Review and photos by Art Rex, edited by Suspsy
Before the release of Jurassic Park in 1993, Playskool’s Definitely Dinosaurs was one of the best brands of prehistoric playtime, rivaled only by Tyco’s Dino-Riders. Most of the Definitely Dinosaurs were relatively simple in design, almost cartoonish to play to a younger demographic.
The very first time I laid eyes on the Early Cretaceous ankylosaurian known as Polacanthus was at a birthday party when I was only four or five years old. I can’t rightly recall if it was my own or some other child’s, but I’ll never forget that wrapping paper.
The Early Cretaceous Wessex formation in England is rich in vertebrate fossils, including dinosaurs like Baryonyx and Iguanodon, pterosaurs like Caulkicephalus, many kinds of fish, and even some fragments of small mammals. Today we’ll take a look at one of the most heavily armored denizens of Early Cretaceous Eurasia, Polacanthus, as depicted by Papo.
Most paleontology enthusiasts are familiar with ammonites, the predatory mollusks with muscular arms and calcium carbonate shells. Most ammonites’ shells were disc-shaped coils (planispiral) that contained chambers, some of which afforded buoyancy, and one of which housed the squishy parts of the animal.
Every now and again, something rather interesting pops up that you wouldn’t expect to be as good as you’d think. The toy sets you would see at supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl, often seen as cheap item makers, having something worth getting. Here, we examine the Joy City line on prehistoric animals, a counterpoint to there Dinosaur wave, which seems more typical chinasaur.
Figure numbers 13 to 15 are a trio of marine reptiles, and their dark blue colour works very well for aquatic animals.
Paper is usually not the material of choice for collectors of any sort. I anyway want to introduce you to something that may be of interest for a dinosaur collector, though it are probably not the figures….
The introduced cut out model was first released in 1993 under the title “Make these Dinosaurs” and the art of it, especially the dinosaur desgin, certainly represents this time.
