Review and photographs by DrWheelieMobile, edited by Suspsy
British manufacturer Ravensden is nowadays best known for making plush toys of various extant animals, as their website states, “for the zoo, aquarium, leisure and promotional markets.” However, there was a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s when one would be hard-pressed to enter any zoo or aquarium gift shop and not find a rack containing another of their product ranges: the aptly, if unoriginally, named Inflatable Animals line.
The second set of dinosaurs in the Z-Cardz line reveals some surprising, if questionable, choices going on in the lineup for these little collectibles.
Constructible strategy games are a concept typically involving 3D punch-out card minifigures, which can be collected and utilized for play in large-scale games between players.
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.
Feathered dinosaurs are truly awesome and I adore them all, whether they’re from somewhere in the Mesozoic or still alive in the present, probing for earthworms on my lawn, swimming in the pond at the park, flying high in the sky, and so on. And certain of these extant dinosaurs are, of course, quite yummy to eat, especially when they’re from Swiss Chalet or Mary Brown’s.
Today’s review marks a small milestone for the DTB as it’s the last review for a Marx toy in the Medium Mold Group, Pl-750. This mold group was released in 1955 and was the second wave of dinosaur figures produced by Marx. All in all, 17 out of 23 Marx toys have been covered thus far.
A relic of toy trends from the 2000s, these cheap assembled models make for a decent little novelty item, as long as you’re delicate with them.
I’ve never been much of a “card” collector, so I’ve never followed the hobby closely, but I do recall a time in the early 2000s when 3D card models like Z-Cardz and Star Wars Pocketmodels became all the rage, at least within my own friend circles.
Review and photographs by Stolpergeist, edited by Suspsy
Spinosaurus has always been an animal of mystery; the way it has been depicted over the years changes drastically with each new discovery. Just last year, we saw a huge change in its appearance with a new publication about its tail.
The Marx Stegosaurus was first released in 1955 as part of Marx’s second wave of dinosaur toys, known as the Medium Mold Group, PL-750. The Marx Stegosaurus is based on the Stegosaurus painted by Rudolph Zallinger in his Age of Reptiles mural at the Yale Peabody Museum.
Kazunaki Araki’s sculpt reflects how our scientific understanding of Mosasaurus has changed, while retaining more classic, retro traits in appearance.
Dinosaurs have often been compared to modern lizards, perhaps because they tend to be a default image the general public has of reptiles. In fact, dinosaurs were only very distantly related to lizards; but while they were dominating the land throughout the Mesozoic era, a genuine branch of the order Squamata began conquering the seas during the Cretaceous.
With all the new rexes (to be) released, let`s have a look to the past for a change. Almost 30 years ago, in the year 1992 the Californian company Horizon released a small number of high quality dinosaur models made from vinyl. Two of these models are already covered here on the blog, the Elasmosaurus and the Stegosaurus.
Discovered in the Moreno Hill Formation in New Mexico by a paleontologist’s young son (lucky kid!), Zuniceratops is quite a significant animal in that it is the oldest North American ceratopsian known to have possessed horns. Indeed, it appears to be a transition between the more primitive protoceratopsids and the more advanced ceratopsids.
