For those of you not familiar with this dinosaur (and I suspect that is most people!), it was discovered in the 1940’s in the Gobi Dessert in Mongolia. The discovery of this dinosaur was originally thought to be a giant turtle, however as more of it was uncovered they discovered it was a dinosaur with really long claws that were up to 1.5 meters in length. This Giant dinosaur was actually a herbivore although part of the theripod family of dinosaurs and it lived in the cretaceous period. I think its the claws that captured my sons imagination and he saved really well to buy his own model of this dinosaur. It was this model I based my design on. I don’t know how accurate this model is to the original dinosaur, but since they haven’t found a complete skeleton yet I am not too worried. Oliver loves it and recognises it as a Therizinosaurus so really that’s all that matters. (All information in this paragraph I learnt from Oliver!)

I created this dinosaur using mostly two colours and he is made in different sections. The body, neck and tail is made in two panels and the limbs, claws, head and jaw are all made separately and

joined together, some with join as you go techniques and others are sewn. I use pipe cleaners (or wire with a cork on the end for the larger dinosaur) to get the shape required for the legs, arms and

spines and these allow the dinosaur to keep his shape. I really wanted this dinosaur to have an open mouth with visible teeth so he could pretend to eat. At this point in Oliver’s life, making his dinosaurs eat seems to be very important to him. Both the Mummy & baby dinosaurs are created using this basic idea. However, I wanted to do something a little more interesting rather than just a larger version of the same dinosaur, and so the Mummy dinosaur has a pouch underneath her which can store an egg. This pouch can be opened so she can lay her egg. Then the baby dinosaur can be curled up inside the egg and he can hatch out of the opening egg. This really does make this dinosaur more interactive! The video below shows the interactive nature of these dinosaurs.