Review and photos by Harper Bloomingdale, edited by Suspsy
For those of you not into LEGO, LEGO Ideas is a website where users share their builds and, provided the goal of 10,000 supporters is achieved within a time frame, the build has a chance of getting put into production.
Review and photographs by Brontozaurus, edited by Suspsy
I recently visited the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum (FPDM) while on a trip in Japan. The museum is located near the Kitadani Formation, where many of Japan’s dinosaur species have been found and described. It was well worth it, but even before I got to the FPDM, I was encountering Japanese dinosaurs in toy stores.
The majority of items in my prehistoric collection are purchased online. Schleich abounds at several brick and mortar stores in my neck of the woods, but I’m not a huge consumer of their wares. Safari Ltd. products are sold at Michael’s and the local natural history museum, but the assortment is always woefully limited.
Review and images by bmathison1972; edited by Suspsy
Sinoceratops zhuchengensis is a centrosaurine ceratopsid that lived during the Late Cretaceous of present-day China. The holotype specimen was discovered in 2008 from the Hongtuya Formation in Shandong Province and was formally described in 2010. It was the first ceratopsid formally described from China!
The late Triassic Herrerasaurus is one of the oldest dinosaurs known from the fossil record. So old and primitive is Herrerasaurus that there is still debate about where it fits in the dinosaur family tree. At various times it has been proposed that Herrerasaurus was a basal theropod, a basal sauropodomorph, a basal saurischian, or not a dinosaur at all.
Before we begin the review, I would like to extend my gratitude towards Happy Hen Toys for sending this figure along as a review sample. Happy Hen Toys is a U.S. distributor of figures by Safari, Papo, CollectA, Schleich, and other similar companies. In the case of CollectA they’re often the only place that sells their products at a reasonable price within the United States.
Seventy-one million years ago what is now Alberta, Canada, would have been located next to the Western Interior Seaway with various coastal habitats including swamps, marshes, tidal flats, lagoons, and estuaries. Familiar faces would have swum the aquatic ecosystems, including gar, bowfin, and sturgeon that are all present in North America’s freshwater habitats today.
“This one was always my favorite when I was a kid. And now I’ve seen one, it’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw.”
Those words from Alan Grant resonated with me upon my first viewing of Jurassic Park, because like Alan Grant, Triceratops was my childhood favorite too.
Does Mattel release too many repaints? Yes. Is there value in these repaints? Also, yes. Case in point, this Styracosaurus. This figure is the 3rd release of this toy. The first two times it was released I ignored it. I was disappointed by how much smaller it was compared to Mattel’s other ceratopsians.
Before we get on with the review, let’s all have a moment of silence for the now extinct Amber Collection. Honestly, I always had my reservations about the Amber Collection and never bothered to get invested in it. I always thought that Mattel should stick with the 3.75” line, and that it was unlikely that anything larger than a Velociraptor would ever be seen in a 6” line.
Jaws author Peter Benchley once stated in an interview that “every young man in the world is fascinated with either sharks or dinosaurs”. With that in mind, you would think that the sharks that lived alongside the dinosaurs would be doubly fascinating.
Growing up in the 90’s every dinosaur book I grew up reading liked to compare the Cretaceous dinosaur fauna of North America with that of Asia, highlighting just how similar they were. Both continents had representatives from the same major groups; dromaeosaurs, ornithomimosaurs, ankylosaurs etc. Some genera were remarkably similar, like North America’s Tyrannosaurus and Asia’s Tarbosaurus, and other genera could be found on both continents, like Saurolophus.
While many of us debate over which of the spectacular Tyrannosaurus toys released over the last couple decades are the best and most definitive, we can all pretty much agree on what the best Corythosaurus toy is or was. And while the 1993 Carnegie Collection Corythosaurus was the unquestionably best figure of that genus it is alarming to think that that particular toy had remained the definitive version of that genus for the last 27 years.
