New LEGO Jurassic Park set teases the perfect Velociraptor

Mar 20, 2023

This summer's biggest LEGO Jurassic Park set includes another all-too-big Velociraptor – but also teases a much more appropriately-scaled dino.

Back in 2015, the LEGO Group introduced a brand new Velociraptor for its inaugural wave of Jurassic World sets. And then it sat back, job done, content with its creation at the first time of asking. To its credit, the Velociraptor is very good: it's a detailed dino with just enough articulation to make it playable, too. But cramming all that in came at the expense of scale.

Next to both minifigures and other dinosaurs – such as the T. rex – the LEGO Velociraptor is wildly oversized, effectively robbing the creature of some of its menace. Think about it: would the kitchen scene in 1993's Jurassic Park have worked nearly so well had the raptors been twice their size, rampaging through the room rather than stalking their human prey?

In beefing up the size of its own Velociraptors, the LEGO Group has actually doubled down on the error originally made by Spielberg and company three decades ago. The real Velociraptor stood roughly 50cm tall, but the filmmakers apparently based their interpretation of the diminutive dino on its larger cousin Deinonychus, increasing its size for the silver screen.

So for a truly scientifically-accurate LEGO Velociraptor, you’re actually looking at something maybe a quarter of its current size. Good luck getting any playability out of that. For a LEGO animal closer to the Jurassic Park and World movies – the source material for these sets, after all – we need only look to this summer's 76961 Visitor Centre: T. rex & Raptor Attack for inspiration.

The largest set of the LEGO Jurassic Park 30th anniversary wave includes both T. rex and Velociraptor, perfectly illustrating the disparity in scale between the two. But look beyond the plastic dino to a sticker inside the visitor centre, and you’ll find an illustration of what could have been. The mural on the window pane is pretty much spot on for the raptors’ size in the original movie, relative to a LEGO minifigure.

It's essentially the same design as the current LEGO Velociraptor, too: all the LEGO Group would need to do is shrink it by around 50%. But with that design decision comes inevitable compromise – you’d lose the articulated arms and legs, which in the current format are attached through Technic pins – so with one eye on the age rating on the front of these boxes, it's easy to see why the Jurassic team has stuck to its original, playable raptor.

If we ever get another display-focused 18+ LEGO Jurassic Park set, though – like last year's 76956 T. rex Breakout – we’d love to see the LEGO Group come up with an accurately-sized Velociraptor figure. The blueprints are right there in 76961 Visitor Centre: T. rex & Raptor Attack.

The full range of LEGO Jurassic Park 30th anniversary sets is available now. Check out our reviews of all five here.

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