crazy8wizard's weirdest collection update (9-17-2024)

[Faelrin]

@crazy8wizard My cats do the same sniffing thing all the time lol.

@Halichoeres My Spaz has done this on a few occassions, but most are generally kept away from her reach. My recent Mattel Borealopelta has been a victim. Thankfully I got pics for the review before she gave it the face bite treatment. Mostly in tact but yeah there is an obvious "scar" in one area.

[TooOldForDinosaurs]

Hey! Good to hear one of those plushies found it's way into your home after all. 

[Concavenator]

Looks like your cat is thinking the Dromaeosaurus is a worthy opponent!

[crazy8wizard]

Ahoy there everyone. I'm back with another update post to my collection. I haven't posted one of these since November of last year, so this update is going to be another big one and will encompass December, January, and most of February.
The collection shot this time around contains a much more colorful cast of characters and even a few customs. As usual, extra photos and my thoughts on these figures will be posted below.

Colorful variety, but quite a few Sauropodomorphs this time

Spoiler

Starting off are some horned herbivores from Safari. Two of these three are from the big discontinuation sale. Everything else being discontinued this year I either already owned one of, or we sell in the gift shop of the museum I work at, so only the Uintatherium and Diabloceratops warranted an online order. Zuul I picked up just because I had finally decided to go for it.

I know the majority opinion is that the PNSO Zuul is better but I'm a sucker for figures based on a semi-official piece of art, in this case the illustration from its description.

Next up are two Safari customs that I've actually had for a while, but were WIP customs that I only recently got around to finishing. The Patagotitan I heated up to have its back legs a little more bent and the neck raised up higher. This was going to be a Prehistoric Planet Dreadnoughtus flavored custom but then Collecta announced a legitimate Dreadnoughtus, meaning I don't have to modify this one any further. The paint scheme now is based off of the Patagotitan's designs featured in Titanosaur 3D: The Story of Maximo, meaning this one doubles as a documentary repaint and a museum repaint.

The Nanotyrannus is based off of Junior from Dinosaur Revolution. I gotta say, the safari Nanotyrannus looks a lot better with a refreshed paint scheme, personal bias notwithstanding.

Keeping up the Titanosaur theme, here's the Argentinosaurus and Sciurumimus from Collecta. By pure coincidence I bought the Argentinosaurus in early December, and the Sciurumimus in late February. Bookending with big and small, somewhat reminiscent of Lori the Hesperornithoides being found with Jimbo the Supersaurus.

The Argentinosaurus is certainly dated but I surprisingly love this figure, mostly because all the osteoderms and bumpicles make it so pleasing to hold.

Another sauropod. This ugly duckling is a knockoff of the Carnegie 2012 Brachiosaurus. Notable for being one of the very few Brachiosaurus that we can confidently say is definitely supposed to represent B. altithorax. The American species, or depending on how picky you want to be with the taxonomy, the only true species of Brachiosaurus. I stumbled onto this one online and knew it would make for a great custom without painting over a crazy expensive, hard to find model.

But like the ugly duckling I'm going to do my best to make it into the beautiful swan it should be by giving it a Walking with Dinosaurs flavored paint scheme. I've also been trying to straighten out the neck with the boiling water trick and while it has reduced the sharp bend it originally came with (it was curved into a dramatic u shape, almost 90 degrees from the base) the molding process and the fact it's hollow has left it with a slight bend like the original had, so before painting it I'll be doing a touch of plastic surgery to fix the curvature.

Speaking of figures I intend to customize, here's the Kid Galaxy Coelophysis. I had purchased this one along with the Scaphonyx to customize them into different genera. The Scaphonyx is still being painted, so expect to see it sometime later, but so far this one hasn't even been primed.

For this one I'm going to make the skull a little taller and maybe fix the hands. I'm going to use it as a stand-in for Gojirasaurus. Since Gojirasaurus is so fragmentary and many argue that it might just be Coelophysis, I figure it is really more of a symbolic custom. The Mesaland Dinosaur Museum has a Gojirasaurus model that I may use the color scheme of for the repaint but a corny part of me wants to give it a shin-godzilla inspired color scheme. What do you think?

Keeping up with the Triassic, the Mattel Eoraptor and Poposaurus, both figures I never thought I'd see, let alone from the Jurassic World line, and especially not good from the Jurassic World line. I was super excited when I heard that Mattel would be making a Poposaurus because that would make it the first, and so far only figure representing paleobiota originally found in the Popo Agie formation, which is local to me and one of Wyoming's very scant fossil bearing Triassic formations. Sure, I know it's been found in the Chinle formation too but it's awesome to see local and moderately obscure fossils make it into figure form. Here's to hoping somebody makes a Heptasuchus.

The Eoraptor is also very exciting because Ischigualasto fauna is also rare in figure form aside from some Herrerasaurus figures of varying quality and the remarkably uncommon Dawn of the Dinosaurs set. Before this, every other figure I've seen online has been a mislabeled knockoff, None of which looked like Eoraptor. I've seen mislabels of Indominus rex, Tyrannosaurus, Therizinosaurus, and even Scary Monsters from Jojo's Bizzare Adventure?! (That's not an Eoraptor, that's a Dioraptor!) The figure is a little odd but you know what, I'd take a genuine attempt that ended up weird than a completely different animal.

Freshly hatched Exaeretodon make for a perfect snack!

Next up is a figure I am surprised with how much I ended up loving; The Beasts of the Mesozoic Dilong. I disliked the color scheme when it was still in the concept stages, but after seeing some in hand photos of it, I ended up liking it a lot more. Same goes for the articulation. I thought it would be too similar to the dromaeosaurs and it would feel redundant, but surprisingly only the body is like that. The legs are considerably better at standing and if you're smart about the pose, it can stand unsupported.

