Review and photos by Charles Peckham, edited by Suspsy
Sea turtles. Seeing them majestically soar through the water with their stoic yet playful expression can inspire awe in any observer. Who doesn’t love them? Well, I suppose jellyfish don’t. And some crustaceans. And seagrass. You get it.
With the recent release (and review) of Rebor’s Charles R. Knight inspired Mesozoic Rhapsody I thought it would be a fitting time to look at the very first Charles Knight inspired Tyrannosaurus toy, and one of the first Tyrannosaurus toys ever produced. I’m talking of course about the Marx Tyrannosaurus, a toy that isn’t just retro in appearance, but so vintage that it was produced at a time when it would have been considered reasonably accurate too.
Fans of prehistoric creatures have made some remarkable things over the years, including the members of this forum. In recent times, forum member Oammararak showed a kickstarter for their own game LIFE: evolution of life in earth, the series, to which many of us backed, given the vast number of intriguing species that have never been made by any company.
Review and photos by Charles Peckham, edited by Suspsy
How does Kaiyodo find new animals to make toys of? Much of their Dinotales series consists of strange and obscure animals that even a seasoned paleontologist might not have come across before. Case in point: Pleurocystites, an echinoderm from the Late Ordovician.
The Jurassic period is often called the time of the titans for good reasons; this is the time when dinosaurs really took off and grew to enormous sizes. This is also the time when some of the most famous dinosaurs roamed the planet. In a land dominated by icons, ones stood out from the crowd: Stegosaurus. While fellow icons and contemporaries like the enormous sauropods such as Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus, Brontosaurus, Camarasaurus, and Apatosaurus, and the apex predators Allosaurus and Ceratosaurus; Stegosaurus’s unique appearance made it easily the most eye-catching and easily recognizable of them all.
For collectors of prehistoric fishes 2021 has been a banner year, it saw the release of several toy fishes and two of them weren’t an O. megalodon or Dunkleosteus. Astonishing! Of course, we got those too. Papo tackled the meg. and PNSO released their own Dunkleosteus.
Thanks to its appearance in Jurassic Park, Dilophosaurus is, in the words of one paleontologist, “pretty much the best, worst-known dinosaur.” Even if you’re well aware that it wasn’t small and didn’t spit venom and didn’t have a frill around its neck, you probably grew up reading about how fragile its twin crests were and how relatively weak its bite was.
The Sinclair Triceratops might look quaint to collectors spoiled modern toy brands, but it’s a very finely-made little figurine that’s quite accurate for its time.
I wasn’t too aware of the history of dinosaur toys and collecting until recently, when I came into the acquisition of a few older figurines from my grandparents’ collection.
Review by GiganotosaurusFan, photos by Dino Scream3232, edited by Suspsy
A long time ago, Edward Drinker Cope found the largest carnivore that ever existed, Tyrannosaurus rex, although he thought it was a ceratopsid, so he named it Manospondylus gigas. Eventually, however, Henry Fairfield Osborn gave it the iconic name that we know today.
This stand was purchased separately and is not included with the model.
270 million years before orcas, 250 million years before megalodon sharks, 170 million years before even the mosasaurs, the largest macropredators in the ocean were probably eugeneodontids, large fishes with bizarre tooth arrangements and cartilaginous skeletons.
It was inevitable. Funko has now found its way onto the Dinosaur Toy Blog. Since this is the first Funko review on the DTB I suppose a brief introduction of the company is in order, not that it’s needed. Funko has managed to spread its tendrils into virtually every pop culture fandom imaginable and even if you don’t collect them, I know that at least a few readers here have a couple Funko figures around their home.
The island nation of Japan is usually not on the top of the list when it comes to dinosaur discoveries, but in the last few years, that quickly changed as more dinosaur fossils are found especially those from the Cretaceous.One of the most recent and exciting discovery from the Land of The Rising Suns is a nearly complete hadrosaur skeleton, Kamuysaurus japonicus.
