The best figure of every species, according to Halichoeres

[Loon]

That theropod comment is very much how I feel about it all, too. But, I definitely agree that when taking a step back there's a lot to appreciate in these figures. My feelings on the Baryonyx are similar, but wow, that Daspletosaurus is so much nicer in hand.

[ceratopsian]

You have convinced this non-theropod lover to splash out on the Baryonyx... (and you made me smile too with your "fan" comments). I'll get the Daspletosaurus in due course when it reaches these shores).  You should get a commission!  (Seriously though, it's always interesting to read your well balanced assessments.)

[SBell]

Baryonyx is one of my favorite dinos, but I might skip this one only because I have the Favorite and they are very similar.

Have to make those choices somehow

[Gothmog the Baryonyx]

I agree with you on theropods, especially if you add to it the depictions in fiction  as they go hand in hand with the annoying "fans" of theropods.
I will be placing an order for the Baryonyx on Everything Dinosaur later today. It looks gorgeous. I'm guessing it's about the same size as the Favorite Co one?
I wish my Tiantaisaurus stands up. It seems that every figure that other people have trouble standing is fine for me. But ones everyone else have that stand up fine are terrible with me and keep falling. I have fixed the Atlasaurus with hot water,  but I worry about breaking the Tiantaisaurus with that. I had guessed that the Tiantaisaurus was 1:25 ish scale but that's without working it out.

[Halichoeres]

Thanks for stopping by, everyone!

Have you ever learned of the existence of a band, found their music enjoyable, catchy but not earthshattering, but then found out that their fans are awful? To the point where it's hard to enjoy the band? Sometimes theropods feel like that. When I step back, though, and consciously set aside the people whose enjoyment of prehistory only extends to "who would win in a fight?", I can appreciate this very fine work by Mr. Watson.

Thats basically how I feel about that Rick and Mortimer show everyone talks about. Also I'm sorry people like me have made you feel this way about theropods. I hope people can realize us theropod lovers arent either "feather-crazists" or "awesombros". I used to feel that way about hadrosaurs, but i realised the folks(which i now find very charming) are the problem, not the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are cool. And always will be.

I've also had that experience with Rick & Morty; it's very weird to me how some of its fans behave, which I wouldn't have guessed at all from watching the (quite entertaining!) show in a vacuum. Anyway, thanks, although I'm sure that I have done plenty to make people hate fish too!

You have convinced this non-theropod lover to splash out on the Baryonyx... (and you made me smile too with your "fan" comments). I'll get the Daspletosaurus in due course when it reaches these shores).  You should get a commission!  (Seriously though, it's always interesting to read your well balanced assessments.)

I'm not a lawyer, but I believe as a resident of England you are legally bound to purchase a Baryonyx this nice.

Baryonyx is one of my favorite dinos, but I might skip this one only because I have the Favorite and they are very similar.

Have to make those choices somehow

I agree with you on theropods, especially if you add to it the depictions in fiction  as they go hand in hand with the annoying "fans" of theropods.
I will be placing an order for the Baryonyx on Everything Dinosaur later today. It looks gorgeous. I'm guessing it's about the same size as the Favorite Co one?
I wish my Tiantaisaurus stands up. It seems that every figure that other people have trouble standing is fine for me. But ones everyone else have that stand up fine are terrible with me and keep falling. I have fixed the Atlasaurus with hot water,  but I worry about breaking the Tiantaisaurus with that. I had guessed that the Tiantaisaurus was 1:25 ish scale but that's without working it out.

They are in fact very similar and almost identical in overall size. I haven't measured a lot of individual elements, but I definitely trust Watson's proportions over Araki's. @Gothmog the Baryonyx fingers crossed your Tiantaisaurus is as stable as mine is! My Chilantaisaurus still stands perfectly on its own after several years and an interstate move, but my Sinraptor does not. The vagaries of biped ownership, I guess.

[Sim]

I still prefer the Favorite Baryonyx over the Wild Safari version, which I'm not getting.  As @Flaffy has pointed out, the number of teeth in the WS Baryonyx's upper jaw is too little, the Favorite Baryonyx is much better in that regard.

The WS Daspletosaurus's teeth look better in your photos than in the video reviews I've seen, I'm glad about that!

[The Atroxious]

Thats basically how I feel about that Rick and Mortimer show everyone talks about. Also I'm sorry people like me have made you feel this way about theropods. I hope people can realize us theropod lovers arent either "feather-crazists" or "awesombros". I used to feel that way about hadrosaurs, but i realised the folks(which i now find very charming) are the problem, not the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are cool. And always will be.

Honestly, theropods are essentially the reason I'm interested in dinosaurs in the first place, and I'm just as exasperated by the extremists as anybody. I'm just a bird nerd who finds evolution fascinating, and subsequently has a bunch more "birds" to read about.

