The best figure of every species, according to Halichoeres

[BlueKrono]

Although the dinky Collecta toob Xipha will surely pale in comparison to this one:
http://www.everythingdinosaur.com/catalog/product/gallery/id/1087/image/3348/

[CityRaptor]

If you don't want the Spinosaurus that comes with it, I'll give a good home for free. 

[SBell]

Although the dinky Collecta toob Xipha will surely pale in comparison to this one:
http://www.everythingdinosaur.com/catalog/product/gallery/id/1087/image/3348/

But it will at least look alive--the one with the Spino appears to have had a bad time.

[SBell]

Although the dinky Collecta toob Xipha will surely pale in comparison to this one:
http://www.everythingdinosaur.com/catalog/product/gallery/id/1087/image/3348/

But it will at least look alive--the one with the Spino appears to have had a bad time.

[Halichoeres]

I actually have that model kit in a closet. I bought it thinking I would just paint up the Xiphactinus and display it on its own (I have no interest in the Spinosaurus, so if somebody actually wants it, I'm all ears). Unfortunately, Xiphactinus is designed to only rest on the ground. The side that contacts the ground is hollow and flat, so if I wanted to display it I would first have to sculpt the entire left surface of the fish. Let me tell you, that was a really disappointing unboxing. I may tackle it at some point, but I certainly don't have time for it right now.

[BlueKrono]

I actually have that model kit in a closet. I bought it thinking I would just paint up the Xiphactinus and display it on its own (I have no interest in the Spinosaurus, so if somebody actually wants it, I'm all ears). Unfortunately, Xiphactinus is designed to only rest on the ground. The side that contacts the ground, is hollow and flat, so if I wanted to display it I would first have to sculpt the entire left surface of the fish. Let me tell you, that was a really disappointing unboxing. I may tackle it at some point, but I certainly don't have time for it right now.

Ah, I should have known no pez prehistorico could escape you! I would be really interested in the grounded fish if you would be willing to part with it. Less so the Spinosaurus... CityRaptor?

[SBell]

I actually have that model kit in a closet. I bought it thinking I would just paint up the Xiphactinus and display it on its own (I have no interest in the Spinosaurus, so if somebody actually wants it, I'm all ears). Unfortunately, Xiphactinus is designed to only rest on the ground. The side that contacts the ground, is hollow and flat, so if I wanted to display it I would first have to sculpt the entire left surface of the fish. Let me tell you, that was a really disappointing unboxing. I may tackle it at some point, but I certainly don't have time for it right now.

You could mount it upright on a plaque, like a fishing trophy. Half mounts are not uncommon even with real (or fake-but-based-on-real fish mounts).

[Halichoeres]

You could mount it upright on a plaque, like a fishing trophy. Half mounts are not uncommon even with real (or fake-but-based-on-real fish mounts).

That hadn't occurred to me! Interesting idea, thank you.

@BlueKrono--I'm still considering whether to paint (and now perhaps mount!) this thing, but if I ever decide to ditch it, you'll be first to know.

@CityRaptor or anyone else interested--I can definitely be persuaded to part with the Spinosaurus, and the Xiphactinus is anachronistic anyway. Better to give it a shark, or a coelacanth, or a sawfish, or a bichir, or....

[SBell]

You could mount it upright on a plaque, like a fishing trophy. Half mounts are not uncommon even with real (or fake-but-based-on-real fish mounts).

That hadn't occurred to me! Interesting idea, thank you.

@BlueKrono--I'm still considering whether to paint (and now perhaps mount!) this thing, but if I ever decide to ditch it, you'll be first to know.

@CityRaptor or anyone else interested--I can definitely be persuaded to part with the Spinosaurus, and the Xiphactinus is anachronistic anyway. Better to give it a shark, or a coelacanth, or a sawfish, or a bichir, or....

No problem...

But I'm kicking myself that I haven't been in place TWICE now to put my name in for one of your Xiphactinus.

Of course, I will always have the FaunaCasts, and that's not going anywhere!

[Halichoeres]

Phanerozoic tracheophytes! I'm going to change the name of the thread again, since it's hard to use the word "paean" with a straight face.


