Ornitholestes Stop Motion Dinosaur Armature

Own a unique piece of stop-motion animation history with this original puppet armature of the Ornitholestes dinosaur from the 1970 educational short film Dinosaurs, the Terrible Lizards. The film traces the history and eventual extinction of the dinosaurs, all brought to life through stop-motion animation. Ornitholestes — its name means “bird robber” — was a small, agile, slender theropod from the Late Jurassic period, roughly 150 million years ago. It lived in North America alongside giant sauropods, and its lightweight, speedy build let it hunt small prey such as lizards and early mammals. Though only about the size of a modern wolf, it embodies the predatory traits captured in the word “dinosaur” itself, which translates literally from the Greek as “terrible lizard.” An armature is the internal skeleton of a stop-motion puppet, and this piece offers a rare, close-up look at how those puppets are constructed and fabricated. This particular armature is especially notable as the first ball-and-socket armature ever made by animation and visual effects supervisor Harry Walton. It appears and is discussed in Walton’s book The Magic of Visual Effects and Stop Motion Animation, making this a well-documented and rare piece of behind-the-scenes filmmaking history.