CollectA: New for 2023

[Gothmog the Baryonyx]

Not only do I like that a big Deluxe Stegouros toy captures all the unique features, I actually like how it will dwarf all the other ankylosaurs in my collection.

that to me would be weird,  like having a giant Microraptor sitting behind small Austroraptor and Utahraptor figures or having a tiny figureof Jabba the Hutt next to a massive Salacious B Crumb, so it would have to go nowhere near them.

[DinoFan2010]

Surprised how both CollectA and Papo are both releasing a Mosasaurus this year. The influence of Jurassic Park strikes again!

[suspsy]

Except the Papo Mosasaurus was originally supposed to be released this year.

[Lynx]

Anomalocaris
Looks like it is decaying. Not horrible, but not very great. I don't collect that stuff at the moment, but I think it's an alright offer. Could be a LOT better though. 6.5/10

Brighstoneus
No opinion. I love this creature and others related to it, but I fear it may be painfully small. Still might purchase it, but not a priority. 8/10, only thing dragging it down is the color scheme. Would be nice had it not been done two other times on related animals

Ceratosuchops fishing
It does not look like it is fishing, at all. It looks bent over roaring, just kind of standing there. Please, please bring bases back. Or at the very least actually make sure your figure holds up to the title you gave it. 8/10, I like spinosaurids a lot, so it is obviously going to be higher regardless of my gripes.

Hadrosaurus
I admit I did not like this figure. However, I actually like it more than the other two releases it was revealed with. Very nice, more of this, please! A rearing hadrosaur would also be cool, maybe one bipedal due to a running pose? 8.5/10.

Koolasuchus
How do you get an Amphibian this wrong? The sculpt is stunning, it is of fair size, and the colors are fine but, why, why did you give it scales? I was considering purchasing this, but the scales are such an easy thing to avoid and yet here we are. I could just tell myself it is covered with pebbly or warty skin, but this is not an animal known for having that. Looks like crushed spinach, 3/10.

Mosasaurus
I wanted not to like the figure, and honestly? It is very alright. A worthy update to a good figure. I like the old one more, and dislike the articulated jaw on this one, but it is REALLY good for the animal itself. 9.5/10,


Ruyangosaurus
WAY too small for me to consider getting it. The sculpt is beautiful, but I am hoping CollectA drifts away from this color for sauropods. If we just ignore the colors and scale, it's quite good. 9/10.

Shastasaurus
I feel no need to explain why I like this. Nice colors, not too chunky, but still has bulk, and the sculpt is just mwah. 10/10, best released here for me.

Stegouros
I just don't like this figure. Maybe it's the colors, maybe it's the angle, who knows. It's just fugly to me. Is it cute? Yes, but something about it seems off. I will probably get it eventually as I love Ankylosaurus, Nodosaurs, and anything of the sort, but by far low on the list. There's nothing wrong with accuracy and I don't mind the size, but something just looks wrong. 4/10

Triceratops confronting
If you have not noticed already, these reviews are slowly getting more and more negative. The colors do not break this for me. But the scales, the strange unpolished look, the unnecessary title. Just nothing here looks interesting. It's a Triceratops, is pretty much all I can say. 3/10, would probably be considered one of the 'better' Schleich releases if it were from that company.

[bmathison1972]

Except the Papo Mosasaurus was originally supposed to be released this year.

Not to mention these are often planned out years in advance, so the timing with JW could be a coincidence.

[Halichoeres]

Well, JW came out in 2015, and more than half of the Mosasaurus figures on DTC are more recent than that even if you exclude licensed products, so I do tend to think it has had an effect!

@Flaffy @Lynx @Faelrin and anyone else who is interested in temnospondyl integument, I've had some time to gather my thoughts and some references, so here goes:

I can think of a few reasons that people would assume that chigutisaurids like Koolasuchus or Siderops would have been smooth like a modern salamander. Maybe it's just because all the extant amphibians we know and love are smooth. Even if you know that some early amphibians must have been scaly, you might assume that something as late as the Cretaceous was 'advanced' and therefore more similar to modern ones. Or maybe the ecological similarities between Koolasuchus and modern giant salamanders make baldness seem like a good option. These are all understandable but not terribly strong premises.

