PNSO: New for 2022

[Renecito]

Expensive or not, as someone who enjoys all of these hadrosaurs PNSO puts out I am absolutely gonna have this!

I think the same thing.

[Faras]

@Flaffy So far 57 replies in main Tsintaosaurus thread, no complain. Hmm iirc majority were fine with prices since posters were added, though PNSO also offered big discounts for recent museum line releases (Triceratops and Iguanodon), so the extras only cost about $5.

[SidB]

I'm impressed by this beefy neck !
Was this figure rumored or is it a complete surprise ?

It was on the projected list of 8.

[Sim]

Thanks for that info @Sim but I don't really need a second Tarbosaurus in my collection, especially since it will cost me 25% more now than when I purchased it.

However I am curious how your newer Tarbosaurus looks. Do you have any pictures of it?

Sorry for my late reply.  I can't take a photo of my Tarbosaurus at the moment, but if I do in the future I'll let you know.  The newer Tarbo looks like the older one except being painted more precisely and having the light patches on its snout less bright than on the older Tarbo.

[Faelrin]

I forgot, but wasn't this Tsintaosaurus one of the ones rumored too? So just Acrocanthosaurus, Sinraptor (I think), and Torosaurus left right?

[SidB]

I forgot, but wasn't this Tsintaosaurus one of the ones rumored too? So just Acrocanthosaurus, Sinraptor (I think), and Torosaurus left right?

That's right. The Zheuchentyrannus was an "extra."

[CARN0TAURUS]

This looks absolutely gorgeous!  Hopefully people won't get carried away with the negativity once it releases because it's small and there is no way the production versions are going to be painted with that much detail.  I mostly collect theropods so for all of you guys, I hope the production version comes close to looking like the promo photos

I'm not sure what's going on at pnso but I'd love it if the guy that designs the paintwork on some of these hadrosaurs would get to do a couple of the theropods too.  Between caroline and this one I'd love to see those types of colors design patterns applied to a T-rex or a new Giganotosaurus etc.

[CARN0TAURUS]

for those of you in the US, I get mine from HappyHenToys. Might take a little while longer to get them, and they aren't cheaper, but at least I don't worry about international shipping.

I don't pay for shipping on Amazon, I just wait for the item to become a prime item about 2 weeks after it first posts on their site and then I get it delivered overnight for free.  Most of the time they even offer a discount anywhere between 6-8% depending on the promotion.  A couple times a year they offer 20% off.  I paid $31 for paul, $31 for connor, $33 for gamba, and $36 for the Tarbosaurus and got them delivered next day.  It's nice to hit buy on something and it arrives at your door the following day

[CARN0TAURUS]

Speaking of amazon I'm not sure what's going on but Lana toys is selling the new zhenchutyrannus, styracosaurus, and centrosaurus with lower shipping at a later delivery date and those are not part of the pnso store.  Did rebor hijack one of pnso's shipments!? 

Lana toys is selling them under this brand name:  WLNTDOLA

This can't be okay, right?  I don't know if they're bootlegs or what.

[Faras]

Tsintaosaurus will be available on Taobao from 9:00am 21st, +8GMT, Price is same as Iguanodon, so probably $59.99. New base have two hexagonal holes that look exactly like holes on transparent stands.

PS: tbh I'm a bit confused about prices. Seems new Mamenchisaurus, Triceratops and Iguanodon are all $59.99 on Amazon, but on Taobao they are ￥199, ￥249 and ￥229 (Tsintaosaurus is ￥229).

Link: https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=a1z0d.6639537.1997196601.4.67e9748488Rxt8&id=668815726730

Spoiler

[close]

[Shonisaurus]

Thanks for the information, it costs your money but I am not going to be intimidated by the price, I plan to buy it too, allowing yourself a "whim" from time to time is not bad and in this case a well modeled tsintaosaurus like the one from PNSO and with the base and book illustrative and graphic of this great lambeosaurine hadrosauroid and one of my favorite herbivorous dinosaurs is for me yes or yes it is a must buy.

I hope that one day PNSO will be encouraged to make a kosmoceratops and medusaceratops (two of my favorite ceratopsids) then I would buy them and whatever costs me a lot or a little, I take it off even for basic purchases in my life, I hope the members in charge listen to me of the PNSO company.

