I didn't like this as a "dimetrodon", not because dimetrodons weren't actually dinosaurs, but because the front and back legs don't match up properly.

Fun fact: Lego has only made three Dimetrodons, and this was before Jurassic World sets!

Boy, these old dinos are truly primitive. Wish they made this one in molded form.

Huboy...Jurassic Park/World's reeeally cutting corners. This one looks like it needs to go 'back to the plant':)

@MeisterDad:
It should be possible to figure out which version was available where you live, and easiest to just assume that's what you found.

The babies were the bad combination of of bricks and some special molded parts.
Just like some of the ninjago dragons.

@StyleCounselor said:
"Boy, these old dinos are truly primitive. Wish they made this one in molded form."

You wanted molded, 6721 contains the adult version

I was wondering why it didn't show I owned this when I moused over the set number (I love that feature), until I realized that this was the polybag version, and I had the boxed one. And I agree with @Spritetoggle that the baby dinos (even when the creature represented weren't dinosaurs) had charm. Not the same kind of charm as today's molded dino-babies, but their own kind of charm.

Also, Spritetoggle, I roll to disbelieve.

@watcher21 said:
"The babies were the bad combination of of bricks and some special molded parts.
Just like some of the ninjago dragons.

@StyleCounselor said:
"Boy, these old dinos are truly primitive. Wish they made this one in molded form."

You wanted molded, 6721 contains the adult version"

Now, I want that one (Mosasaurus) brick-built, but HUGE! Big enough to swallow the molded Indominous Rex.

I have the boxed version. I found one in a bargain bin.
In 2008.
For one euro.

Suffice to say, it was a 'pity buy' of sorts. Back then it was always exciting to find sets from years earlier because 2001 was a completely different era from 2008.

I mean, in 2001 you had the weirdest themes kicking around. Licenses were still a relatively new thing and had yellow skins (first year of Harry Potter, anyone?), Bionicle had just started and we still had the myriad of colors in lego's palatte. In 2008 we got blue 3L technic pins, fleshies, the new grays were old news, lego as a whole had shifted to focus on the brick again and Bionicle was nearing its climax and had only 2 years left to go. Stuff like Belville and Clickets were also out.
So finding something from that many years ago was always fun!

That said, this is also one of my most boring sets. It's barely posable. Those arms and head aren't anything like the real Dimetrodon at all! And as I grew more knowledgeable, having a Synapsid grouped in with dinosaurs is just the icing on the years past due date sand blue cake.

Seriously, look up stem-mammals, proto-mammals or Synapsids (the former two terms are a bit outdated). They were a group of somewhat reptile-like creatures living in the Permian (the period before the Great Dying when life got the closest to being completely eradicated on the planet. After that came the Mesozoic, the 'age of the dinosaurs') that filled a lot of niches that were then left vacent for other creatures to take over again. You had hippo-like creatures, 'cow'-like creatures, wolf-like creatures etc. But they were all more closely related to mammals than to other animals. Mammalia even got its start through one of the Synapsid lineages. Fascinating stuff. The Paleozoic era deserves more spotlight in general.
Of course, the Dimetrodon lineages came quite early and are distantly -albeit relatively closely- related to what came after. Still, not a dinosaur at all.

@Randomness said:
"This is also exactly the same as 7003, which was RSotD on April 22nd, 2020."

I also have the boxed version 7003. No regrets.

Holy cow these were creepy

I personally think these baby dinosaurs (or not-really-dinosaurs, I dunno, I'm no expert) were cute. I mean, they do look like they were built out of the bin of leftover parts from the main Dinosaurs sets; but to my eyes they still have their own kind of charm - even if it isn't of the scientifically accurate variety!

I thought of getting one of the main dinosaurs at the time, but never did; they were pretty cool but because of the big specialised parts didn't feel like good value for money... plus, that was when I was kind of in my "if it doesn't have minifigures and isn't Slizer/Bionicle, I'm not that interested in it" phase regarding Lego, so they kinda slipped by me. In the end, the only parts from them I got were the ones that were reused in the Orient Expedition elephants a couple of years later.

... I literally won this fellow on Ebay last night. How bizarre.

@Binnekamp:
So I guess the relevant question is, just how many of the "dinosaurs" they've produced over the years are actual dinosaurs, and how many fall into other categories? I'm pretty sure anything that flies or swims is not a dinosaur, for starters.