Modern amphibians are probably a specialized group of temnospondyls. Their technical name is Lissamphibia, meaning "the smooth amphibians," specifically to differentiate them from other amphibians, which were mostly scaly. All those scaly amphibians died out, so the only ones left are the smooth ones. According to a 2018 study (and other studies), the lissamphibians probably emerged from the neighborhood of the Amphibamidae sometime during the Permian period. Other temnospondyls continued to diversify for another 100+ million years, but there's no reason to expect they would all have gone scaleless. Scalelessness is probably correlated with miniaturization, since lissamphibians are the only clade of modern tetrapods with significant gas exchange across their skin, which means their skin has to be mostly scaleless and less keratinized than that of other tetrapods. This is part of the reason why you do not find many giant lissamphibians, and when you do, they are in colder environments: cold water has higher concentrations of dissolved oxygen. Even then, they have to be pretty wrinkly to increase their surface area, and they supplement their oxygen intake with ordinary breathing.

Remember also that tetrapods all evolved from fishes, and non-tetrapod sarcopterygians pretty much universally had mineralized scales (lungfish and coelacanths still do, for example). This is unlike the scales in amniotes, which are keratin-based and probably derived independently. Oddly, some modern caecilians do have mineralized scales, although they tend to be pretty buried in the skin, and it isn't certain that they're homologous with the scales of fishes. Anyway, the earliest tetrapods were scaly too, and temnospondyls across the tree were known to have scales of one sort or another: Gerrothorax, Australerpeton, and maybe most relevant to us, Plagiosuchus. Plagiosuchus is from the Triassic and part of the clade Stereospondyli, which also includes chigutisaurids like Koolasuchus. Note that Plagiosuchus is an amphibian with scales living tens of millions of years after lissamphibians had already split off on their own branch. As far as I know, there are no known skin impressions from chigutisaurids, but Plagiosuchus is reasonably close and definitely has both ventral scales as well as dorsal osteoderms (Witzmann 2007).

Scales are one of those things where it's easy to prove their presence if you have the right fossil, but it's extremely difficult to prove their absence if all you have is endoskeletal remains. So we don't know exactly when Lissamphibia lost their scales, but we know they had to lose them. We also don't know how many other temnospondyl lineages might have lost them, but it's probably more likely in small animals than large ones. As a large temnospondyl more closely related to Plagiosuchus (known to be scaly) than to Lissamphibia (known to be scaleless except some caecilians), I think it's more parsimonious to believe that Koolasuchus was scaly. That said, I wouldn't immediately dismiss a scaleless interpretation as definitely inaccurate, because as I said it's hard to prove definitively.

[Lynx]

Very interesting, thank you.
With that in mind, I will increase my rating to a 7/10. Mainly the scales were bothering me at first.

[ceratopsian]

Thanks for putting in the time on this @Halichoeres. That certainly illuminates an area of which I was in complete ignorance.

[Flaffy]

Really appreciate the breakdown as well @Halichoeres . Lots of info I wouldn't have known otherwise.

Makes me rethink what other presumptions I have on Temnospondyls as a whole. I guess a lot of these assumptions on the gross anatomy of Temnospondyls stems from some form of "survivorship bias" with extant amphibians.

[Pliosaurking]

I thank you for putting the time in on this bit of info, very interesting!

[Faelrin]

@Halichoeres Hold up, extant amphibians are temnospondyls? I was under the impression Koolasuchus was the last temnospondyl so that changes things up quite a bit. Are there papers supporting this I could take a look at?

Also thanks very much for the breakdown, and namedropping the closest possible relative to justify scales in Koolasuchus (other then being the original trait). I'll have to make a point of that when I do my review.

[bmathison1972]

2015? Has it been that long? Time flies the older you get lol

[Halichoeres]

I'm glad people found it useful! @Faelrin yeah, temnospondyls went extinct in the Jurassic the same way synapsids went extinct in the Triassic: only if you ignore a major descendant lineage. The 2018 study I cited above recovers lissamphibians as temnospondyls, and so do Ruta & Coates. There have been studies that found lissamphibians to be lepospondyls (that is, closer to things like Diplocaulus), but that conclusion is less frequent and in my view less well supported.