[Sim]

I've noticed this new Tsintaosaurus doesn't have cheeks, in contrast to PNSO's previous hadrosaurids.  I guess that's why the PNSO Iguanodon didn't have them either, it's because these figures were made after someone at PNSO started believing in "most likely no cheeks on ornithopods".  It's disappointing for me as I strongly prefer ornithischians to have cheeks.  Oh well, I wouldn't be interested in this Tsintaosaurus even if it had cheeks, and PNSO can still make ornithischians I like e.g. the PNSO Styracosaurus.

I'm also a little unhappy due to PNSO's two most recent figures being species whose appearance is unknown.  In the case of Tsintaosaurus, the shape of its crest is still not known, and this new figure by PNSO has a more upright crest than the 'official new reconstruction'.  I will say though that PNSO's guess at the crest shape looks more believable based on my limited knowledge of Tsintaosaurus as I find it hard to believe that the "unicorn"-like crest was really distorted into that position.  In any case, Tsintaosaurus was the rumoured species I was least looking forward to.  I hope what PNSO will release next will be more interesting to me.  I'd really like it if the Acrocanthosaurus or Sinraptor is next.


Something else that's on my mind is how PNSO has represented some families very well while not representing others at all.  I have to say it currently doesn't bother me as every couple of releases PNSO has made there's a figure I like, and there are species from well-represented families that I'd like PNSO to make e.g. Gorgosaurus, Chasmosaurus.  However at the same time I'd like PNSO to represent diversity a bit better and release figures of groups they have been neglecting rather than yet another species from a well-represented group.  I thought it would be interesting to see how PNSO has represented different dinosaur groups in their "standard" figures (in other words excluding their large vinyls, minis and Microraptor that requires assembly).  I've listed this below:

Allosauroidea (4): Allosaurus, Carcharodontosaurus, Giganotosaurus, Yangchuanosaurus
Ceratosauria (1): Carnotaurus
Megalosauroidea (2): Torvosaurus, Spinosaurus
Tyrannosauroidea (6): Nanotyrannus, Qianzhousaurus, Tarbosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, Yutyrannus, Zhuchengtyrannus

Ankylosauria (4): Ankylosaurus, Borealopelta, Pinacosaurus, Sauropelta
Ceratopsoidea (7): Centrosaurus, Machairoceratops, Pachyrhinosaurus, Sinoceratops, Spinops, Styracosaurus, Triceratops
Ornithopoda (6): Corythosaurus, Iguanodon, Lambeosaurus, Olorotitan, Parasaurolophus, Tsintaosaurus
Pachycephalosauria (1): Pachycephalosaurus
Stegosauria (4): Chungkingosaurus, Stegosaurus, Miragaia, Tuojiangosaurus

Basal Sauropoda (1): Mamenchisaurus
Diplodocoidea (1): Amargasaurus

Looking at the numbers, ceratopsoids are the most represented group by PNSO (7), followed by tyrannosauroids and ornithopods (6 each).  Allosauroids, ankylosaurs and stegosaurs are also well-represented (4 each).  So it's a mix of groups that tend to be well-represented by companies in general (ceratopsoids, tyrannosauroids, allosauroids) and groups that are not focused on much (ornithopods, ankylosaurs, stegosaurs).  Impressive!   However it's not all good news.  Some groups are completely unrepresented.  The notable groups I notice are unrepresented are basal Theropoda, Ornithomimosauria, Therizinosauria, Oviraptorosauria, Deinonychosauria, Avialae, basal Neornithischia, basal Ceratopsia, basal Sauropodomorpha, Macronaria.  Also, Ceratosauria, basal Sauropoda and Diplodocoidea could benefit from more figures having only 1 species each from PNSO.  Megalosauroidea would also benefit from more attention, it has only two species represented, any other species from this group would definitely interest me, Suchomimus being my number 1 choice!

So maybe it would be good for PNSO to take a break from groups that have 4 or more species represented by them, as there's a lot of dinosaur groups that have gotten little or even no attention.  Personally I'd like PNSO to represent basal Theropoda (e.g. Dilophosaurus), Ornithomimosauria (e.g. Deinocheirus), Deinonychosauria (e.g. Linheraptor) and basal Sauropodomorpha (e.g. Lufengosaurus, but with the mouth open to hide the absence of lips and bipedal).