The therapist vs. hadrosaur fan wars are ridonkulous though. How on earth does something like that even occur? I get that theropod fanboys might not like hadrosaurs that much and vice versa, but it's kind of weird to act like the other side is somehow a rival to the point that you have to duke it out over who got more toys this year.

I've also had that experience with Rick & Morty; it's very weird to me how some of its fans behave, which I wouldn't have guessed at all from watching the (quite entertaining!) show in a vacuum. Anyway, thanks, although I'm sure that I have done plenty to make people hate fish too!

To be fair, any fandom that gets that big and loud has problems that drive people away. Rick and Morty, Steven Universe, Undertale, Five Nights at Freddy's and so on. Personally I avoid most of these IPs due to not wanting to be associated with the fandom. I briefly followed Five Nights when it was new, but it went downhill so quickly. I bailed when people were trading personal insults over differing ideas about the animatronics' gender even after the creator himself specified. Unfortunately the internet has a habit of ruining a lot of otherwise innocuous IPs.

So maybe this is some kind of heresy, but incidentally, before I got interested in theropods, I was interested in fish. I was super into marine animals for most of my childhood, the weirder and/or toothier the better. I liked dinosaurs as a kid, but bathypelagic fish were my real jam. After I got interested in other subjects in my late teens, I drifted away from zoology, but when I got into birds in my early twenties I came right back. I still like fish quite a lot to be honest, but birds have become something akin to a muse.

[Stegotyranno420]

@The Atroxious What do you mean by therapists. Did you mean Theropod?
@Halichoeres , on the bright side, you have educated many about some really cool fish we never knew existed.

[The Atroxious]

@The Atroxious What do you mean by therapists. Did you mean Theropod?

Yes, I did mean "theropod". Oops! Typing on my phone I guess autocorrect got overly ambitious.

[Halichoeres]

I still prefer the Favorite Baryonyx over the Wild Safari version, which I'm not getting.  As @Flaffy has pointed out, the number of teeth in the WS Baryonyx's upper jaw is too little, the Favorite Baryonyx is much better in that regard.

The WS Daspletosaurus's teeth look better in your photos than in the video reviews I've seen, I'm glad about that!

Hmm, that's an interesting wrinkle. With that tooth datum I'll have to do some more comparisons of proportions and so forth to see if that outweighs other strengths and weaknesses. It's funny, normally I derive a fair amount of enjoyment from comparing two (or more) figures in depth to see which is more accurate, but with theropods these days it feels like a chore.

Thanks for that perspective, @The Atroxious. Given that pterosaurs, ornithischians, sauropods, and Mesozoic theropods are all stem-birds, they all have something interesting to say about bird evolution! Hadrosaurs are an interesting point of comparison with theropods, because they're a relatively restricted, moderately diverse group with fairly good representation in plastic. Some important well known taxa lack figures (like Brachylophosaurus, as Newt pointed out elsewhere recently), but there's a pretty good spread.

As you probably know, I'm interested in evolution in a very catholic way--I specialized in fishes in grad school, but my first publication was on Philippine shrew-rats, in undergrad I was one course shy of a plant biology major, and I minored in entomology. I've taught courses on plant identification, vertebrate anatomy, and human anatomy. So for me, when it comes to the toy market, what I really want is some balance. It just irritates me generally that so much design and manufacturing effort goes into a handful of the same old standbys, and it happens that some of those standbys intersect with a really toxic seam of people who are really more into monsters than animals. Like, ceratopsians are extremely well represented, but they don't have that same intersection. Although I won't necessarily go to any effort to try to popularize ceratopsians or increase their representation in art, they also don't get my dander up. I'm always going to agitate for the less-represented (plants, echinoderms, fish, even the less-popular clades of theropods like therizinosaurs or enantiornithines), because I want more variety on my shelves. This is definitely a product of my specific style of collecting, which is about evolution and ecology more than anything else. And my style of collecting might, just might, be influenced by the fact that my office was just downstairs from the Field Museum's Evolving Planet exhibit when I got into the hobby.

Anyway, no heresy in going from fish to birds; I went from mammals to fish. Life is interesting, and I'm not sure any is inherently more so than another.

[Stegotyranno420]

Wait up.  Would only paraves or coelurosaurs count as stem birds. What counts as stem-? How far does it go. Just kind of confused here.

[Gothmog the Baryonyx]

Wait up.  Would only paraves or coelurosaurs count as stem birds. What counts as stem-? How far does it go. Just kind of confused here.

all non-avian dinosaurs are stem-birds, as are pterosaurs, silesaurs and any other extinct archosaur closer related to birds than crocodiles that is not itself a bird. Stem-something means anything extinct that the something is their closest living relative, but they themselves are not part of that group. Like Dimetrodon and Edaphosaurus are stem-mammals.