I also forgot about a small lineage of amphibians called the albanerpetontids, which are actually the sister group to the living lissamphibians [edit: they're closely related to lissamphibians, but they might be closer to salamanders and frogs than to caecilians; it's not a settled question]. They only went extinct at the beginning of the Pleistocene, and they had scales! From the paper describing Celtedens: "the skeleton is fully ossified and ultraviolet light photography reveals the presence of body scales. The skin of the head, including the eyelids, contains a mosaic of small polygonal osteoderms, a feature that explains the distinctive skull ornament." As you suggest, @Flaffy, we have biases based on the few things that survive to the present, and if things had been just a tiny bit different, we'd have an extant amphibian that could radically shift our way of thinking about the group as a whole!

[Faelrin]

Thanks for sharing more info on that. Very interesting and I'll have to make note of it for my review. I guess it is also like how all non-avian dinosaurs went extinct, but the survivors, the birds, are still theropod dinosaurs at heart. In any case though the group Koolasuchus was in certainly went extinct and it was likely still the last of that particular lineage.

Good info to have on Celtedens as well. I had no something like that survived until recently.

[japfeif]

The Anomalocaris is incredibly disappointing. Looks like a carbon copy of this commonly circulated model of the Cambrian radiodont. Not sure what the sculptor was thinking by referencing this extremely outdated reconstruction when PLENTY of updated resources are available. Easy pass. If you're looking for an Anomalocaris that reflects our current understanding of radiodont anatomy, the 2020 Takara Tomy one is your best bet; closely followed by Favorite Co's minis and Kaiyodo's "Great Leaps" version.



(Top: decade old outdated shrimp/arthropod-like reconstruction. Bottom: up-to-date reconstruction of A. canadensis by Jun)

Hmmm...I guess I'm either not that observant, not overly critical, or just plain stupid here, but I really don't see much difference in the photo of the model and the "updated" drawing below.

What exactly is so wrong with the figure?

(or course, this post was like a month & a half ago...I'm way behind on my DTF perusing....so I imagine it's been clarified in succeeding posts! I'll keep reading on! 

[Flaffy]

Hmmm...I guess I'm either not that observant, not overly critical, or just plain stupid here, but I really don't see much difference in the photo of the model and the "updated" drawing below.

What exactly is so wrong with the figure?

(or course, this post was like a month & a half ago...I'm way behind on my DTF perusing....so I imagine it's been clarified in succeeding posts! I'll keep reading on! 

Here: https://dinotoyblog.com/forum/index.php?topic=10525.msg332316#msg332316

[Eatmycar]

Anomalocaris is an easy must-buy for me and I only collect action figures. Seeing that strange critter in Paleo Facebook and Twitter memes made me fall in love with it. Bring me an Opabinia, CollectA, I beg of you.

[dinofelid]

Hmmm...I guess I'm either not that observant, not overly critical, or just plain stupid here, but I really don't see much difference in the photo of the model and the "updated" drawing below.

What exactly is so wrong with the figure?

(or course, this post was like a month & a half ago...I'm way behind on my DTF perusing....so I imagine it's been clarified in succeeding posts! I'll keep reading on! 

Here: https://dinotoyblog.com/forum/index.php?topic=10525.msg332316#msg332316

The twitter thread you linked to at https://dinotoyblog.com/forum/index.php?topic=10525.msg332427#msg332427 was also very helpful in spotting the inaccuracies because of all the comparison diagrams.

Also the post about more accurate models at https://dinotoyblog.com/forum/index.php?topic=10525.msg332360#msg332360 was good for comparing, though it didn't include a link to images for the Takara Tomy version which you had rated highest.

[triceratops83]

Minizoo just sent out a newsletter with the timetable for the new releases -

JANUARY
Triceratops
Hadrosaurus
Ruyangosaurus
Ceratosuchops
Brighstoneus
Shastasaurus
Mosasaurus

MARCH
Koolasuchus
Anomalocaris

JUNE
Stegouros

[JimoAi]

Minizoo just sent out a newsletter with the timetable for the new releases -

JANUARY
Triceratops
Hadrosaurus
Ruyangosaurus
Ceratosuchops
Brighstoneus
Shastasaurus
Mosasaurus

MARCH
Koolasuchus
Anomalocaris

JUNE
Stegouros

What about the modern animals?