I'm an environmental scientist and former college professor, with a background in evolution and ecology. I'm on a mission to hunt down the best toy version of every Paleozoic and Mesozoic animal and plant, which leads to some incongruous display shelves. That mission also means a pretty motley assortment of reviews, with maybe a bit of a bias in favor of fishes. 
My sincere thanks to Happy Hen Toys for furnishing this review sample. More Mosasaurus toys have been produced in the 8 years since Jurassic World than in the entire previous history of the toy industry. The majority of those toys have been influenced by the JW design, with spikes all over the back, cavities all over the head, and an...
My sincere thanks to Happy Hen Toys for furnishing this review sample. Several other companies have made Mapusaurus figures before, including Bandai, Playmates, and CollectA. So far, however, we’ve only reviewed CollectA’s four (!!!) versions on the blog. A brief re-introduction might be useful, then: Mapusaurus hails from the Huincul Formation (English approximation: “ween-COOL”) in Argentina, just like its recently...
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. One lineage of ammonites went a little wild with their shell coiling, producing some very strange shapes....
“It stinks!” — Jay Sherman Most of the toys reviewed on this blog have been purchased by the reviewers. There are rare exceptions, and while I can’t speak for other reviewers, I’m always careful to disclose if I’m reviewing a complimentary copy. But by and large, they’re figures we liked enough to spend money on, and so reviews tend to...
This stand was purchased separately and is not included with the model. 270 million years before orcas, 250 million years before megalodon sharks, 170 million years before even the mosasaurs, the largest macropredators in the ocean were probably eugeneodontids, large fishes with bizarre tooth arrangements and cartilaginous skeletons. They’re often referred to as sharks, although their jaw mechanics and tooth...
Every fall, Safari Ltd announces their releases for the upcoming year. Understandably, probably owing to the pandemic and the attendant slowdown in trade, their announcements for 2021 were pretty limited, only three new items in the core dinosaur range. I confess I was a bit disappointed that all three were theropods, not being a particular fan of the clade (or at...
Brazilian paleontologist Tito Aureliano published the time-travel dinosaur adventure novel Dino Hazard: Realidade Oculta (English subtitle: Hidden Reality) in 2015, and since then he and a team including other paleontologists and artists have been spinning off paleo-themed merchandise and media, including a video game. The setting for the story is Brazil in the middle of the Cretaceous period, and it...
The Middle Triassic began a mere five million years after the end-Permian extinction. On land, forests had finally staggered back from the destruction. Insects, mammal relatives, and sauropsids started to diversify into new–or sometimes rediscovered–morphologies. In the oceans, ray-finned fishes and coelacanths thrived, and some sauropsids returned to the sea. Among them was the earliest marine reptile thought to be...
350 million years before the advent of humans, reindeer, or consumerism, our distant gnathostome forebears celebrated Fishmas. Fishmas originated when Santa Claus turned the wrong dial on the time machine he uses to travel to every house in the same night, landing him in the Devonian and the gaping maw of a Dunkleosteus. Fish have been celebrating this auspicious occasion...
If somebody has heard of just one Paleozoic fish, it’s probably Dunkleosteus, designated yesterday as Ohio’s official state fossil fish! Toy companies have made more than a dozen different versions over the years, and several higher-end models exist as well. Earlier this year, a Thai studio called Like Hobby/ThinkArt released one of the latter. The prototype was sculpted digitally, and...
At this point I think it’s fair to say that a new large-format pterosaur is among the highlights of CollectA’s new figure announcements. They don’t quite come every year, but they do seem to be coming more frequently. This year’s choice was one of the earliest pterosaurs, the peculiar Caviramus schesaplanensis from the Rhaetian (Late Triassic) of what would become...
Most of us, if we’re familiar with Italian toy company Geoworld, are familiar with the extensive “Jurassic Hunters” line of dinosaur and Cenozoic mammal figures, or perhaps the “Jurassic Action” line of articulated figures. Many collectors have a low opinion of these figures due to their crude sculpts, uncredited accompanying artwork, or garish paint jobs. What if I told you...