[SBell]

Wait up.  Would only paraves or coelurosaurs count as stem birds. What counts as stem-? How far does it go. Just kind of confused here.

all non-avian dinosaurs are stem-birds, as are pterosaurs, silesaurs and any other extinct archosaur closer related to birds than crocodiles that is not itself a bird. Stem-something means anything extinct that the something is their closest living relative, but they themselves are not part of that group. Like Dimetrodon and Edaphosaurus are stem-mammals.

Those aren't necessarily stem groups, they're sister groups. Stem groups are a group plus their descendants. A pterosaur is not ancestral to anything dinosaur, it's the sister group, for example.

[Stegotyranno420]

@Gothmog the Baryonyx based on @SBell response:
A sauropod is not ancestral to any bird.
Neither is a spinosaurus
Or even a Tyrannosaurus

I don't want it to seem like I'm arguing I'm just genuinely curious. So sorry if I seem angry

[SBell]

@SBell
A sauropod is not ancestral to any bird.
Neither is a spinosaurus
Or even a Tyrannosaurus

I don't want it to seem like I'm arguing I'm just genuinely curious. So sorry if I seem angry

@Stegotyranno420  try responding to @Gothmog the Baryonyx, whom I was responding to.

As you may have noticed--or not--my response was that, for example, sauropods would be a sister group to the theropod line, not a stem group.

Stem groups, as I said, are the basal group to the descendants. So coelurosaurs are the sister group to birds... broadly.

It might not be entirely up to date, but this site has some good cladograms to answer your question:
https://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/G104/lectures/104therop.html

[Stegotyranno420]

@SBell
yeah i dont know why i responded to you instead of Gothmog. I was trying to say "Based on Sbells response" but it only put "Sbell"
Not sure how that happened
But thanks for the cladogram.

[SBell]

@SBell
yeah i dont know why i responded to you instead of Gothmog. I was trying to say "Based on Sbells response" but it only put "Sbell"
Not sure how that happened
But thanks for the cladogram.

No worries.

I just realized that the link I gave is the theropods.

This one https://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/G104/lectures/104coelur.html is specifically the coelurosaurs

[Gothmog the Baryonyx]

Wait up.  Would only paraves or coelurosaurs count as stem birds. What counts as stem-? How far does it go. Just kind of confused here.

all non-avian dinosaurs are stem-birds, as are pterosaurs, silesaurs and any other extinct archosaur closer related to birds than crocodiles that is not itself a bird. Stem-something means anything extinct that the something is their closest living relative, but they themselves are not part of that group. Like Dimetrodon and Edaphosaurus are stem-mammals.

Those aren't necessarily stem groups, they're sister groups. Stem groups are a group plus their descendants. A pterosaur is not ancestral to anything dinosaur, it's the sister group, for example.

@SBell I was using stem group in the wider sense as in Benton 2005 in which everything closer to birds than crocodiles is a stem-bird, as in the wikipedia article below: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_group#Examples_of_stem_groups_(in_the_wider_sense)
In that sense, pterosaurs are stem-birds, and so are sauropods.

@Stegotyranno420 when i say these are stem-birds I do not mean birds evolved from them, I mean only that birds are their closest living relatives.

[Stegotyranno420]

so by that logic, if crocodilians went extinct today, then tomorrow they will also become stem birds, and so will every archosauromorph ever. And lets take it a step further and say every lepidosauromorph and every turtle went extinct. Will they also become stem birds?

[SBell]

Wait up.  Would only paraves or coelurosaurs count as stem birds. What counts as stem-? How far does it go. Just kind of confused here.

all non-avian dinosaurs are stem-birds, as are pterosaurs, silesaurs and any other extinct archosaur closer related to birds than crocodiles that is not itself a bird. Stem-something means anything extinct that the something is their closest living relative, but they themselves are not part of that group. Like Dimetrodon and Edaphosaurus are stem-mammals.

Those aren't necessarily stem groups, they're sister groups. Stem groups are a group plus their descendants. A pterosaur is not ancestral to anything dinosaur, it's the sister group, for example.

@SBell I was using stem group in the wider sense as in Benton 2005 in which everything closer to birds than crocodiles is a stem-bird, as in the wikipedia article below: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_group#Examples_of_stem_groups_(in_the_wider_sense)
In that sense, pterosaurs are stem-birds, and so are sauropods.

@Stegotyranno420 when i say these are stem-birds I do not mean birds evolved from them, I mean only that birds are their closest living relatives.

I think that's way too broad an interpretation, and that's not how I would read the article's definition.

"For example, Neornithes (birds) can be defined as a crown group, which includes the most recent common ancestor of all modern birds, and all of its extant or extinct descendants."

Including all of the archosaurs as a stem is technically correct but renders the term meaningless.

https://images.app.goo.gl/w8nYtA1tu68upHK88

That image sums up how we would probably conceptualize a stem group. So technically, non-avian lineage coelurosaurs could be considered a stem group.

@Halichoeres or someone more currently engaged with phylogenetic terms might be better able to explain.