This Krayt Dragon Resin Pendant contains fragments of the film prop skeleton used in Star Wars: A New Hope. The "Krayt Dragon," a long serpentine skeleton seen in the desert of Tatooine, is encountered by C-3PO soon after separating from R2-D2 at the beginning of the film.

The pendant comes on an 18" waxed cotton cord along with a handsome storage box. An informational card is included that serves as statement of authenticity.

After the original filming in Tunisia, the production team left the Krayt Dragon as well as several sets to rot in the desert. Over the decades, the area has become something of an attraction with locals excavating material and selling it to film location tourists. However, while some sets have remained, the dragon was eventually lost to the shifting dunes.

As noted, this pendant includes several fragments of the lost Krayt Dragon skeleton prop, which was recovered from the desert before its disappearance. The pattern of these fragments varies from pendant to pendant.

The skeleton is a fiberglass model, which was originally used as a Diplodocus skeleton in the 1975 film One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing. Its inclusion was a matter of happenstance; when some forgotten equipment needed to be flown out to the shooting location, the skeleton was tossed in with the cargo simply because they had space for it. The creature would not even be given a canonical name until some years later.

After the original filming in Tunisia, the production team abandoned the Krayt Dragon as well as several sets in the desert. The entire area is considered a significant tourist attraction, bringing in thousands of visitors per year. Locals of the area conduct tours of the ruins and salvage the abandoned sets for sale.

Science has also benefited from the remains. NASA uses the position of the Star Wars sets to track the progress of large, crescent-shaped sand dunes called "barchans" which sweep through the area at 15 meters per year.

Arial photography gives scientists a clear reference point by which to measure the movements of these dunes. Thanks to the leftover sets, there's something that can be used to help tell the scale of the image, unlike other parts of the desert that only have sand.

Side Note: The largest barchans in the solar system are on Mars. Known as megabarchans, these massive dunes reach over 500 meters high and 6-7 kilometers in length. Perhaps someday film crews will leave behind props there as well!

The Krayt Dragon recently returned to the Star Wars universe when a living specimen featured on an episode of The Mandalorian. Though the show returned to Tatooine, production took place on a stage in California instead of North Africa.

The Mandalorian shoots with a massive LED screen as its backdrop, running a game engine in order to build digital environments. With this technology, they can shoot a scene set on an icy mountain back to back with a desert ravine. Though this technique is vastly different from the on-location shooting Lucas and his crew did in the 70s, it retains the spirit of efficiency and scale that caused them to choose Tunisia in the first place.

Als George Lucas nach einem Drehort für eine „weit, weit entfernte Galaxie“ suchte, entschied er sich für Tunesien an der Mittelmeerküste. Inspiriert von Arrakis aus Frank Herberts bahnbrechendem Roman Dune wollte Lucas sein Weltraumepos auf einem...