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. 
Review and photos by Tim Sosa, edited by Suspsy The interval of Earth’s history which shows fossil evidence of animals is known as the Phanerozoic Eon (literally “visible animals”). The Phanerozoic is divided into three Eras. We live in the Cenozoic, which was preceded by the Mesozoic (during which dinosaurs were the largest terrestrial animals). The Mesozoic began after the...
Review and photographs by Tim Sosa Some of the commonest vertebrates on earth during the Devonian period were the antiarchs, a group of armored fishes that lived all over the world while the ancestors of you, me, and Triceratops were just barely starting to crawl out of the water. Despite their abundance, they went extinct almost 300 million years before...
Review and photographs by Tim Sosa From July-October 2015, the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo hosted an exhibit called “Leaps in Evolution: Tracing the Path of Vertebrate Evolution.” To commemorate the exhibit, Kaiyodo made a set of five vending machine capsule figures, most representing a stage in the evolution of vertebrates. Each of these can be tied...
Review and photographs by Tim Sosa Yowie is a Perth-based company that markets nature-themed toys in little chocolate eggs. These days they have some extant animals that you can buy at places like World Market (at least in the United States), but around a decade ago they had an Australia-only line of prehistoric figures called Lost Kingdoms. The majority of...
Review and photographs by Tim Sosa In the Devonian period, the largest animals were arthrodires, huge armored fish informally referred to as placoderms. ‘Arthrodire’ means “joint-necked,” referring to the fact that there was a hinge in their armor between the thorax and the back of the head. One of the largest arthrodires was Dunkleosteus, a fish so ancient that when...