The other "standard" figures PNSO has released are all marine animals and I've listed how they are represented below:

Arthrodira (1): Dunkleosteus
Basal Sauropterygia (1): Atopodentatus
Eugeneodontida (1): Helicoprion
Ichthyosauria (2): Eurhinosaurus, Himalayasaurus
Lamniformes (2): Cretoxyrhina, megalodon
Metriorhynchoidea (1): Dakosaurus
Mosasauroidea (2): Mosasaurus, Tylosaurus
Physeteroidea (1): Livyatan
Pliosauroidea (1): Kronosaurus

It bothers me that out of all of these PNSO hasn't made a long-necked plesiosauroid, the most iconic type of prehistoric marine animal, yet they've made two mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs and lamniformes.  I hope PNSO will make a long-necked plesiosauroid, preferably something known from better remains than Elasmosaurus though.  It would also be great if PNSO focused on pterosaurs!  So, maybe it would be good for PNSO to take a break from groups they've represented with 4 or more species, as there's a lot they haven't represented?

[Faelrin]

That's a really well done write up there @Sim. I agree it would be nice to see pterosaurs and more marine reptiles from them. I'm also surprised both them and CollectA are ignoring dromaeosaurids (except Microraptor), despite them being some of the most dinosaurs out there. I still also long for a return to mini figures. Basal and/or smaller theropods and ornithischians work really well as those smaller figures I think, like their Tianyulong and Sinosauropteryx as examples. I'm also surprised they have yet to make a Psittacosaurus either.

[dinofelid]

I've noticed this new Tsintaosaurus doesn't have cheeks, in contrast to PNSO's previous hadrosaurids.  I guess that's why the PNSO Iguanodon didn't have them either, it's because these figures were made after someone at PNSO started believing in "most likely no cheeks on ornithopods".  It's disappointing for me as I strongly prefer ornithischians to have cheeks.  Oh well, I wouldn't be interested in this Tsintaosaurus even if it had cheeks, and PNSO can still make ornithischians I like e.g. the PNSO Styracosaurus.

In the Iguanodon video, PNSO designer Zhao Chuang talks about the cheek issue starting at 15 minutes 12 seconds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdRwW198s2U&t=912s

At 16 minutes 55 seconds he says "Finally, in recent years there was a definitive study. At the beginning of this year, at the beginning of 2021, some medical scholars analyzed muscles of many dinosaur skulls including Iguanodon. From a medical point of view, the way its muscles were connected was not vertically between the upper and lower parts but might be diagonally backward. The diagonal backward connection meant that it had no cheeks."

It's possible he's referring to this paper by Ali Nabavizadeh (a followup to this one), since although it was originally published in November 2019, a tweet from Nabavizadeh here shows it first became open access in April 2021. Does anyone know of any other paper he might be talking about?

If Zhao Chuang is referring to Nabavizadeh's paper, I think he's jumping to conclusions that go beyond what Nabavizadeh actually argued when he uses this to justify total cheeklessness. What Nabavizadeh's papers argue is that the old hypothesis of mammal-like cheek muscles should be ruled out in favor of a different muscle configuration, as see in the left vs. the right image in this diagram from the first paper:



However, neither paper rules out the idea of a non-muscular tissue flap, what Nabavizadeh calls "buccal soft tissues" or a "buccal flap", and in both papers he notes that there seems to be evidence for such a flap in at least some ankylosaurs. From the second paper:

It should be noted that, although it is not encased in muscle, the presence of a buccal osteoderm in the nodosaurid ankylosaur Panoplosaurus shows there was at least a rostrally extending buccal flap of skin along the lateral margins of the tooth row in nodosaurids (Barrett, 2001), which is indicative of how much can be speculated and how much is unknown about extraoral dermal soft tissues in dinosaurs (see Nabavizadeh [2018] for more on this subject).

