Review and images by Kikimalou, edited by Suspsy
This is the very first time I’ve submitted a review for DTB and I thought that the new 2023 CollectA Shastasaurus would do the trick. What attracted me to this new ichthyosaur is the black and white interpretation.
Shonisaurus was an upper Triassic Ichtyosaur from Northern Ameria that probably fit the ecological niche of today´s sperm whales. The fact that adult animals did not have teeth can as well lead to the conclusion that it could have been a plankton filtering animal. Shonisaurus sikanniensis with a length of some 23m is the largest marine reptile that has been described by now.
For many years, the Triassic period has been the most overlooked part of the Mesozoic in toy form, usually Coelophysis or Postosuchus. More recently, however, more and more species are coming to the forefront and being made available in plastic. Even the Jurassic World toyline has jumped to this, as we see here in a recent figure of Shringasaurus, an archosauromorpha from the middle Triassic of India, a bizzare horned species that certainly caught the eye of the public.
The Jurassic and Cretaceous periods featured tetrapod lineages exploring minor evolutionary variations on a handful of themes. But during the Triassic period, tetrapods evolved into all kinds of strange forms, some of which looked like slightly wrong versions of later animals. One of these is Shringasaurus, which has some features of a sauropod, a ceratopsian, and an iguana, without being particularly closely related to any of them.
As a person of Polish decent with a love for Triassic fauna I was elated to see that CollectA was producing a figure of Smok wawelski, a Triassic archosaur found near Lisowice village in Poland. And hot on the heels of their excellent Lisowicia too, another Triassic animal from the same fossil site.
Review and photos by EmperorDinobot, edited by Suspsy
I, Emperor Dinobot, was not very surprised to hear that Mattel would make a Tanystropheus figure. They had already done genera such as Scutosaurus and Postosuchus, along with numerous other non-dinosaur figures.
When most will think of extinct animals on the islands of Tasmania, they will think of the Thylacine. While it is very famous, there are, of course, many other extinct creatures that are worthy of note.One such example is Tasmaniosaurus, one of the most complete Triassic reptiles found in Australia.
The kinds of dinosaur toy fans who care about accuracy and realism tend to find Schleich frustrating, perhaps because Schleich has, at the very least, the technical capacity to make outstanding figures. For example, their recent Kentrosaurus was a solid effort, but in the same year as a good figure like that they’ll release arrestingly ugly toys.