Whoever can correctly guess what this pose is paying homage to gets a cookie.

Finally, a recent holy grail of a find. A figure I have been searching for quite some time. The Play Visions Placodus! The Play Visions "marine dinosaurs" set is coveted by many since it was only available for a short time. This set is hit or miss for me, since the Jurassic and Cretaceous sea monsters are a little dated and don't impress me much. The Triassic figures on the other hand (which fortunately, is over half the set!) are awesome and two of them have never had another figure made of them; Mixosaurus and Placodus. What surprised me about this figure is that despite seeing it in photos beforehand, I never noticed that it has blue tipped teeth.

I really like Placodus because it shows that not every placodont had big shells and looked like turtles. Granted, the fact that there's at least 5 unique placodont figures out there is impressive to me.

My army of Triassic sea creature miniatures grows. The Kaiyodo Tanystropheus and PNSO Atopodentatus would really tie it all together (along with the other 5 Triassic minis from Play Visions, hah)

[close]

Tune in next time where hopefully I have some better fabric for the backdrop. The green fleece is fine but the color looks inconsistent depending on lighting. I also have some customs coming so I might make a new thread for that too.

[Halichoeres]

Nice selection! My Placodus has the blue on the mouth, too, and it's too tidy to be accidental. Maybe it's meant to show it grasping some mollusk or brachiopod?

[crazy8wizard]

Hey there folks. I'm back with a collection post but this time it's not anything new. This time I decided to see what it would be like to organize some of my figures into a rainbow color scheme. Unfortunately I don't have much in the way of purple but that's okay because I was running out of room on my set.



If you also have a collection of figures with highly diverse color schemes I'd recommend you try this too! It's a lot of fun.

[crazy8wizard]

Greetings. I'm back with another collection post. I haven't done one one of these updates in months mostly because I just got tired of doing them. I do have a different thread in the works that I may post sometime this week.
Until then here are some figures!


Up first is the CollectA Torvosaurus. I found this one on sale and I thought I'd check it out to see if I like it better than the PNSO version. Unfortunately I don't, but it's still a pretty cool figure.


Next is a personal goal figure of mine: the Bullyland Liliensternus. If you've seen my previous posts on this thread, you may know about my affinity for figures based on real museum displays. The Bullyland museum line is the perfect example of this but since their discontinuation they have become quite rare. I've managed to acquire about five, now six of these rare figures and this one is especially exciting since I have the Plateosaurus which is part of the same diorama that the Liliensternus this figure is based upon is in.

The two are way out of scale with one another but I think that the Plateosaurus this figure is emulating is meant to be a subadult. Also I really like seeing the feathers on this. They're much more sparse than I would anticipate but feathers on basal theropods back in 2006~ish was fairly uncommon.


So this is an odd one. This little figure was made to be included with the Go Diego Go figure line from Mattel. It's meant to be a Sinornithoides, but I've been hunting one for quite some time to use as Hesperornithoides. (How many times are you going to hear a dinosaur collector say they've been actively searching for a figure this cartoony?) Regardless, it's a neat figure of a species that seems obscure in the scheme of things. I think I might repaint it though.



No, what you're looking at is not a tray of brownies, it's actually 48 MPC Cynognathus.
Did I necessarily want 48 of them? Not particularly, but now I have enough to keep as is, customize, and send to friends. If you want to trade something small for one of these feel free to DM me.

And now for something surprisingly weirder and more baffling than a tray full of nearly 50 cynodonts.

Well, not the figure itself, but what I did with it. This one requires some explanation.
First off, the Brachiosaurus. This is a 4D vision dinosaur anatomy kit. I had purchased this earlier in the summer to use the skeleton to teach about air sacs and pneumatic diverticula in saurischian skeletons at my local museum but afterwards I decided to keep the skeleton as is because it looked very aesthetically pleasing to me (I love sauropod skeletons) but now I had the problem of a hollow, half transparent brachiosaurus figure...
Second, a couple years ago I had a running joke with my friends about how I kept finding these tiny plastic ducks all over campus. This trend of finding ducks in weird places went on for years. (I promise this is relevant. Bear with me)

So finally it clicked as to what I should put inside this hollow brachiosaur.

So now you may be some of the first people to see a Brachiosaurus filled with roughly 100 tiny plastic ducks. This started out as a simple gag but has inadvertently turned into an artistic piece about dinosaur bird relationships and how something as small as a duck is distantly related to sauropods.

[Faelrin]

Hilarious great use of that hollow transparent Brachiosaurus other half.

Some good hauls, but I think the MPC Cynognathus dump takes the cake. I have many questions about the source you've obtained that group from. For starters, why that many, lol?

[crazy8wizard]

Some good hauls, but I think the MPC Cynognathus dump takes the cake. I have many questions about the source you've obtained that group from. For starters, why that many, lol?

I genuinely have no clue. The seller I bought it from is an antique seller on ebay but they mainly focus on vintage paper products. If I had to guess how this many ended up in one place would be that this is factory error stock. The lot also came with 50 MPC Plateosaurus which all have errors in the spots where the mold would inject the plastic. A few of the cynognathus have overextruded lines of extra plastic around their tails, but they're all in much better condition than the Plateosaurus.

[Faelrin]

Oh that is genuinely interesting. Congrats on obtaining them, factory errors or not.

[Halichoeres]

Those are very small ducks! They look like they're enjoying their cozy home. The Brachiosaurus kit is a neat little kit.

And not often I see that little Sinornithoides, one of Mattel's less talked about theropod figures.