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Gigantic Thrashers Review
Stegosaurus Gigantic Thrashers Jurassic World Survival Review
A massive, bulky re-imagining that takes the classic herbivore and turns it into a defensive fortress. An armoured honeycomb carapace, jagged obsidian-looking plates, a five-spiked thagomizer, and two separate thrashing actions — it looks far more aggressive than any previous Mattel Stegosaurus.
Two thrashing action featuresFive-spiked thagomizerHoneycomb armour carapaceMattel · 2026Scan code included
About the Survival Line
The Jurassic World Survival line depicts mutated versions of familiar dinosaurs, tied to the Survival PS5 game concept, and Gigantic Thrashers are the big figures in it — exaggerated features, added armour, and button-driven thrashing actions. Stegosaurus is an obvious candidate: it was already the franchise’s walking fortress, so the Survival treatment just keeps piling on.
Paint & Colour Scheme
This might be my favourite Stegosaurus purely on colour. The main body is a solid medium green, contrasted hard against jagged back plates painted black and exaggerated tail spikes in light grey.
The most complex work is on the armoured back shell: a light yellow or cream base with a dark black-green webbed pattern painted over its honeycomb texture. It is the kind of multi-stage paint application that usually gets skipped at this price, and it is what lifts the whole figure.
Sculpt & Detail
The Armoured Back Shell
The sculpt is loaded with heavy-duty Survival modifications, and the most obvious is a thick armoured shell or carapace covering the back and hips. It carries a distinctive honeycomb-like texture that nothing else in the line has, and it is the single feature that most changes the animal’s silhouette — the Stegosaurus goes from spiny to genuinely armoured.
Plates and Thagomizer
The classic thagomizer has been upgraded into a genuinely massive weapon, with five huge branching spikes where the real animal had four. The regular back plates are still there but sharper, more jagged and almost crystalline — closer to obsidian shards than to the smooth kite shapes on a standard Stegosaurus.
Dual Thrasher Action
✓ Button 1 — side-to-side tail whip✓ Button 2 — up-and-down ground pound✓ Both buttons on the back✗ No sounds or lights
As a Gigantic Thrasher, the figure has two separate action features, both driven by buttons on its back. The first unleashes a powerful side-to-side tail whip that swings the massive thagomizer across. The second activates an up-and-down thrashing of the same tail, pounding the ground — the sort of display that in the game would alert the rest of the pack to its intentions.
Having the two motions on separate buttons rather than one combined sequence is the right call: it gives the figure two distinct play patterns instead of one animation you watch repeatedly.
At a Glance
Should You Buy It?
Yes. Mattel has made a lot of Stegosaurus figures and this is one of the best-looking of them, which is not a sentence I expected to write about a mutated one. The honeycomb carapace, the obsidian-sharp plates and the five-spiked thagomizer give it a silhouette nothing else on the shelf has, and the cream-and-webbing paint on the shell is unusually ambitious for this price bracket.
The two separate thrashing actions are the right features for the species too — a Stegosaurus that swings its tail is a Stegosaurus doing the one thing everyone wants it to do.
✦ What Works
- Two separate thrashing action features
- Five-spiked thagomizer, hugely upgraded
- Honeycomb-textured armour carapace
- Jagged, almost obsidian back plates
- Ambitious webbed paint over the shell
- Bold green, black and grey contrast
- Massive, bulky Gigantic Thrashers scale
✦ What Doesn't
- No sounds or light effects
- Both features are tail-only
- A long way from an accurate Stegosaurus
About the Stegosaurus
“Our original Stegosaurus was already a ‘walking fortress.’ The Survival model is… more. We gave it a reinforced back-shell, plates that look like they were mined from a volcano, and a tail that’s frankly a violation of several weapons treaties. It’s less ‘roof lizard,’ more ‘roofed and weaponized… everything.’”
— InGen Asset Designer
Stegosaurus — the name means “roof lizard”, a reference to the plates along its back, and is said steg-oh-SOAR-us — was a Late Jurassic herbivore of the Morrison Formation in western North America, living alongside Torvosaurus and Allosaurus around 155 to 145 million years ago. Its two staggered rows of tall bony plates are among the most recognisable features of any dinosaur, and are now generally read as display and thermoregulation structures rather than armour.
The tail is the business end. Four long spikes at the tip — nicknamed the thagomizer — were a genuine defensive weapon, and Allosaurus fossils with puncture wounds matching them suggest it was used. At roughly 8 to 9 metres (26 to 30 feet) long and 5,300 to 7,000 kg (11,700 to 15,400 pounds), it carried a famously small skull and a brain the size of a lime on a body the size of a bus. The Survival figure keeps the plates and the spiked tail and then adds a carapace it never had, along with a fifth spike the real animal would not have recognised.
How to Unlock Stegosaurus
How do you unlock Stegosaurus in the Jurassic World Survival collection?
Open your Jurassic World Play App (previously the Jurassic World Facts App), press the Scan button and point it at the DNA code below.
Gallery
Frequently Asked Questions
There are two, both on buttons on the figure’s back. One unleashes a powerful side-to-side tail whip that swings the thagomizer across. The other activates an up-and-down thrashing of the tail that pounds the ground.
It adds a thick armoured shell or carapace over the back and hips with a honeycomb-like texture, upgrades the thagomizer to five huge branching spikes, and reshapes the back plates into sharper, more jagged, almost crystalline forms. None of that is on any previous Mattel Stegosaurus.
The main body is a solid medium green, the jagged back plates are black, and the tail spikes are light grey. The armoured back shell has a light yellow or cream base with a dark black-green webbed pattern painted over its texture.
It is the name for the cluster of spikes at the end of a Stegosaurus tail — a joke coined in a Far Side cartoon that palaeontologists then adopted. The real animal had four spikes; this Survival figure has five.
Open the Jurassic World Play App, tap the Scan button, and point it at the DNA barcode on the figure or at the code shown on this page.