Scary Monsters

The power debuts with Dr. Ferdinand, and after his death Diego Brando keeps the transformation through the Saint's Left Eye and grows his own take on the Stand. When Diego shifts into a Utahraptor, stripes reading "DIO" spread over his body, his hair hardens into spikes tipped with rounded knobs at the back of his head, and scraps of his checkered shirt remain across his chest. Given enough time under its influence, he can settle into a more human silhouette that still keeps fangs, claws, saurian legs, a tail, and a crazed grin. Because the Stand is fused to Diego's own flesh, its look follows whatever shape he currently wears, and the smaller dinosaurs it spawns appear in blue and brown wherever color is used.

The Stand channels the raw power and speed of prehistoric reptiles and can also seize command of a person through the barest touch, which makes confronting it perilous. Its central trick is a virus that reshapes living creatures into dinosaurs and hands their control to the user, needing only skin contact to start, as when Diego brushed the coat of his horse Silver Bullet to convert its fleas into miniature beasts. The transformed dinosaurs can pass the infection along by biting or clawing, yet a grave wound to the user erases the power and snaps every dinosaur back to normal. The change is drawn inconsistently, gradual the first time and instant afterward, and it shows no ceiling on distance or numbers, having swept an entire village into a pack of dinosaurs. Anything from raptors to a T-Rex to tiny creatures is fair game; Ferdinand rode or hid inside his converts, while Diego prefers armies of small carnivorous hybrids grown from birds, rats, and fleas, or a dinosaur made from his own horse.

Unlike Ferdinand, Diego can remake his own body into a dinosaur outright or as a partial hybrid, and the fused Stand lets him trade blows with other Stands and injure them with bare hands. A partial change grants heightened senses and might, boosting his stamina, strength, and speed enough to rival Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, and it gives him motion-based sight so the faster a thing moves the more clearly he tracks and dodges it, though slow attacks slip past that vision. He uses the same sense to read the terrain and plot the best line for his horse during the race, and he can assume both large and small dinosaur forms at will. Later he reveals a fossilizing trick that locks his converts into a hardened, dormant state, whether fusing a body into rock or a tree for camouflage or reshaping one into something like candle holders.

Dr. Ferdinand is the original wielder, exploiting the virus to travel on his victims and set them fighting for him. Diego Brando becomes the definitive user after gaining the Saint's Left Eye, developing the self-transformation and fossilization that Ferdinand never showed. Araki has cited the film Jurassic Park as the Stand's inspiration.