Off (Or On!?) With Their Heads: Every Non-Human LEGO Head

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With only two weeks left to enter, our pi-RATS and BUG-aneers competition got me thinking—just how many creature heads are there in the LEGO ecosystem? Since human heads aren’t allowed in our contest, what else is there to create a pirate crew?

At the risk of stating the bleedin’ obvious, non-human species outweigh humankind many, many times over. At your most basic, any animals that show up in pirates sets throughout the LEGO universe could be a crew. On a quick check, I can see sharks, parrots, crocodiles, monkeys, octopuses, fish, mermaids, sawfish, snakes, frogs, crabs and rats and horses.

To be honest, looking at this pistol-wielding monkey and cutlass-toting shark, the non-humans are already stepping up to the mark!

But if we step beyond your traditional pi-RAT companions, there is a whole other world of opportunity in the LEGO ecosystem to explore non-human heads.

Heads Up

At one end of the scale, you have ‘non-human-heads-you-can-fit-on-a-minifig-torso’—sadly this isn’t a uniquely specified category in BrickLink (it’s mostly, but not exclusively, in ‘Minifigure, Head, Modified’) so I took one for the team and dived in to find out what is available… There were more than I expected.

A tiny selection of my favourites are below. If I showed any more we’d never finish this article!

Head and Shoulders

Upon further research, there is a whole sub-class of more complicated minifigure heads: modified ones that don’t fit on a standard minifig torso. Here is a sampling of what is available:

One of my all-time favourite fictional creatures are the Minions; I just can’t get enough of them. I could easily see them running a banana-based piratical paradise!

Heads or Tails

Getting a bit further away from standard LEGO minifigures, there are way more Minecraft creatures than I realised – everything from earthly varieties of axolotls, bees, bats, bunnies, cats, chickens, cows, a dolphin, a donkey, foxes, goats, hogs, horses, llamas, ocelots, pandas, parrots, pigs, polar bears, pufferfish, sheep, a silverfish, spiders, squid, a turtle and wolves, to the less corporal and fantasy options of dragons, ghasts, guardians, magma, phantoms, a ravager and slime.

The axolotls are just so cute! Imagine them with a pirate hat!

Using Your Head

Stepping away from minifigs and modified heads, there are also creature heads in both System and Duplo, and in constraction too. Setting aside purely brick-built ones (where anything is possible), there are a huge range of moulded heads pieces too, for example:

  • The late 1990s Freestyle/Creator sets included dogs, horses, elephants and camels.

  • The 2000s, for all their problems, included wonderful Duplo head-pieces

  • Ninjago’s debut year of 2011 started with beautiful, moulded dragon heads that have returned in the 2020s after many years of equally beautiful brick-built ones. (I don’t think there has been a single year of Ninjago sets without at least one dragon.)

  • Elves’ second year in 2016 gave us more stunning, moulded dragon heads and followed it up in 2018 with foxes, a turtle and a lion.

  • Legends of Chima’s CHI constraction line in the 2010s super-sized some fantastic creatures.

And all that without even touching on dinosaurs, which are a vast resource on their own. BrickLink lists 49 decorated dinosaur heads (and half a dozen undecorated ones). All of these, have been released this century, and since 2015 have been exclusively part of the Jurassic World ecosystem.

Personally, I’m a sucker for the old-school Dinosarus sets—clunky and naïve as they may be—the modularity of the builds is brilliant and I love the moulded tops to the boxes.

In Way Over My Head

When I sat to write this I thought, “This should be reasonably simple. I’ve got a bunch of creature heads in my collection; I’ll look at those and then I’ll branch out into minifig-based ones.” But the more I looked at it the more options I saw—and the bigger the can of worms I found to bait the hook of inspiration. There are probably loads of creature heads I haven’t covered (including costumed figures!), but I hope I’ve given a taster of what’s available.

In all honesty, the possibilities do indeed seem endless! Now, it’s time to go head to head and get your head out of the clouds to build something amazing off the top of your head for our contest that will turn the heads of the judges!

Did we miss any head categories? What’s your favorite non-human LEGO head? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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