This is a 3,800-year-old knick-knack from an Egyptian tomb. Over the last hundred years, it's become a mascot of sorts for The Met. If you take a close look at the lotus markings, they're really just made out of triangles and dots.
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| Painting by Charles R. Knight |
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| These things said "Hong Kong" when I was a kid. |
Uintatheriums are a somewhat odd extinct mammal. The tusks give them a certain resemblance to hippos (they're not meaningfully related to any modern mammal). Uintatheriums started popping up in bags of chinasaurs around the time that Gary Gygax was playing with
other cheap plastic critters in his basement, but never got turned into anything iconic, D&D-wise.
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| Reaper 77144: Mummy for scale. |
This sort of thing is what happens when I play with cheap plastic critters in my man-cave. Acrylic paint, an alcohol pen, and a paperclip used to wire him to the Magic-Sculpt base. The biggest time consumption came from the cleanup stage - the molds have not aged well. One big advantage over doing this in the '70s is that I can pull up a 3-d view of the original hippo's markings while I've got the pen in hand. He's deliberately glossy because "William" was originally glazed with blue glass. He seems to be perfectly serviceable as a statue, living construct, or magical critter. I kind of picture him as an immobile oracle that speaks with a lisp due to the tusks.
