Nanuqsaurus (Wild Safari by Safari Ltd.)

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The sky is turning white and the winds are picking up, which means it will soon begin to snow again. Suluk knows this, and she also knows that she must return to her chicks soon, but the familiar scent she picked up while out hunting is getting stronger. It is the unmistakable scent of something dead. And there, up ahead, lies something partially covered by snow. Too small for an ornithomimosaur, not the right shape for a pachyrhinosaur. A hadrosaur, perhaps? Suluk draws closer and then realizes that the icy form is one of her own. Indeed, it is none other than the crippled intruder that she and her mate chased out of the territory some days ago. Clearly, he didn’t survive the last snowstorm.

Not a moment to lose; Suluk gets right down to work. The corpse is frozen solid to the point where even her powerful teeth and jaws will be put to the test. She gnaws and gnashes until at last, she severs one of the hind legs. Then she begins to trudge back home, dragging the heavy frozen load in her mouth. That snow will begin falling any moment . . .

Thanks to its prominent appearances in AppleTV’s Prehistoric Planet no doubt, Nanuqsaurus is becoming one of the more popular tyrannosaurs after the king tyrant itself. Last year, I reviewed the toy of it by CollectA; now here we have the Wild Safari one from Safari Ltd. I’ve chosen to interpret mine as a female by the name of Suluk, which simply means “feather” in Inuit.

Suluk is sculpted in an unusual pose: hunched over with her right hand foreclaws just millimetres off the ground and her spine and head turning to the left, with mouth wide open. Her left foot is extended forward while the right one is extended back and her tail is raised high with the tip swaying to the right. It’s a cool and unusual pose. It looks as though Suluk is on the attack, snapping at the flanks of a ceratopsian or a hadrosaur, or even attempting to drag a smaller animal out of its burrow. Alternatively, she could be crouching down like this in order to signal her willingness to mate, just like many a modern female bird will do.

Suluk measures slightly more than 23 cm long and 9.5 cm high at the arch in her tail, making her much bigger than her CollectA counterpart and comparable to the Safari Albertosaurus. Which is fitting given that a mature adult Nanuqsaurus is thought to been about the same size as its southern relative.

With fearsome feathered friends Hardbit and *Yutyrannus*.

Suluk’s main colour is a very pale porcelain blue, rather like fresh snow in the early evening. A streak of dark brown runs from the back of her head to the tip of her tail, with stripes coming down on the sides. Dark blue-grey is used for her muzzle, hands, and feet. Her eyes are bright blue, her mouth is light pink, her teeth are light beige, and her hind claws are black. Oddly, her tiny foreclaws are unpainted, although this is possibly a factory error. Aside from that, I think it’s a rather cool colour scheme, no pun intended. Fitting for an animal that lived up near the chilly top of the globe.

Whether or not tyrannosaurids really did have feathers anywhere on their bodies remains a topic of debate, but Suluk follows in the footsteps of her CollectA predecessor and the Prehistoric Planet depiction by being almost entirely covered in a shaggy coat of feathers. The only parts of her that have scales are her feet, her hands, her muzzle, and the region comprising her orbits and brow. Her hands and feet have the usual rows of scutes and pitted skin, including on the soles. The scales on her head are fairly large and somewhat faint.

Suluk’s feathers have a thick and shaggy appearance to them, rather like the fur on a polar bear or an Arctic wolf. As with her scales, they do look good, no question, but they are just not as well defined as on the Safari toys sculpted by Doug Watson. The same goes for the sculpting inside her mouth. Her teeth are pointy enough, but her tongue and her palate are smooth.

Which brings us to the accuracy factor. As I noted in my CollectA review, Nanuqsaurus is only known from fragmentary bits of skull at the time of this writing. Nevertheless, it was definitely a tyrannosaurine, and Suluk definitely looks like one. But I will note that her lower jaw looks to be too wide. Moreover, she unfortunately has fully exposed teeth when it is almost certain that tyrannosaurs and other theropods had lips. As for all the feathers, well, I say that if the paleontologists who worked on Prehistoric Planet are okay with Nanuqsaurus being this feathery, then I’m perfectly okay with Suluk being that way too.

Taking on the Battat *Pachyrhinosaurus* . . .

And how, you may ask, does Suluk stack up against her CollectA predecessor? Well, she has size and presence going for her, and she scales much better with other tyrannosaur toys around the 1:35 scale. But when it comes to sculpting detail, the CollectA version is the clear victor, as both its feathery and scaly bits are objectively better defined than Suluk’s.

Overall, the Nanuqsaurus isn’t the very best toy in Safari’s 2025 prehistoric assortment, but I would say that it’s still a fairly solid and unique one that ought to be pleasing to collectors of all ages.