Tsintaosaurus (CollectA)

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Available from Amazon.com here.

Tsintaosaurus was a duck-billed dinosaur, or hadrosaur, that lived in China about 84 to 71 million years ago.  Like many Lambeosaurs, Tsintaosaurus is believed to have sported a fancy crest on its head.  In this case, the crest is a skinny rod that stuck out above of the dinosaur’s face much like a mythical unicorn’s horn.  A while back it was believed that this crest is actually just a piece of the animal’s top jaw that had broken and become bent upwards.  Then another specimen was found with the exact same feature, thus leading most people once again to believe that this animal indeed sported a unicorn crest.  Today I will be reviewing for you CollectA’s rather interesting rendition of this unicorn dinosaur.

Well let’s get it out of the way because I know you are only staring at one thing right now.  It looks like the figure has a man’s genitals sitting atop its head. This is mainly due to the fact that the sculptor of this piece (who had to have been in a spiteful mood that day) decided to add on two air sacs under rod-shaped crest.  Air sacs are commonly depicted on hadrosaurs for the sake of the animals being able to produce loud noises much like the inflatable sacs on modern day frogs, toads and Frigate Birds.  Now for other species of hadrosaurs this looks perfectly fine and I have even seen renditions of Tsintaosaurus itself with little balloon sacs that simply differ in size or placement that look completely innocent…but this?  Come on!  Somebody had to be in on it.  They even went so far as to paint the crest and balloons a uniform differentiating color!

Okay, got it out of our system now?  Probably not and I totally understand.  I have had this little model for several weeks now and I still can’t look at it and keep a straight face.  How about now?  Eh, whatever I’m moving on.  On to the rest of the sculpt!  This little figure is actually pretty accurate for the most part.  Its fingers and toes have of the right number and length of digits.  All hadrosaurs had four digits on their forelimbs.  Digits one, two and three were of equal size and were most likely used for walking while digit four was highly reduced and likely was just along for the ride.  This is emulated in the figure quite nicely.  The face is also good.  It sports a nice flattened mouth which matches the actual skull.  The tail is the right length and sticks out straight and rigid behind it and there is a ridge of elongated neural arches going down the back.  The only complaint I have is the fact that the critter’s legs and ankles look awfully skinny.  Also, there is recent belief that ornithopod dinosaurs would have had their palms facing inward, much like all theropod dinosaurs did.  This figure has its palms facing back.

The detail on this guy isn’t bad.  It’s completely covered in little pebbly scales, which we know at least certain hadrosaurs actually had in life from actual fossil evidence.  It also has some nice wrinkles on the underside of its neck and two really nice, deep wrinkles going along either side of its belly.

The colors are nice too.  The dinosaur has a base color of very pale greenish yellow with bolder green colored soft pattern all over the body.  The finger tips and toes are dark brown and the eyes are orange with that same stupid vertical slit pupil that CollectA seems to love so much.  Annnnd the phallus crest is painted a bright traffic-cone orange as if it didn’t grab your attention enough already.

So all in all…this figure is pretty good.  That is of course if you don’t mind the fact that the crest looks the way it does.  It’s a little smaller than 1:40 scale but it still looks at home in a 1:40 scale collection.  It can easily be bought at any place that already sells CollectA dinosaur models for a low price.  Oh yeah did I mention its crest looks like genitals?  Because it does…okay just making sure.

Available from Amazon.com here.

Special thanks to forum member, Postsaurischian, for providing me with this figure to review!