Fluffy Velo population increase

My feathered Velociraptor family has gained a new member!

The new addition is in the middle, and also fits in the middle in terms of when these were made. All three are Safari Ltd. figures, from left to right apparently from 2009, 2015, and 2017, respectively. (The 2009 one I've painted a little, you can see here how it looked straight out of the package.) It's a nice sample of evolution in accuracy of dinosaur figures, at least for one company. Obviously two of them have a bit of an extra advantage in being big enough to include a lot of detail, but ignoring that, it's pretty cool to see the plumage get progressively fluffier and birdier, and especially the wings have gotten more functional-looking with each one.


The small 2009 one that I've just decided to think of as a downy nestling doesn't seem to have proper flight feathers (and the Sinornithosaurus from the same set, despite having feathers on the hands, seemed to have those feathers attach to the wrong finger, which I fixed with some epoxy putty when customizing that figure into one of my OCs).

The one I got now, from Safari's 2015 Carnegie Collection, already has both a tail fan and remiges on the wings. None on the hands, though, which is corrected in the 2017 figure - the primaries should attach to the middle finger instead of flight feathers stopping at the wrist.

This tail fan is so nice and fancy! Though should probably extend further down the tail. Again on the latest figure out of these three, the tail fan feathers run the entire length of the tail instead of just the tip.

The 2017 Velo still has room for some improvement, too, as has my understanding of raptor wing anatomy had since I made the post featuring that figure. The flight feathers seem to continue all the way up to the arm pit on both of the bigger figures here, which it turns out, they shouldn't. On birds and on deinonychosaurs, flight feathers stop at the elbow, and the gap between the upper arm and the body isn't actually very visible, with the arm being usually held close to the body in addition to the joint being obscured a bit by skin flap and feathers. Which as far as I can tell has been improved on again in this year's Deinonychus figure, but more on that one later.

I'll just let the tripod pose slide for allowing the figure to stand without a base, even though it's always a bit questionable when it's with a tail, due to the whole dinosaurs having been perceived as tail-dragging lizards thing.

Enough blabbing, look at the pretty raptor:

They screeeeam!

Displayed together they do kind of look like a family. This one of the bigger Velos, being slimmer with a fancier tail fan, can be a male, and the stockier one with less flashy colours a female, perhaps. Dad Velo just had an unfortunate encounter with particularly hungry feather mites and they ate his primaries.