Safari tree fern (cf. Psaronius). This was a very large fern from the Late Carboniferous and most of the Permian. This one is about 1:60, but you could fudge it to 1:40. I use it next to my small Dimetrodon, Keratocephalus, and Arthropleura figures. As has been pointed out elsewhere, it has a very unfortunate morphological flaw: the new leaves are unfurling backward. They ought to start curled inward and spread in a rosette as they mature. Here it's a little as though an embryonic human had its arms grow toward the middle of the chest such that the elbows touched. A plant whose leaves grow toward each other would experience just as much trouble gathering food as a human thus disabled.


CollectA cycad tree (cf. Psuedoctenis). Apparently this genus is based on leaf fossils which share gross morphological features and a few traits of the cuticle. In living plants, leaves are taxonomically unreliable because there's widespread morphological convergence. I don't know paleobotany well, but my impression is that Pseudoctenis stands an excellent chance of representing many evolutionarily distinct taxa. Different species have been described from the earliest Permian straight through the mid-Cretaceous. If the identifications here are correct, this is the only true cycad on the mass market. A couple of papers I skimmed suggested the leaves could be 20-30 cm long, suggesting that this cycad tree is probably around 1:10-1:30 (so pretty versatile for dioramas!).


Safari cycad (according to this blog post, it's cf. Pentoxylon). Pentoxylon resembles a cycad by retaining plesiomorphic spermatophyte characters, but is probably more closely related to angiosperms than to living cycads (according to Magallón 2010, Syst. Biol. 59: 384). This example is probably anywhere from 1:8-1:15, highly variable, because 1) it's a plant, and 2) it's found from the Late Permian through basically the entire Mesozoic.


CollectA Williamsonia. Williamsonia is actually a benettitalean, so not a true cycad either, but even more closely related to angiosperms than Pentoxylon is. Williamsonia is known from throughout the Jurassic and Cretaceous, and this one is about 1:20 based on a large specimen.


CollectA Cycadeoidea (the short, squat plants) and Monanthesia (the taller ones). Both of these are also bennetitaleans (thus, stem-angiosperms). The first name should be a hint: Cycadeoidea means roughly "that which looks like a cycad," leaving unspoken that it is not in fact a cycad. Both of these are known from the Lower Cretaceous of England, which is no doubt why Anthony Beeson selected them for CollectA. These are about 1:18 when you account for plausible sizes for both genera.


You could really make a nice little thicket of these.


Safari Agathis. This genus persists in the antipodes, but was much more widespread during the Late Jurassic and Cretaceous. It's a gigantic monster of a tree, so at the level of development this one seems to show, it's about 1:150-1:300. It really only makes sense next to my tiniest sauropods, and even then looks a little out of place.

Going through these has really made me wish there were more prehistoric plants out there.

[Archinto]

Those are some nice looking plant models. Dang... now I want some for my shelves LOL  The collecta plants are certainly higher quality looking than the safari ones. I like the little thicket :3

[Halichoeres]

Those are some nice looking plant models. Dang... now I want some for my shelves LOL  The collecta plants are certainly higher quality looking than the safari ones. I like the little thicket :3

Yeah, I have to agree. The CollectA plants are better than the dinosaurs they were releasing around the same time, and they were treated as worthy figures in their own right. The fact that Safari called this series "prehistoric landscapes" makes it sound like they were intended as just background. I have one of each of these, but sitting and taking pictures of them makes me want to buy a bunch more to populate my shelves.

[BlueKrono]

::puts on math hat::
I guess the smaller number of people who buy plants as opposed to other prehistorics is made up for by the quantity some people buy.

[Halichoeres]

::puts on math hat::
I guess the smaller number of people who buy plants as opposed to other prehistoric a is made up for by the quantity some people buy.

Partially, but if that were all the way true, I'd bet we'd have more plant options than we do. I'm looking forward to the Araucaria trees from the BotM line.

[BlueKrono]

The title of this thread has suddenly become less imperious.

[Halichoeres]

The title of this thread has suddenly become less imperious.

It's still secretly pretentious and pedantic because it includes all tetrapods as fishes.

