The Lego Natural History Museum, and the question of scale

For my birthday this year, my wife bought me the newish Lego kit Natural History Museum 10326. (Well: actually she bought me a Chinese knock-off for 1/3 the price, but that’s not the point.) It’s a lovely kit and I had a great time building it. One of the exhibits that you build for the museum is a sauropod skeleton — recognizably a brachiosaur. But as previously documented on this blog, I also have a much larger Lego brachiosaur, built from the piece of the kit Dinosaur Fossils 21320. (That one was also a present from Fiona!) Here they are, side by side. So which brachiosaur is more accurately to scale? Lego is often considered to be in 42:1 scale, based on minifigure height of about 4 cm relative to a typical adult human height of about 1.68 m. (5 feet 6 inches). I measured the big brachiosaur at 37 cm high from the top of its plinth to the top of the head. At 42:1 scale, that’s 15.54 m. The smaller one is 15 cm tall from plinth to head, which at 42:1 scale is 6.30 m. The real…