Images from the Nuremberg Toy Fair have revealed that Schleich will also be releasing a toy of Megalodon midway through this year.
It looks, well, a lot like previously released Megalodon toys from other companies. That’s not to say that it’s a bad sculpting job, of course.
Monster In My Pocket was a toy franchise that released waves of, you guessed it, pocket sized plastic-monsters throughout the 90s. Several of the series included dinosaurs or near-dinosaurs, and some of the later series consisted almost solely of dinosaurs. The figures all seem to have come in at least three colour-variants, and included cards.
“Maip” may sound like an odd name for a dinosaur at first, but it is in fact a reference to a malevolent entity in Tehuelche mythology that is described as “the shadow of death that kills with cold wind.” That therefore strikes me as rather appropriate for a large and powerful meat-eating theropod.
So, friends, here I am again. It took a little longer, that’s for sure. I was busy writing and marketing my first book about my own and other people´s fascination for prehistory (The Dinosaur Toy Blog and Forum play a big role in it!) and had the usual private and professional struggles.
Other reviewers seem to have stopped covering UKRD figures years ago, but there are still a lot of them left to go, so I guess that’s my lot in life. While they may seem like mass-produced dreck to most people, I find them interesting and charming because they often reflect outdated or downright bizarre ideas and vintage palaoart, usually (with some notable exceptions) based on John Sibbick’s paintings from the 1985 book Enyclopaedia of Dinosaurs by David Norman.
Before we begin the review, I would like to thank the generous folks over at ToyMonster, for sending me a large selection of Captivz figures to share with the blog.
When Jurassic World: Dominion came out there was a lot of talk about the inaccuracies of its dinosaurs.
My heart jumped in excitement when Mattel announced in 2021 that they were going to make one of my favorite dinosaurs, Masiakasaurus knopfleri! I finally get to talk about it which is an added bonus. This particular reconstruction is based on the 20 or so years old depiction that has dominated all sorts of media this animal was featured in.
Having been described in 1908 and being the eponymous ankylosaurid, Ankylosaurus has long been a staple of dinosaur toys. Originally known from rather fragmentary material, reconstructions of this dinosaur historically evolved from Stegosaurus-like before the tail-club was known, to the version that was made familiar by Rudolph Zallinger’s 1947 Age of Reptiles mural and the 1964 World’s Fair model, with their nodosaur-like spikes, sprawling limbs, and dragging tail-clubs.
Jakapil is a genus of basal thyreophoran discovered in the Candeleros Formation of Argentina and described in 2022, it is also one of the coolest dino-discoveries in recent years, although I might be biased since I have a thing for basal thyreophorans.
To my surprise, there are still figures that were released as tie-ins with the original Jurassic Park film in 1993 that lack reviews here, including the die-cast metal dinosaurs line by Kenner, who of course made the main action-figure line for the film as well.
Lophostropheus is a coelophysoid theropod known from the boundary between the late Triassic and early Jurassic. It is known from a single tooth, a handful of vertebrae from the neck, back, and tail, some pelvic material, and an unidentified fragment. Such scant remains practically guaranteed a toy of Lophostropheus from Mattel, and here we are.
This is my first review as an author rather than guest reviewer at this blog, so I’ll start out with a classic figure, the UKRD Iguanodon from 1992. Iguanodon of course has the distinction of being the second named dinosaur genus (after Megalosaurus), and has remained relatively famous for a non-American dinosaur, even being the protagonist of a film, Disney’s Dinosaur.
