Linde is an Austrian company producing substitute coffee – at the beginning in the 50s, because real coffee was hard to get, later because some people really enjoyed this substitute from malt, barley, rye and chicory. Occasionaly the company would put collectable little plastic premiums into the packagings in order to promote their product. Luckily for us collectors, they could not do without dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals.
In 2009, my goodness, was this really seven years ago, I did a review of their Tyrannosaurus and their Sphenacodon, which was a really odd and interesting choice.
Everyone reading this knows everything about Dimetrodon, I take this for granted. So let´s concentrate on the very figure here.
It is made of army-green plastic in different shades and every peace is unique in its marbling. Some may be uniquely green, some may be more marbled, some come darker, some brighter, which results from the production process and probably the rareness of material in those days, too. It is eight centimetres long and four centimetres tall thanks to its iconic sail.
Linde Dimetrodon, as all the Linde figures, obviously refers to its artwork shown at the great dinosaur mural at Yale, Rudolph Zallinger´s classic prehistoric landscape inspiring lots of people to become palaeontologists, artists or both. The usual depiction of both dinosaurs and non-dinosaurs was odd-giant – lizard-style these days, so one can´t blame the sculptors for that. Neither can we for the incorrectness of its head, especially its chops. Linde Dimetrodon, take a closer look at your one, looks as if it was smiling to you from out of the depths of time. Its eyes look very calm, too.
I really love this figure both for its appearance and its own history as an object. It is sixty or so years old, and I wonder who saw it first, unpacking it, rejoicing, showing it to her or his siblings or parents, playing with it, imagineing age-old landscapes. I wonder how it came into my hands (per ebay, yes, but what had happened before?) I wonder how many Linde Dimetrodons are still out there overall. It´s fascinating to think of myself as the keeper of a figure over the next decades and then passing it on to possible new generations who may even read my review in a digging- act of internet-archaeology in sixty or so years.
You know me, I´m still a monochrome fan, so it would be careless not to refer to the other two monochrome Dimetrodons out there. I prefer Linde Dimetrodon over the Marx version and prefer the Invicta version over both Marx and Linde.
Still, this classic figure is a valuable contribution to my collection.
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What a unique little critter!