The original argument for cheeks was that some ornithischian skulls indicate they were capable of a kind of chewing called pleurokinesis, and if there was no muscle or tissue to block the teeth then some of the food would just fall out of the side of their mouth (unlike iguanas, which just bite and swallow and therefore have no need for cheeks). Nabavizadeh's reconstruction of the jaw muscle attachment shows that for some ornithischians like Triceratops, the new placement of the jaw muscle would almost entirely block off the teeth, so that there might be no need for extra cheek tissue to prevent food from falling out while chewing. But in the iguanodontids and hadrosaurs, the reconstructed position of the muscle would still leave most of the teeth exposed, so without any cheek tissue I think it would be hard to explain how they avoided having a lot of food fall out while chewing. Here's a diagram from the second paper:



In his review of Harvey the Iguanodon, DinosDragons has a section on cheeks starting at 15:10 which makes a similar point about how the jaw muscle in iguanodontids and hadrosaurs wouldn't come forward enough to block food from falling out in the absence of cheek tissue, and he includes a computer animation of the pleurokinetic chewing cycle to help illustrate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfjrBdjEJCg&t=910s

[SidB]

Thanks, D @dinofelid , for this succinct and thorough summary from these recent sources. In particular, they seem to indicate that @Sim 's preference for cheek structure of some sort on iguanodon and hadrosaur - type ornithischians is quite justifiable, if not absolutely certain. For myself, I'm open to either interpretation, though I continue to prefer the depictions with cheeks.

[Duck]

Love the bulk on this one. Still waiting for an Acrocanthosaurus (Maybe) until I buy my next PNSO

[Flaffy]

Love the bulk on this one. Still waiting for an Acrocanthosaurus (Maybe) until I buy my next PNSO

Same! This makes me hopeful that PNSO will also reconstruct Acrocanthosaurus as appropriately beefy, with a "hump" instead of a thin sail.

Thanks, D @dinofelid , for this succinct and thorough summary from these recent sources. In particular, they seem to indicate that @Sim 's preference for cheek structure of some sort on iguanodon and hadrosaur - type ornithischians is quite justifiable, if not absolutely certain. For myself, I'm open to either interpretation, though I continue to prefer the depictions with cheeks.

I'm more partial to cheeks too. I think Zhao is jumping the gun here with his completely cheekless ornithischians.


And thanks for the write up @Sim . I'm still surprised since their revival in 2019, PNSO has only produced 17 asian genera.
Though to be fair, I wouldn't be surprised that the revenue generated from popular species and theropods funds PNSO's ventures in more obscure animals.

[Shadowknight1]

Love the bulk on this one. Still waiting for an Acrocanthosaurus (Maybe) until I buy my next PNSO

Same! This makes me hopeful that PNSO will also reconstruct Acrocanthosaurus as appropriately beefy, with a "hump" instead of a thin sail.

I hope so as well.  I have three Acros, one from Rebor, from Safari, and Papo.  Safari's is probably the most accurate, but is a very small figure for such a large predator.  Rebor's Acro has a pretty beefy spine, though it tapers a little too much and the head isn't 100% right on.  Papo's looks nice, but suffers from a thin spine, long skull, and way oversized arms that are bent at the elbows at angles that are actually mechanically impossible from what I remember reading.

[Halichoeres]

Yeah, Nabavizadeh has been pretty clear that his reconstructions of muscles don't make simple membranous cheeks impossible, only cheek muscles like the mammalian buccinator. Anyway not a huge deal to me and I'll be picking this figure up.

for those of you in the US, I get mine from HappyHenToys. Might take a little while longer to get them, and they aren't cheaper, but at least I don't worry about international shipping.

I stopped using Amazon after the HQ2 thing, and I had tried waiting until several recent PNSO figures were available on AliExpress to order them together and have only a single international package, but they kept needlessly splitting up the shipments anyway, so I'm switching to Happy Hen too for PNSO purchases.

[Sim]

I hope that one day PNSO will be encouraged to make a kosmoceratops and medusaceratops (two of my favorite ceratopsids) then I would buy them and whatever costs me a lot or a little, I take it off even for basic purchases in my life, I hope the members in charge listen to me of the PNSO company.

I'd like PNSO to make a Medusaceratops too!  Although PNSO has made 6 centrosaurines and only 1 chasmosaurine, so I think it would be good if their next couple of ceratopsids were chasmosaurines.  Chasmosaurus is the one I'd like most, though apparently a Torosaurus will be next.  When PNSO goes back to centrosaurines Medusaceratops is the one I'd most like them to make.

One other thing I've noticed is that all 5 of PNSO's "standard" hadrosauroids are lambeosaurines.  Maybe it would be good for PNSO's next one to be a saurolophine or a basal species.

Having said all that, ceratopsoids and hadrosauroids are among the most represented groups in PNSO's "standard" figures so I hope PNSO focuses on less represented groups like the ones I listed previously before making more ceratopsoids or hadrosauroids.