One of the very first ornithopods I ever learned about as a small child was Camptosaurus, a mid-sized member of the iguanodontian clade hailing from Late Jurassic North America. Due to its utter lack of horns, spikes, and armour, it has long been depicted in books and museum displays as “stock fodder,” either fleeing from or being eaten alive by...
The fish is small, but still big enough to be worth the effort for Camber, who begins swooping down toward the ocean surface. As he nears his target, his bill opens ever so slightly, ready for a precision strike. But then he is abruptly thrown off course by a larger male streaking past him. Flapping furiously to regain control, Camber...
When we think of sauropods, we usually think of giants like Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus, and Patagotitan. The very first sauropod ever to be discovered, however, was Cetiosaurus. Described and named by Sir Richard Owen in 1842, it measured around 15 metres in length and 11 tons in mass. That may seem small compared to those other sauropods mentioned above, but Cetiosaurus nevertheless remains...
The family of Baobabs is one of the most distinct and recognizable trees in the world. Eight species exist under the genus Adansonia, they are native to Subsaharaian Africa, Madagascar and Australia. The natural history of Baobabs is somewhat clouded and methods as molecular clocking yield debatable results. Most accepted amongst scientists seems to be the view, that Australia was...
Alongside trilobites, ammonites are far and away the most popular group of prehistoric invertebrates. These shelled cephalopods belong to the broader Ammonoidea, which evolved over 400 million years ago during the Devonian. Keep in mind that not all ammonoids are ammonites and actual ammonites from the Ammonitida clade lived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous, a time during which they flourished....
CollectA has long been at the forefront of producing obscure toys of prehistoric animals but by and large they’ve all been tetrapods; four legged vertebrates and their descendants. This includes a variety of dinosaurs, pterosaurs, marine reptiles, and mammals. But this year CollectA has raised the bar and released four prehistoric invertebrate figures: a trilobite (Redlichia rex), Orthoceras, Pleuroceras ammonite,...
From atop a hill, the view of the dry wind-swept plains below is obscured by what at first looks like a dust storm. Soon, it becomes clear that the dust that has engulfed the plain is not from a storm. Here, in what would be known today as Argentina, an epic battle between two of the largest animals that have...
Diplodocus is one of the most famous and iconic dinosaurs and has been around for some time now. Its graceful form is easily recognizable so it has become one of the staple species in pop culture, from merchandise and films.With that, information about it already saturate the forum as well as the blogosphere so we can skip all that. This...
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...
Review by Paleo-Nerd, photographs by RobinGoodfellow and Suspsy, edited by Suspsy Even though CollectA has always released models of almost unknown dinosaurs or recently discovered ones, when Saltriovenator was revealed as a new release for 2020, the surprise for Italian paleo-nerds was huge. Not long after the description of the theropod by Dal Sasso, Maganuco, and Cau, the third Italian dinosaur...
In an Early Cretaceous forest of what would today be known as China, strange, bird-like creatures can be seen moving around in the thick vegetation and canopy high above.These animals are, at first glance, looks like birds roughly the size of a raven, with long tails and black plumage. A small animal lurking above the forest canopy As they move...
Time has eventually come, for one of the most impressive CollectA figures of 2020 to hit the European continent. And fittingly, it represents a European species. In 2006 paleontologists Jerzy Dzik, Tomasz Sulej and Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki discovered large bones in a clay pit in Poland. What was initially considered to be sauropodomorph dinosaur, was later recognized to be a massive...
