Giant Lizards

The giant lizard has been a staple of cinema as a low budget option for stop motion dinosaurs since the making of the Academy Award-winning One Million B.C. in 1940.

The footage of giant iguanas from this film was recycled in dozens of low budget dinosaur movies in the following decades.

The Harryhausen remake of the movie employed a giant blue iguana as an homage to the original film.

Later, in the 1981 comedy Caveman, technology had advanced to a point where even the giant lizard was stop motion animated.

The giant lizard crossed over to D&D as mounts and beasts of burden for lizardmen and drow.

One of my grail miniatures has always been the Dragontooth miniatures Champion on Giant Lizard (SMC1) upon which the Sutherland illustration in the Holmes Blue Book was based.

I was finally able to obtain one of these miniatures, and will eventually paint it up in the color scheme of the original Sutherland miniatures. Next to it is a smaller Archive Giant Lizard (Dungeon Nasties 774).

Both of them seem to be modeled after iguanas of some type and are pretty difficult to find.

More commonly available miniatures include the Pathfinder Battles Hodag (Legends of Golarion #33) and the D&D Icons of the Realms Guard Drake (Tyranny of Dragons #22).

The Hodag has been linked to the Paul Bunyan legends by some sources, but no specific legend is ever mentioned. The closest explanation I could find seems to suggest that the Hodag is somehow related to an ox owned by Bunyan (presumably not his Blue Ox?).

The Guard Drake is still easy to find, but kind of expensive nowadays. I bought my miniatures when they were first released, at about a quarter of the price they sell for currently.

The final picture includes the Pathfinder Battles Monitor Lizard (Kingmaker #13). Based on how it's painted, this miniature seems to represent a Greater Monitor Lizard. While for something closer to real-life monitor lizards, Mick Yarrow sells a prehistoric Megalanio [sic] (Inuit 86) stated to be for 15mm figures, but which I think falls within the size range of Megalania at 1/72 scale.

I still think that the Dragontooth miniature is the ideal giant lizard. I wish that there were some similarly sized plastic toy marine iguanas that I could use to assemble a squadron of lizard cavalry.

Marche!

I don't remember anything like this in the book,
but I admit it's been a long time since I've read it.

Dogsleds have held a fascination for me ever since reading Call of the Wild and White Fang way back in high school.

1/72 sets that include dogsleds are made by Nikolai and BUM, but both are rather pricey and not particularly easy to find.

However, I recently ordered some huskys produced by Mick Yarrow Miniatures as part of his 15mm Warriors of the Late Ice Age line (Inuit 11), and they look to be perfectly sized for 1/72 huskys (and at £2.20 for 8 dogs, the price is eminently reasonable).

The huskys come in two poses, and can probably also double for a number of other types of sled dogs if you are not too picky.

I used some Siberian Husky color profiles created by Sedillo-Kennels on DeviantArt as painting guides.

M.Y. Miniatures also has some dogsled team sets - Sledge and 3 team with cannon balls (Inuit 102), and Sledge and 3 team with light cannon (Inuit 103), which seem perfectly fine as smaller Inuit sleds.

Obviously we have moved beyond the stone age with these sets, and the sleds are appropriately built to more modern standards out of wood instead of whalebone and antlers.

I'm trying to figure out how to do the basing on these right now. I'd like to have the dogs and sleds separable from the tug lines so that they can be used in a number of different hitch patterns.

A nice explanation of the various hitch styles and their strengths and weaknesses can be found at the Old School Alaskan blog.

Traditional fan hitch

Single file hitch

Gangline hitch - dual hitch lead dogs

Gangline hitch - single lead dog