Medusa (Bullyland)

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Summer melts us here since weeks, so time for another wet review….

Today I want you to introduce you to one of those creatures everybody knows, but knows almost nothing about, a jellyfish. Jellyfish are a very very old group of animals, they date back to the famous Ediacarian, more than 600 mya. Fossils are very rare as jellyfish are more than other life forms “just water”. Up to 99% of their body is water, so there’s not much left to fossilize, but nevertheless, eons following eons gave some the chance to leave their imprints in stones.

Interestingly, the jellyfish or medusa is just a stage in the life cycle of the animal, just as the butterfly is. Same as the butterfly, the medusa is the sexual stage, the other stages can’t procreate though the polyp stage is the one that produces the medusa stages, and not just one, but several or dozens, so here the comparison to the butterfly fails. If you are interested in this very ancient and fascinating life form, have a look here or read the great wikipedia article.

Jellyfish have not changed much over time and the few fossils found leave a lot room to interpret on reconstructions. Bullyland released this particular model in 1998 together with two different ammonites, a belemnite and a trilobite. With the expection of the bigger ammonite, all are discontinued since 2010 and can be very hard to find. The tag coming with the Medusa figure says the figure was sculpted in cooperation with the Urwelt-Museum Aalen. I am unaware if fossil remains of jellyfish have been found near Aalen, but as you could see in the link above, some have been found in Germany and Bullyland often did produce figures of prehistoric animals found in Germany. However, no species is given, so there’s little to say about accuracy. The whole sculpt is true to what a jellyfish can look like, there’s the arms to catch prey and guide it to the mouth opening and there’s gonads visible under the bell. The mouth opening isn’t really sculpted, instead there’s a round hole, probably due to production as the figure is made of two pieces (fitted together by the producer).

The figure measures roughly 6 cm in diameter and 9.5 cm in height. The bell is creamy white in base color, the rim light blue. On the top of the bell is a purple cloverleaf, lined by pointy imprints and a plae light blue. The arms are held in a darker hue of the same light blue with a pale purple centre, the gonads are dotted white.

Well, that’s it. Being what it is the figure is very nice. It is totally safe as a toy but kids probably won’t find a jellyfish toy very attractive and in any way, if you find one of these, you would not want your kid ruin the paint job on it. If you want to spice up your prehistoric marine environment or are a collector of Bullylands or invertebrates, I recommend this figure.