Dasta is a small green meat-eating dinosaur, slim and lightly built, making him very fast and able to sneak up on other dinosaurs. Despite his small size, his sharp claws and rows of sharp teeth make him a dangerous opponent. Unlike Ardul, his eyes are green and are equally sized. He has a brown stripe or finlike ridge running down his neck and back, more prominent in his redesign after The Mind-Swap Menace.
Biography[]
Crool Dasta is an antagonist from the fourth Astrosaurs book, The Mind-Swap Menace. He is a crooked coelophysis inventor who robbed a raptor bank to pay for the necessary materials for his latest invention, hiring another coelophysis, Ardul, to help him.
Crool Dasta first appeared in The Mind-Swap Menace, where, before the story's events, he robbed the Universal Raptor Bank to pay for his latest invention, and hired another coelophysis, Ardul, to aid him in the theft. Because the dim-witted Ardul forgot to wear a mask, the raptors captured both fugitives and sent them to space prison. However, Dasta managed to hide his invention, the replicator, and hid it in the Geldos Cluster before he was arrested. The pair were freed when a meteor struck the prison where the pair were held and the officers evacuated.
Eventually the Sauropod came across the abandoned space prison and Teggs and Iggy entered to put up a warning beacon. However, Dasta locked them both in a cell and put them to sleep using gas. He and Ardul took them to the offic
ers' lounge and tied them up. When they woke up, Dasta and Ardul used Dasta's mind-swapper to switch bodies with Teggs and Iggy respectively. Then they tricked Arx and Gipsy into taking them off the ship while Ardul placed the real astrosaurs in a rubbish chute to get them out of the way. Dasta was able to take on the captain's role, but Ardul had difficulty resisting his carnivorous instincts and nearly gave them away. The evil genius successfully persuaded Arx to set course for Geldos, but they eventually ran into a raptor death ship that belonged to a division of the Raptor Border Patrol. Dasta wanted to fight the raptors, so Arx used a plan invented by Teggs to escape. As Dasta didn't know about this, his disguise fell apart and Arx and Gipsy were about to turn around when Ardul appeared and asked where the engine room was.
Dasta commanded him to take Gipsy and they left for Geldos in one of the Sauropod's shuttles, after warning Arx not to follow them. Dasta, Ardul, and Gipsy dug up the replicator on the surface. However, Ardul tried to take the machine and Dasta challenged him, beginning a fight. While the pair were distracted, the Sauropod dropped its load of plants on top of them and Arx switched their minds back to their own bodies. Dasta and Ardul tried to wriggle away to safety, but were captured by a robot T. rex guard and returned to prison.
However, Dasta reappeared in Revenge of the FANG as another FANG member, without Ardul this time, alongside Tonka, Attila, and King Albu. He said that he wanted revenge against Teggs along with the other members of the group and showed the suspicious stegosaurus that his captured friends Dutch and Blink weren't dino-droids by scratching Dutch. He reappeared in the final battle on Tartara and challenged Teggs's sample of Mega-Spray Y with Attila and Blink.
Dasta then shrugged off Teggs's ray gun with King Albu, calmly replying that he wasn't alive and, therefore, couldn't die. He wasn't the real Dasta, who was still in prison, but was only a mechanical copy that was created for Attila's plan to destroy the Mega-Spray Y and eventually to replace all living things with robots. All of Attila's Dasta-droids were destroyed in the resulting battle, and, as of now, the real Dasta is still safely locked away in jail for the time being.
Personality[]
Dasta is surprisingly competent on his own, viewing the dense Ardul as a hinderance (in fact, Dasta would probably not have been captured by the raptors if it had not been for Ardul's incompetence) and only keeping him around out of necessity. He feels no loyalty to his partner and is happy to double-cross him or leave him behind when it suits him.
Dasta is very proud and convinced of his own importance, and gets angry when he meets dinosaurs who don't know who he is. He is tricky, conniving, and underhanded, using any means necessary to get what he wants. Dasta also likes money and uses his inventions to increase his own wealth. While able to adapt to a situation quickly, Dasta easily gets frustrated with other dinosaurs and is quick to yell at them. He is a skilled mechanic, inventor, and engineer, and is not to be underestimated as a threat despite his small size.
According to their collector cards, Dasta and Ardul come from different planets-Dasta hails from Coel Major while Ardul is from Coel Minor. This could explain their different hide colors, as Dasta is green and Ardul is brown.
Dasta's name is probably a play on the word "dastard", a word for a sneaky, malicious coward. The word also sounds similar to 'dastardly'. Interestingly, his first and middle names, 'Crool' and 'Narsti', are corruptions of the words 'cruel' and 'nasty', referring to his behaviour.
On the FANG collector card, Dasta has sprouted a brown finlike ridge on his neck. In his original cover illustration, he has a dark green neck and no ridge. However, the original illustration was based on the cover style for books 1-4, so that could explain why his appearance changed.
Dasta is a Coelophysis bauri, a small North American theropod dinosaur that is one of the earliest dinosaurs known.
Real Coelophysis may have had simple feathers.
Dasta and Ardul are the only theropod antagonists so far who belong to a Triassic species of dinosaur.
While Dasta threatens to eat the Sauropod crew after he takes the replicator, Coelophysis would only be interested in eating prey smaller than itself - such as fish, insects, and mammal-like reptiles. Sprite and the Dimorphodon would realistically be the only crew members in danger from him.
While some herbivores do occasionally eat a little meat for extra nutrients or as a last resort, if Dasta repeatedly consumed dinosaur meat while in a Stegosaurus body it would make him sick - Stegosaurus’s teeth and digestive system did not evolve to digest meat. While in Ardul's case this could be explained by his stupidity, Dasta is smart enough to know this. In the same way, since Coelophysis was an obligate carnivore which had to eat meat to stay healthy, Teggs giving Dasta's body ferns would make him very sick.
In the American edition of The Mind-Swap Menace, Dasta is depicted on the cover as a yellow dinosaur that is covered in red spots. He is somewhat larger than his previous portrayal in the English edition of the book, where he is a small green meat-eating dinosaur.
