Where did the One of our Dinosaurs is Missing dinosaur come from?

It’s now fairly well established that the remains of the Krayt Dragon that C-3PO and R2-D2 walk past in an early Tatooine scene of Star Wars (1977) were re-used from the knockabout Disney film One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing (1975).

I want to quote the Telegraph article I just linked, because it’s pretty amazing:

“The British view [on making the film] was definitely more tongue in cheek.”

That would be true from the very start of principal photography on A New Hope on March 22, 1976. Arriving in Tozeur, Tunisia, producer Gary Kurtz opened the Lockheed Hercules aircraft that he’d chartered to ferry equipment over from London, and was surprised to find… a dinosaur skeleton. And not just any dinosaur, but the diplodocus from Disney’s One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing.

His new British crew had found the prop at Elstree, where it had been filmed a couple of years earlier, and had gleefully hidden it on the plane for a laugh. But no matter: it then became the skeleton we see when C3PO and R2D2 crash-land on Tatooine.

It’s hard to credit that a film crew would load an entire sauropod skeleton (or at least a substantial part of one) onto a cargo plan as a prank. But since this is the only story we have, I guess we need to accept it unless something else emerges.

The best image I have seen of the Tatooine skeleton, from this Kickstarter page. ” data-large-file=”https://svpow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/journey-to-tataouine.jpeg?w=480″ class=”size-full wp-image-25564″ src=”https://svpow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/journey-to-tataouine.jpeg” alt=”" width=”480″ height=”270″ srcset=”https://svpow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/journey-to-tataouine.jpeg?w=480&h=270 480w, https://svpow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/journey-to-tataouine.jpeg?w=960&h=540 960w, https://svpow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/journey-to-tataouine.jpeg?w=150&h=84 150w, https://svpow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/journey-to-tataouine.jpeg?w=300&h=169 300w, https://svpow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/journey-to-tataouine.jpeg?w=768&h=432 768w” sizes=”(max-width: 480px) 100vw, 480px” />

The best image I have seen of the Tatooine skeleton, from this Kickstarter page (which I found in the Matt Lamanna article discussed below).

But the real question — and one that has not been properly investigated, as far as I can see — is how did the One of Our Dinosaurs crew source the dinosaur in the first place?

The only place I’ve seen this addressed at all as in Matt Lamanna’s article Dippy in Star Wars?. Here’s what Matt has to say:

Assuming this was indeed the case (i.e., that the krayt dragon skeleton is the same sauropod prop that was used in One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing), and that (as Matt Wedel had already demonstrated), that sauropod was almost certainly based on Diplodocus, I then tried to determine where the Disney Diplodocus could have come from; in other words, what real Diplodocus specimen(s) it might have been cast or sculpted from. Sadly, I was unable to do so. But the only Diplodocus skeleton (or the only substantial portion of one, anyway) at London’s Natural History Museum during the 1970s was the cast of CMNH’s very own Diplodocus carnegii that was presented to England by Andrew Carnegie himself in 1905.

So, in a nutshell, although I can’t absolutely, definitively prove it (yet?), I think there’s an excellent chance that the krayt dragon in Episode IV was ultimately based on Diplodocus carnegii. Specifically, the evidence suggests that it was inspired by the cast of D. carnegii in London, either a sculpted replica of that cast or even potentially a second-generation cast of that cast.

(For much, much more on the Carnegie Diplodocus and its many casts, see Taylor et al. 2025.)

Looking at the Journey to Tataouine (sic) image above, clicking through and looking closely at the vertebrae, it’s clear that there are specific details of lamination and pneumaticity that I would not expect a prop sculptor to have bothered with, which makes me think this was likely a cast rather than a sculpt. Do others agree?

And if it was a cast, where from? One possibility is, as Matt suggests above, it’s a second-generation cast made from moulds taken from the London cast. But that doesn’t seem probable: I’ve never heard of moulds being taken from that cast, and one would think that if this laborious and potentially damaging task was undertaken, there would have been more casts made from molds, turning up in other museums in the UK.

At one point, I thought another possibility is that the One of Our Dinosaurs crew simply bought a cast from Dinolab Inc. in the USA. As extensively documented in Taylor et al. (2023), Dinolab took moulds from the Concrete cast, and made and sold several second-generation casts around the world. But I’d got my chronology all mixed up: they made the moulds in 1989 and started selling casts in 1990 (Taylor et al. 2023:80), long after One of Our Dinosaurs was made.

