Review and photos by Charles Peckham, edited by Suspsy
Sea turtles. Seeing them majestically soar through the water with their stoic yet playful expression can inspire awe in any observer. Who doesn’t love them? Well, I suppose jellyfish don’t. And some crustaceans. And seagrass. You get it. The point is, sea turtles are amazingly easy to love, and as with so many animals that we see today, they used to be a lot larger.
Review and photographs by Loon, edited by Suspsy.
Too often, I see people dismiss Archelon as “just a large sea turtle.” Understandably, this makes many toy companies shy away from producing figures of it, since any modern sea turtle figure could be used as a substitute if that were really the case.
Review and photos by Ravonium, edited by Suspsy
In 2014, a group of Chinese paleontologists working in Yunnan Province discovered a near complete skeleton of Atopodentatus, a new genus (and likely, lineage) of Sauropterygia (the main group of Mesozoic marine reptiles) with an odd and somewhat creepy skull unlike that of any other known vertebrate.
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.
Not surprisingly, the Brachiosaurus is HUGE. It stands nearly 27 cm tall and measures 51 cm long, making it the largest animal figure in any Playmobil line.
The Playmobil Deinonychus is a small figure, standing only up to 9 cm tall and measuring 14 cm long. That said, it is probably the scariest-looking dinosaur in the line.
The Dimetrodon measures a good 17 cm long and is 9 cm tall including the sail.
When it comes to TV shows, a chance to make merchandise and thus more money is a major point. With the success of the Doctor Who figures based on the series, ITV’s own time travel based show, Primeval, attempted the same. It ran for the first two series, but no further.
I love picking up rare species on the toy market, especially where they are part of groups that are rarely made. As mentioned previously, snakes are incredibly rare on the toy shelves, likely because they don’t vary too much so don’t sell well. Thankfully, Yowie comes in to the rescue, giving us the Giant Wonambi, a constrictor from the Pleistocene of Australia, the first fossil snake found in Australia.
Given that I counted correctly, this here will be my 50th review for the DTB. On the search for a worthy entry for that occasion, I deceided to add some figures to my collection that will provide the chance to combine the jubilee with a premiere cause to my big surprise I found that the American company Marx, despite its significance for our hobby, has not a single entry on the blog as of yet….