@TannerTheHunter said:
"... I literally won this fellow on Ebay last night. How bizarre. "

You have my condolences...

Dimetrodon't

Thankfully we have more articulated dinosaurs now like 76960. Oh, wait...

@PurpleDave said:
" @Binnekamp:
So I guess the relevant question is, just how many of the "dinosaurs" they've produced over the years are actual dinosaurs, and how many fall into other categories? I'm pretty sure anything that flies or swims is not a dinosaur, for starters.

@TannerTheHunter said:
"... I literally won this fellow on Ebay last night. How bizarre. "

You have my condolences..."

No need. I honestly prefer these blockier bois to the over-detailed modern ones in licensed stuff. I also scored the Baby Ankylosaurus and can't wait to build them.

Hm, six of the eight brick-built dinosaurs from 2001 have (already) been selected as RSOTD (cf. https://brickset.com/sets/theme-Dinosaurs/year-2001).
But none of the four moulded beasts.

Dimetrodon... yeah sure keep telling yourself that buddy...

I got all four of the larger sets in the Dinosaurs theme, but none of the smaller four or eight, like this. I wish I had, if only to complete the line, and to have a few more of the parts.

Though the small ones from this line (like not-a-true-dinosaur here) do tend to look goofy, they have their charm, and the four big ones are honestly kind of awesome. Note that all four of the larger ones had additional parts for multiple configurations; they were all basically 3-in-1 sets. I wish now I’d have gotten multiples of each, so I could have all the official builds built simultaneously.

As far as I can tell, this line sort of exemplified the second of four major design styles LEGO has used for dinosaurs (and, er, dinosaur-adjacent fauna like Dimetrodon, let’s say), aside from purely brick-built things like one finds in Creator. The first turned up in the Dino Island subtheme of Adventurers, and used specially molded dinosaurs. Then there were these guys, which were a mix of regular bricks along with special parts designed to make dinosaurs or other large critters, but in such a way as to be repurposed in various combos to make different animals (the large ones in particular benefiting from a versatile semi-generic “large animal body” element used here, in Alpha Team for a cyborg orca, in the next Adventurers subtheme Orient Expedition for elephants, in Star Wars for a dewback, etc.). These two approaches to LEGO dinosaurs overlapped, with these coming right on the heels of the earlier Adventurers style, and for a while when I was coming out of my dark ages it was possible to find both on store shelves at the same time. The LEGO Studios theme even used both approaches for LEGO’s first brushes with the Jurassic Park / World franchise, with an Adventurers-style Tyrannosaur (and baby Tyrannosaur) in the flagship set 1349, and a Dinosaurs-style Spinosaurus in 1379 (featuring a Spinosaurus with the exact same design as the one used as an alternate build of the Dinosaurs set 6720, different only in colors and prints). The third major design style came just a few years later, with a new family of specialty molded dinosaurs that strayed a bit farther from LEGO’s usual design styles and towards other, action figure-driven toy lines, for the Dino Attack / Dino 2010 theme(s) of 2005 - mostly the same theme, but with different names and different versions of some of the sets for the European and North American markets. Finally, five years later still brought the Dino theme, which appears to be conceptually a blend of Adventurers’ Dino Island and Dino 2010 / Attack, with maybe a little Jurassic Park, and which went once again with molded dinosaurs, somewhat akin to the old Adventurers ones but more in line with how LEGO’s general design language for animal figures has evolved over the years. When LEGO returned to the Jurassic franchise with Jurassic World in 2015, they opted to keep and build upon the dinosaur styles from the 2010 Dino line, and that remains the foundation of the Jurassic Park / World sets they’ve continued to do since then.

(It is quite the collision course to wacky misunderstandings that LEGO in 2005 had a theme called Dino 2010, and then *in* 2010 had another theme called Dino…)

I don't know if it's a dinosaur or not, and I have my own opinion on whether it's a good set or not.

But I know for a fact that my 6-year-old would kill to have this one.

And so LEGO had a success!

