In the mid-1980s, Osama “Doehei” Myawaki, owner of Kaiyodo in Kyoto, Japan, asked me to name and give an origin story to a new dragon resin assembly kit that his company would soon be putting out.
I came up with the name Megarex, meaning “Huge King,” and described the creature as a dinosaur that had escaped the effects of the asteroid collision with Earth and the Late Cretaceous mass extinctions by taking refuge in a mysterious cave. There the dinosaur was subjected to powerful unknown forces that, coupled with the enormous passage of time, mutated the animal into a winged dragon (or kaiju) that I named Megarex.
The advertisement for the kit debuted on the back cover of a 1986 issue of Artpla, Kaiyodo’s Hobby Magazine (below).