[Halichoeres]

Big collection update! This month marks two years of collecting dinosaurs. I now have 478 figures, representing 428 nominal taxa. Most of those taxa (400) are manufacturer specified; a few (10) were manufacturer-specified, but I call them something different due to taxonomic changes; others (16) are unspecified but identifiable with sometimes very high degrees of confidence; and finally there are two that are just incertae sedis because they're based on specimens that have never been named.

My figures were made by 70 different companies in 15 different countries. That doesn't include individual artists like our own Jetoar, Kayakasaurus, and Mr. Challenger. Slightly more than half of all my figures are from four companies:
Safari      91
CollectA      68
Kaiyodo        54
Favorite       27
I suspect that this year the number of companies in my collection will finally start to fall because there are probably very few obscure brands left to discover and lots of them are now vulnerable to replacement by new stuff from the likes of PNSO and Favorite.

I was recently really glad that I keep a spreadsheet to track my collection. I exported a vector of scale estimates to R and ran a sorting algorithm called Jenks natural breaks optimization, which minimizes variance within groups while maximizing variance among groups. I let the algorithm divide up the range of scales and rearranged my shelves accordingly (the algorithm took literally seconds). There are still some things that look weird together, but not nearly as many as there were before. Once the Creative Beast ceratopsian series is released, it will wreak complete havoc on the categories, though, since it will be mostly in 1:18, which is currently one of the category endpoints. Guess I'll have to re-run the algorithm sometime in 2018.

Anyway, enough nerd stuff! Here are my office dinosaurs! I keep all my sauropods in my office, so people at work probably think I have a special fondness for them. They're not wrong, but they're missing my special fondness for sea creatures, ornithischians, and the Paleozoic.


Cretaceous Period, 1:4.5-1:9


Jurassic Period, 1:4.5-1:9


Jurassic Period + Cretaceous sauropods, 1:9-1:18


Jurassic Period + Cretaceous sauropods, 1:18-1:30


Jurassic & Cretaceous sauropods, 1:30-1:55


Jurassic & Cretaceous, 1:55-1:70


Jurassic & Cretaceous, 1:75-1:95


Mesozoic, 1:9-1:18


Permian & Triassic, 1:2.5-1:4.5


House dinosaurs!


Cretaceous, 1:30-1:55.


Cretaceous, 1:30-1:55


Cretaceous, 1:30-1:55


Cretaceous, 1:30-1:55


Cretaceous, 1:18-1:30


Cretaceous, 1:18-1:30


Cretaceous, 1:9-1:18


Jurassic & Cretaceous, 1:2.5-1:4.5


Jurassic, 1:30-1:55. With all the sauropods on my office shelves, there's surprisingly little left at this scale.


Mesozoic, 1:30-1:65


Mesozoic, 1:18-1:30


Mesozoic, 1:1-1:2.5. I honestly don't like having my books blocked by toy animals, but I am really running out of space anywhere else.


Mesozoic, larger than life


Devonian through Triassic, 1:30-1:60. 200 million years of evolution, and this little shelf is all there is to represent it at this scale. Criminal!


Permian & Triassic, 1:18-1:30


Devonian through Triassic, 1:4.5-1:9.


Carboniferous through Triassic, stuff on the shelf is 1:9-1:18, stuff on the risers is 1:4.5-1:9, except the Diictodon on the far left, which is about 1:2.


Paleozoic, 1:18-1:30


Mostly Paleozoic, 1:9-1:18


Mostly Paleozoic, 1:2.5-1:4.5


Paleozoic, 1:1-1:2.5. I cut off the Kaiyodo Opabinia, but you all know what it looks like.


Paleozoic, larger than life


naked noggins, not remotely to scale

Almost all of these have been featured individually in this thread, but a few haven't, so I'm happy to ID anything if you're curious. Thanks to all the forum members who have traded with me! I never dreamed I could knock down so much of my wish list so quickly.

[RobinGoodfellow]

One of the best collection on DTF.
No doubts.

[Bokisaurus]

Wonderful Collection! Wish I had display space like yours to show my collection

[Jose S.M.]

That's a very impressive and extensive collection!