Review and photographs by Funk, edited by Suspsy
Ever since I first saw preview pictures of the stop motion figures used to animate the dinosaurs in the 1994 Atari fighting game Primal Rage in a Nintendo magazine, I thought, “Wow, they would have made great toys.” Fast forward to a few years ago where I learned such toys were actually produced by Playmates of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fame, and I got a few of them used.
Review and images by PhilSauria, edited by Suspsy
Don’t know that much about Dinostar, just that they appear to be another Chinese company and one of the wave of new manufacturers moving into the field of making prehistoric animal figures in the last few years.
How the Tapejara ever became a toy in the Jurassic Park toy line is puzzling when you look back at the turbulent time before Jurassic Park III was released. Hasbro downsized after the failure of the JP Chaos Effect toys, and the lower than expected sales from Star Wars Phantom Menace toys.
Ever since I, Emperor Dinobot, managed to get most of my Jurassic pterosaurs on the ceiling, I made the reealization that doing so would make it impossible for me to review certain individuals, especially many of the repaints and retools Mattel has released in the last few years.
One of my all-time favorite pieces of paleo-art is Douglas Henderson’s 1989 painting Tarbosaurus and Saurolophus which depicts a red-headed Tarbosaurus pursuing a herd of Saurolophus crossing a river. Like all the best paleo-art this piece serves as a time machine and as a kid I would stare at and study it.
Review and images by PhilSauria, edited by Suspsy
Tarbosaurus (alarming lizard) has only one officially recognised species, T. bataar, and was a large member of the tyrannosaur family that roamed Asia around 70 million years ago. Tarbosaurus had the smallest forelimbs relative to body size of all tyrannosaurids, and that’s saying something for a member of this group!
During the Late Cretaceous, the region currently known as the harsh Gobi Desert of Mongolia was a rich expanse of floodplains, mudflats, and shallow lakes. Here one would find abundant titanosaurs, hadrosaurs, ankylosaurs, and pachycephalosaurs, although no known ceratopsids to date.
