‘My wife nearly left me’: retirement hobby launches a thriving business for ‘Dinosaur king’ Mark Pottinger
A life-size model dinosaur – like this 16m-long titanosaur – is just the thing to brighten up your garden, says Mark Pottinger.
If you’ve got a spare $58,000 and a strange urge to own a life-size titanosaur – and looking at this photo, who isn’t tempted? – you should visit Mark Pottinger in suburban Melbourne. He’ll understand. His own dinosaur obsession started with a whim, too: five years ago, after retiring from the recycled plastics industry, he went over to China intending to buy a single replica T-Rex from the factory where they’re made – and came back with “about 20” life-size model dinosaurs in a couple of shipping containers. “My wife Karen nearly left me,” he laughs.
What started as a retirement hobby has turned into a thriving business. Their 4ha home at Langwarrin now doubles as a showroom for his firm Epic Animals, which deals in all sorts of lifelike model fauna. Turn into their driveway and you’re greeted by a 2.8m-tall gorilla nicknamed King Kong. A little further in there’s a menagerie of giraffes, crocs, rhinos and elephants, then the collection of 40-odd dinosaurs: pterodactyls with 6m wingspans, velociraptors (the vicious pack hunters of Jurassic Park fame) and families of brontosaurus, stegosaurus, triceratops and T-Rex. The daddy of them all is Jack, the 16m-long, 800kg steel-and-fibreglass titanosaur he’s pictured with here. Pottinger, 60, had Jack made in Manila; the National Dinosaur Museum in Canberra helped with the design. Fossilised remnants of these giant herbivores, which roamed Earth for 70 million years, are found on every continent.
“I’m inspired by dinosaurs, and I love what I do – this is my calling,” says Pottinger, who happily reports that his wife of 23 years soon forgave him for the China Incident. “She knows I’m a bit of a dreamer. And I knew I could do something with this business.” He rents or sells the models to zoos, shopping centres and events firms, mainly, though he did once sell six T-Rexs – at $50,000 each – to a company that runs childcare centres. And then there are the customers who “want to make a statement at home”, he says. “Typically it’s blokes aged 40 to 60 who are doing up their pool area or back yard, and are looking for an unusual feature – like a brontosaurus coming out of the greenery. Imagine sitting there with a beer, looking at that.” Chaps, a tip: make sure you clear it with your beloved first...
To see more of Wilhelm Philipp’s photography, go to https://www.wilhelmphilipp.com/