ when I was about nineteen, and as Richard has quite correctly described me as 'a true dino-movie freak', I can do no less than try to figure out exactly what that picture shows.Richard lists several stop-motion films as being potential likely suspects, and as well as those he names, there is of course the Rex from the original King Kong (1933), as well as O’Brien’s earlier dinos from Along the Moonbeam Trail (1920), which featured an allosaurus.
After Kong, we come to O’Brien’s abortive War Eagles and Gwangi, for which projects O’Brien’s chief model maker Marcel Delgado had constructed carnivorous dinosaurs, and in the 1950s, we have the tyrannosaur from The Beast of Hollow Mountain, and the Rex, allosaurus and ce
ratosaurus in Harryhausen’s The Animal World.The problem is, none of the dinos in the above movies look particularly like the Kasai Rex, and I thought that maybe the animal in the picture might have been a custom-made model, constructed especially for the photo.
The latest news is that it seems to appear that the individual describing him/herself as ‘The Highland Tiger’, has correctly identified the image as a composite photograph made up of a dead (or sleeping) rhino, combined with a model allosaurus built by model maker ‘Yarriwarrior’ (yep--apparently, that’s his real name), based on a Charles Knight painting, which in turn, was inspired by the skeleton of an allosaurus--or specifically--allosaurus AMNH 5753, which was initially discovered by Edward Drinker Cope’s assistant and associate ‘digger’, H.F. Hubbell, who found the remains in the Como Bluff region of Wyoming in 1879, the skeleton not actually being put on display until 1908.
Charles Knight had painted the allosaur from its skeletal pose, feasting on the remains of an Apatosaurus. Even in these days of supposedly ‘new thinking’ as regards dinosaur posture, lifestyle and their place in the Mesozoic eco-system, many of Knight’s paintings are still relevant and
surprisingly accurate, and all are fantastically beautiful.The composite Kasai image was assembled by ‘Finbar’ (yep--apparently that’s his real name too), and a pretty fair job he’s made of it. Apparently, Finbar gets up to this sort of thing quite a bit, but always admits his fakery, so that’s all right, I suppose.
I’ve had a go at making my own Kasai Rex. Yeah, it’s crap, and I know it’s crap, but I only took twenty minutes over it--including the time finding the images on the net. If you had a day or so to mess around with it, you might get reasonable results. It’s just a picture of some African grassland, a rhino stuck onto that, and a picture of Gwangi stuck onto that. A bit o
f greyscale, some newsprint overlay, and Bob’s your uncle. Well--kind of….So there you have it. The question is, of course, is the ‘real’ Kasai Rex picture out there somewhere? And will we see Finbar coming the next time?
Keep ‘em peeled….
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