Having already covered two of the line’s highlights with the Edaphosaurus and Eryops it’s time to look at one of the more mundane toys in Diener’s series of rubber erasers, the Dimetrodon. Like the two previously reviewed toys the Dimetrodon hails from the Red Beds of Texas, which makes in a fitting toy to round out this trio, but since...
Edaphosaurus was a sail-backed genus of synapsid that lived during the late Carboniferous and early Permian periods in what is now the famous Texas Red Beds in North America. Remains have also been found in West Virginia, Ohio, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. Fragmentary remains found in Germany have also been attributed to Edaphosaurus. The Texas Red Beds are also known...
If you grew up between the 1960’s and 1990’s you no doubt had at least a few Diener brand erasers in your toybox or backpack. They were ubiquitous through the latter half of the 20th century. Launching in 1955 with Disney themed pencil-top erasers, Diener Industries would go on to produce novelty erasers representing all manner of animals, mythological creatures,...
The Ediacaran is the first geological period with widespread evidence of multicellular life. And those fossils are actually quite extraordinary, as many of them are of soft-bodied creatures that normally do not preserve easily in the fossil record. Most of the fossils are casts and molds in sandstones. One theory for this is that their preservation may have been assisted...
Review and photos by BlueKrono, edited by DinoToyBlog If I were asked to pick a favorite dinosaur toy it would be a challenging query, but I think the one I’d settle on would be the Marx Kronosaurus. A relic of Marx’s early dinosaur lines, the swan-necked prehistoric reptile has a history going back almost a century. I have spent years...
Review and photos by BlueKrono, edited by DinoToyBlog. The dinosaurs created by the Marx Toy Company in the 1950s hold a unique title: the first mass-produced plastic dinosaur toys. All others follow in their thunderous footsteps. Previous to the Marx dinos companies like Sell Rite Gifts (SRG) and Mignot had produced dinosaurs in materials like bronze and lead, but these...
The Sphenacodon was part of Marx’ first wave, produced from 1955 onwards. This species is not a very common choice for toy producers. Since the Sphenacodon was of the earliest wave it may not be surprising that it is a comparably weak representative of the real animal, even with its outdated history in mind. Sphenacodon was a close relative of...
Cynognathus is not a very common choice for toy producers. This Cynognathus was part of Marx’ first wave, produced from 1955 onwards, so it may be not surprising that it is a comparably weak representative of the real animal, even with its outdated history in mind. Overall the sculpt is quite simple and the whole figure looks rather cartoonish, similar...
Dinosaurs weren’t the first giant plant-eaters to roam the Earth; that frontier was pioneered first among vertebrates by the dicynodonts, a group of tusked therapsids (the clade which includes modern mammals) which survived the Permian Mass Extinction and lasted to the end of the Triassic period. They ranged widely in size and distribution, from the diminutive Diictodon, to the pervasive...
“If MPC Ran the Zoo”… Macrauchenia looked like it could have inspired some of the creatures in a Dr. Seuss book, if its history of paleoart is anything to go by. First described in 1838, the “long-necked llama” hasn’t achieved the same level of fame as some of its mammalian contemporaries from the Miocene and Pleistocene; however, its lanky legs,...
Can you detect the tiny ear conches? A firm from the German Democratic Republic, VEB (Volkseigener Betrieb) Plaho, released a series of highly collectable die casting plastic dinosaur figures in 1967. They were sold in the Museum of Sena in Thuringia, Germany, until the mid-1980s. The follower firm to Plaho, Marolin, re-released them in 1990. Plaho / Marolin did...
MPC’s fifth group of prehistoric animals included one truly original mold in the form of Diatryma (ie Gastornis), one of the earliest plastic representations of this icon from the post-Mesozoic age. During the 1950s and 1960s, interest in paleontology was starting its climb back to mainstream interest, and companies like Marx took the initiative to start producing dinosaurs and other...
