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What ever happened to this? It is not listed in any of the books and not even listed in the Lone Wolf Army List (or at least I can't find it). I purchased this when it first came out and fortunately I have the White Dwarf Issues that has the stats, but it just seem to fell between the cracks. I just think it is a cool looking model.

It's in most recent Mordor book, I believe.

Thanks! That is the only book I don't have.

WHAT is a "Great Beast of Gorgoroth?"

MB

One of these:

Well, that is actually kind of cool, even if a-canonical.

It is at least plausible, due to the Miocene era beast (I forget the actual terminology. I just remember that the Wargs in the first trilogy were actually Andrewsaurchus Mongoliensis, a carnivorous relative of the horse, that existed in China and East Asia roughly 7MYA).

But the first trilogy used a lot of Miocene and Paleocene animals. I think they should have stuck with Dire Wolves for the Wargs, though. People really complained about the Andrewsaurchus being used for the Wargs. They were WAY TOO BIG for one thing (the Andrewsaurchus is actually bigger than a horse). The Wargs are supposed to be large wolves, but still capable of slashing under a horse.

As for this beast of Gorgoroth. He does look like an animal that could be weilded as a weapon of war quite well.

I will have to see about adding something similar to my own Mordor Orcs when I get around to sculpting them later in the year.

MB


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I'll have to get one or two of these for my LotR armies of GW minis, though.

The rules I use require large elephantine beasts to be fielded in groups of two.

MB

I won't pretend to have canonical knowledge of all ancient beasts or anything, but while the Wargs in the original trilogy might have been partly based on the Andrewsaurchus Mongoliensis, they're clearly not the exact same thing. The Wargs have a distinctly and significantly different head and jaw. So a size difference isn't especially significant. They obviously followed the same design theory as they did for the humanoid races' and their clothing/weapons - simply taking and appropriating bits from various creatures until they had a design that they were happy with.

The design isn't a GW one, though - it's based on the "great beasts" of burden used to pull Grond in PJ's RotK. Except with a howdah instead, and the name being an extrapolation of the Book's term for them and an assumed place of origin.

I'm in full agreement with you on this model being a nice one. I've also got a pair of them on "the list" of things to buy one day...

 Azazelx wrote:
I won't pretend to have canonical knowledge of all ancient beasts or anything, but while the Wargs in the original trilogy might have been partly based on the Andrewsaurchus Mongoliensis, they're clearly not the exact same thing. The Wargs have a distinctly and significantly different head and jaw. So a size difference isn't especially significant.

Aye, that! I've always said that the wargs in the first trilogy look more like 'dire sheep' than anything, but I think that's pushing it. (though I feel obliged to say that the noble ovine is no bad thing, but not what Weta were going for, I think) They look pretty much nothing like what Andrewsarchus was popularly believed to look like, except for possessing fur and teeth. Especially 'cos there's only been one fossil found and that's an upper skull with a long, narrow, un-warg-like jaw.



These days it's thought that it might actually be an entelodont: one of a family of omnivorous, partially-predatory mammals looking like something between enormous warthogs or boars, and long-legged sprinting hippos. (related to both but more to the latter) Which might be appropriate mounts for Warhammer orcs but maybe not Middle-Earth varieties.

The design isn't a GW one, though - it's based on the "great beasts" of burden used to pull Grond in PJ's RotK. Except with a howdah instead, and the name being an extrapolation of the Book's term for them and an assumed place of origin.

They get, almost literally, a couple of words in the book: "Grond they named it, in memory of the Hammer of the Underworld of old. Great beasts drew it, orcs surrounded it, and behind walked mountain-trolls to wield it."
There's no direct RL analogue for the New Line/GW version AFAIK, but if it is based on prehistoric animals, there's a wealth of candidates for some influence: dinoceratans, brontotheres, and rhinocerotids, to name a few. And I think that's what makes it look good. More natural and believable than most monsters GW puts out...

 Azazelx wrote:
I won't pretend to have canonical knowledge of all ancient beasts or anything, but while the Wargs in the original trilogy might have been partly based on the Andrewsaurchus Mongoliensis, they're clearly not the exact same thing. The Wargs have a distinctly and significantly different head and jaw. So a size difference isn't especially significant. They obviously followed the same design theory as they did for the humanoid races' and their clothing/weapons - simply taking and appropriating bits from various creatures until they had a design that they were happy with.

The design isn't a GW one, though - it's based on the "great beasts" of burden used to pull Grond in PJ's RotK. Except with a howdah instead, and the name being an extrapolation of the Book's term for them and an assumed place of origin.

I'm in full agreement with you on this model being a nice one. I've also got a pair of them on "the list" of things to buy one day...

They look like a variant of a brontotherium. And yes, I know they are from the RotK.