Another possibility is that second-generation moulds were taken from one of the other Carnegie casts — but again, it doesn’t seem likely that this would have been done only for the sake of a film prop, and I’ve never heard of other second-generation casts than those made by Dinolab.

Which I think leaves only one final possibility, which I only thought of as I was writing the post: that the original Carnegie casts — which had made their way to Rocky Mount, NC, by the 1960s, but which we’d lost track of as of the publication of the 2013 paper — found their way into the hands of the film crew.

Since the 2013 paper, I have discovered that the original molds were not bulldozed in Avalon Airport some time after 1968, as we pessimisticaly concluded (Taylor et al. 2013:74). We now know that early in 1969 they were acquired by Arthur Pugh, of the eponymous museum consultancy firm in Houston, who planned to make a cast for the Rocky Mount museum. (That never happened, sadly.)

Photograph printed in a newspaper (I’m not sure yet which newspaper) on Sunday 19 January 1969. The headline of the short article accompanying it is THE HEAD BONE CONECTED TO …. The article text reads: Arthur Pugh of the Houston museum consultant firm bearing his name holds the first cast of a dinosaur head made from molds he has acquired. The molds, made from a dinosaur skeleton found in 1903, will be used to cast a skeleton replica for the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Also to be used in the reconstruction are 65 bones now owned by the museum. The whole skeleton contains 627 bones. Pugh estimates it will take 18 months to two years to complete the project. He first plans to cast a skeleton for the Rocky Mount, N.C., museum. ” data-image-caption=”" data-large-file=”https://svpow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/img_0443-wedel-front.jpeg?w=480″ class=”wp-image-25576 size-full” src=”https://svpow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/img_0443-wedel-front.jpeg” alt=”" width=”480″ height=”601″ srcset=”https://svpow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/img_0443-wedel-front.jpeg?w=480&h=601 480w, https://svpow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/img_0443-wedel-front.jpeg?w=960&h=1203 960w, https://svpow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/img_0443-wedel-front.jpeg?w=120&h=150 120w, https://svpow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/img_0443-wedel-front.jpeg?w=239&h=300 239w, https://svpow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/img_0443-wedel-front.jpeg?w=768&h=962 768w, https://svpow.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/img_0443-wedel-front.jpeg?w=817&h=1024 817w” sizes=”(max-width: 480px) 100vw, 480px” />

Photograph of Arthur Pugh, printed in the Houston Chronicle on Sunday 19 January 1969. The headline of the short article accompanying was “THE HEAD BONE CONNECTED TO …”. The text of the article read: Arthur Pugh of the Houston museum consultant form bearing his name holds the first cast of a dinosaur head made from the molds he has acquired. The molds, made from a dinosaur skeleton found in 1903, will be used to cast a skeleton replica for the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Also to be used in the reconstruction are 65 bones now owned by the museum. The whole skeleton contains 627 bones. Pugh estimates it will take 18 months to two years to complete the project. He first plans to cast a skeleton for the Rocky Mount, N.C., museum.

It’s likely that elements cast from these molds were indeed used to complete the “Diplodocus” (now Galeamopus) hayi skeleton HMNS 175 (formerly CMNH 10670, formerly CM 662), which HMNS acquired from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in 1963. The completed skeleton was mounted in 1975, and it’s likely that elements cast by Pugh still form part of the rearing mount that we featured less than a week ago. But what happened after that, we still don’t know. I’m now entertaining the idea that the old moulds’ final job was to provide the One of Our Dinosaurs prop. The chronology works out, as this film would have been in production within a year or two of Pugh acquiring the moulds.

So can anyone shed any light on this supposition? All thoughts, and especially all actual information, is very welcome!

References

• Taylor, Michael P., Steven D. Sroka and Kenneth Carpenter. 2023. The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal — a Cultural Icon of Utah. Geology of the Intermountain West 10:65-91. doi: 10.31711/giw.v10.pp65-91
• Taylor, Michael P., Amy C. Henrici, Linsly J. Church, Ilja Nieuwland and Matthew C. Lamanna. 2025. The history and composition of the Carnegie Diplodocus. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 91(1):55–91. doi:10.2992/007.091.0104