@PurpleDave This is Canada. I’ve gotten bins from kindly old British ladies who bought stuff for their 55 year-old kids back in the home country, a town plan board from a 70 year old man who was a kid in Germany, and more than once Ive come across US versions of sets like the Galaxy Explorer with their peculiar set numbers (they happened to have paperwork or boxes to determine that). Here we had a lot of imports besides the local Samsonite. So it’s nice to guess based on geography but many times it’s the provenance provided by the seller that nails it down. I have dozens of stories from sellers who shared the history of the collections I was buying. Part of the charm for me.

@TannerTheHunter:
I got 4078 for $10. It was the cheapest way to get two orange 1x1 Technic bricks. I did build it, but using the black ones I'd pulled out of the MOC that the orange ones went into. It's sitting in front of my TV. I can't remember when, but probably a few years ago, it fell over on its side, and I haven't bothered to do anything about it since.

@Blondie_Wan:
I think they were more like 2-in-1, but in cases where they came with both legs and flippers, and two different heads, you could swing 4-in-1 if you didn't mind them having zero basis in reality (like a two-legged Mosasaurus). If you got both blue or both green sets, there were probably other possibilities if you combined them. Anyways, the only things from the Dinosaurs line that I got in original release were the Mosasaurus and the Brachiosaurus, which I used to build the Mosasaurus and a Plesiosaur, aka Nessie. I think both of them spent some time as aquarium decorations.

@MeisterDad:
Of course, that’s not always a reliable gauge anyways. I’ve never left the North American continent, but I have a few Kabaya exclusives from Japan, and some European exclusive polybags and Kanohi, plus I bought a ton of S1 CMF Robots for less than MSRP from some seller in Germany, where they apparently weren’t that popular at time of release. I think I own more European copies of the Robot than North American, just from that one sale. If my collection went up for sale in its current state, the Kabaya sets should be easy to deduce due to having exclusive parts, most of the EU Robots are still in packets that have two barcodes that don’t include the UPC version, and most of the EU Kanohi were never released in other sets. The two Toy Story polybags that I got from the UK, however, could have easily been pieces together from loose parts. The same could be said of this set. None of the sand-blue parts or the dark-grey sail were available in less than four different sets, and the rest of the parts look fairly common. In contrast, the forelimbs only showed up once in sand-green, and the Tinysaur head has appeared in five colors that were only used once. These days it gets even messier, since some sets can be built entirely off PAB.

So, this must be one of those famous "Whateverosaur", they speak of in a World of Warcraft quest :

"Incendosaurs? Whateverosaur is More Like It"

https://www.wowhead.com/classic/quest=7727/incendosaurs-whateverosaur-is-more-like-it

The Questgiver, Hansel Heavyhands complains about his fat fingers in a previous quest : https://www.wowhead.com/classic/quest=7723/curse-these-fat-fingers so he surely would need the player to build this set for him too.

@TeriXeri said:
"So, this must be one of those famous "Whateverosaur", they speak of in a World of Warcraft quest :

"Incendosaurs? Whateverosaur is More Like It"

https://www.wowhead.com/classic/quest=7727/incendosaurs-whateverosaur-is-more-like-it

The Questgiver, Hansel Heavyhands complains about his fat fingers in a previous quest : https://www.wowhead.com/classic/quest=7723/curse-these-fat-fingers so he surely would need the player to build this set for him too."

What the flux?* Didn't think I'd be randomly transported back over a decade to good times, tonight. It's put a... perhaps slightly melancholy smile on my face. Thank you.

* Since we're referencing Vanilla quest names.

@Spritetoggle said:
" @TeriXeri said:
"So, this must be one of those famous "Whateverosaur", they speak of in a World of Warcraft quest :

"Incendosaurs? Whateverosaur is More Like It"

https://www.wowhead.com/classic/quest=7727/incendosaurs-whateverosaur-is-more-like-it

The Questgiver, Hansel Heavyhands complains about his fat fingers in a previous quest : https://www.wowhead.com/classic/quest=7723/curse-these-fat-fingers so he surely would need the player to build this set for him too."

What the flux?* Didn't think I'd be randomly transported back over a decade to good times, tonight. It's put a... perhaps slightly melancholy smile on my face. Thank you.

* Since we're referencing Vanilla quest names."

My favorite WoW character from when I played (circa 2007 - 2009) was the archeologist guy by the "pod racing" area / salt flats. He was a straight-up Indiana Jones rip-off*, kind of like our dear friend Johnny Thunder! I just wish I could remember his name...

*His quests even referenced the Raiders theme music, among other things.