And the Wargs have a different neck and head to make it easier for the Modelers to later interpose the 3D Warg over the horses ridden by the Orcs during shooting.

At a comic con party in 2004 or 5 (or was it 03???) I actually got to put this question to the head of digital design at Weta (about the Andrewsaurchus) and he was very impressed that I even knew the name, but said that was what they modeles them after, but shortened and broadened the snout a little, since that made it look hyena-like; easily done since the Andrewsaurchus already looks very much like a hyena, and when it was first found was placed in the same clade as the Hyena... Only later was it discovered (through examination of a femur found later, since the first was based solely on a skull) to be a relative of the horse.... What a strange thing evolution does.

MB

The squatter Andrewsarchus appearance is dated to before the discovery of some leg bones, which helped to definitively place it into the same clade as the horse.

They proliferate simply due to the preferences of some artists and continuing controversy over the size of the Andrewsarchus.



MB

Where to start...

Back when Andrewsarchus was discovered, there was already a bit of confusion about whether it was related to pigs or not, but it went into mesonychia - an extinct order of carnivorous mammals that were more closely related to ungulates than to the extant order carnivora, which includes all living terrestrial carnivorous mammals, including hyenas. So no, it wasn't placed in the same clade as the hyena, but it has always been seen as a 'relative of the horse', in a very loose sense.

I guess the hyena analogy comes about because of the rounded, crushing rear teeth combined with the wide jaw muscle attachment areas at the rear of the skull; and also the assumptions that the unknown postcrania of Andrewsarchus would have obviously been huge and probably followed the general mesonychian bauplan of a long body and short legs. So not very sprightly. Great bone-crushing abilities + a low turn of speed immediately suggests a scavenging lifestyle, so it's been popularly viewed and depicted as a 'super-hyena'. But as for 'looking very much like a hyena'; well, as mentioned the best remains we have consist of one skull and scraps of other bones (to be honest the only reference to a long-lost Andrewsarchus femur I can find is one youtube comment, and I hope you'll forgive me if I dismiss it as evidence. Happy to consider anything else you can show me, though.) and see how that skull compares with a hyena...



These days, being reassessed as an entelodont or close entelodont relative (see the first 'entelodont' pic in my last post: that's the American Museum of Natural History's illustration of an Andrewsarchus!), it's placed within the order artiodactyla (even toed ungulates; horses are in the order perissodactyla, odd toed ungulates) as a sister-group to hippos and whales. It's been moved only marginally towards horses from it's previous position, and being an ungulate doesn't automatically make it a long-legged runner like a horse, let alone a vaguely horse-shaped giant wolf. It is likely a long-legged runner as an entelodont(oid), compared to it's earlier status as a mesonychian; but again, that's not going to mean it looks like a big wolf, or a big hyena, or whatever. (I've also been sceptical about some artists giving established entelodonts big, black, doglike noses)

To tie that, vaguely, tenuously, back to the topic of Middle-Earth creatures: I don't doubt that Weta designed the first trilogy's wargs after some conception of Andrewsarchus, but if you don't mind me saying, I don't think they were being quite as clever in some ways as they thought they were.

I tip my hat there.

The designation arguments about the hyena relations came about due to maseter muscle placements and the teeth you mentioned.

One of my professors was a graduate student on the dig that returned to China in the 1990's, which was very unproductive, but since the mid-00's, there have been a great many more such expeditions, one of which turned up portions of a femur and the talus, but... I cannot find anything online, and it will be a while before I can contact the professor at UCLA to get any information about it (the find is recent, dating to the early-00's, so there may yet be nothing published about it).

As to its relations to the entelodont, that too comes about due to the discovery of some teeth in China that seem to be those of an enteldont (tusk and carnassials), but as I belong to the Southern California school, we reject these as being Entelodont teeth (not really, it's a pride thing with the Enteldont being local to Los Angeles). Personally... I do not like Entelodonts. Something about them makes me want to slap them and yell "stop it!"

But, when I get back in touch with the guys at UCLA, I will let you know the status of the bones they dug up which include the leg bits (BTW, the leg bits are why the AMNH shows the Andrewsarchus as having proportions more similar to the horse than the more dog-like former images... If you notice many of those earlier images also show a paw structure, rather than a hoove structure).

Lastly, I agree with you about Weta. I find them to be not at all clever. I respect their skill as artists, but I will never forgive them for what they did to Tolkien's works, and the gross license they took in representing so many things in a fashion completely at odds with recorded fact regarding Middle-earth's inhabitants).

The biggest problem I have is with their forced insertion of asiatic elements all over the freaking place (Elven swords, flora, fauna, the Haradrim being modeled after Southern Pacific Islanders, etc.). Middle-earth, and it's immediate surrounds are Northern European with Western Asia and Northern Africa. So saeth John Ronald Ruel Tolkien.

MB