I have some new dinos. As a lovely surprise (I bought them on ebay and don't know the seller personally), they arrived not only securely packaged but giftwrapped!
Thank you! :D
Neither of them have the two horns Pachyrhinosaurus has on top of its frill, but I think the individuals seen in the movie (which, again, I have not seen) are supposed to be juveniles, so they're simply yet to grow those, as is consistent with fossil finds of different age specimens.
Despite Troodon being named for its teeth ("wounding tooth" for the teeth's serrated edges), this one's aren't very visible. Troodontids had small teeth that wouldn't look very impressive compared to some media depictions of carnivorous dinosaurs (they may have been omnivorous, though, at least some troodontids, and the serration may have been to help with that more than with slicing up prey), but the figure's snout looks a bit too much like a toothless beak, so I think I'll give the teeth some paint later. Right now they have none of their own and are covered up by the mouth's red.
The variation in colour is really nice. Maybe I'll give that touch-ups, too, just to tidy things up a bit, as there obviously is a bit of a difference in level of detail between the figure and the collectible card that I assume depicts the movie's 3D model. But it's already very pretty for such a small figure.
Unfortunately it has a case of the wrist wings, with primary flight feathers not attaching to the second finger. That first picture I linked in this paragraph was posted to deviantart a year before the movie came out, so it's not like nobody knew yet at the time how deinonychosaur wings worked. But at least no pronated wrists.
I really like the lively pose. The tripod-ness and the very curved tail are for practical purposes of being a toy figure, I assume, though it's unusual that the three support points are both wings and one foot. It looks like it's in the middle of a quick dash to grab a snack before the snack or its parents notice. Or maybe slipping away from a bigger predator, though in that case the open mouth is not as practical, unless the movie depicts Troodon as social animals, who could be expected to react to danger by calling for help or warning the rest of the group. Troodontids having been social doesn't have much evidence for it, but animals can be social to different degrees instead of a simple yes/no, and for what it's worth I have seen them portrayed as pack hunters in media before, so this movie wouldn't be the first.
They were pack hunters in my own first encounter with them, in a comic I read as a kid in the 90's where they were portrayed as these ghostly predators that ambushed and killed a baby herbivore in a dark forest. The comic magazine it was part of had several dino comics like that with no dialogue and kind of nature documentary tone narration, but with that one I think I'd describe the tone more in line with Dr. Grant's story about 6-foot turkeys to the digsite kid in Jurassic Park. It was the 90's, so they weren't feathered yet either, were probably very shrinkwrapped, and though I don't have a very clear image of their design anymore (but I'd love to find the comic again someday), I do remember a panel boasting about their stereo vision, that had a Troodon looking directly at the viewer with a piercing gaze that I found really scary-looking (probably would find it unnerving now, too, but also I was a kid). This comic's Troodons, which felt to me like a creepier version of already scary JP "Velociraptors", would probably be pretty proud of the genus' depiction in JP:TG as their legacy, is what I'm saying. But they were still depicted as carnivorous animals more than horror monsters, and I was curious about what more there is to them.
Turns out, a lot of things I found interesting. For one they were a lot smaller than I expected from the comic, and that wasn't disappointing. Some of my favorite children's books were about tiny animals and other small things, living their own lives relatively unnoticed right under the noses of humans and other supposed main characters of their environment. That's what modern birds' ancestors (troodontids' close cousins) were like, too, and they survived when the giants didn't.
Troodon is considered to have been pretty intelligent among non-avian dinosaurs, with a large brain relative to its overall size. This has brought about some interesting and also some hilarious speculations of its capabilities, like how they may have continued to evolve if not for the K-Pg extinction event. They probably would not have ended up looking like this. But while we're mentioning Jurassic Park, you know the speech Dr. Grant gives in JP3 about how if not for their extinction, (JP's version of) "Velociraptors", being so smart, could have become the dominant species on Earth instead of humans? That was basically the theory accompanying that dinosauroid statue, except in real life it was about Troodon. But that aside, maybe Stenonychosaurus and/or Latenivenatrix was at least capable of some creative life hacks akin to what's seen among modern corvids, if not quite to that degree.
This animal has gone through quite the transformation in the time I've been aware of it, and every change and new bit of information has made it more interesting to me. I met them as scaly boogeymen, got to know them as crafty little guys, and now there's two of them by another name, they have feathers and wings, and they were crafty little guys I can easily picture having been real animals that once lived.
Anyway, this post was going to be about a toy figure. Despite all the criticism I'm giving it, I do think it's a good feathered raptor figure, or I wouldn't have wanted to have it. I nitpick because I care.
Group picture with two other raptor minis (partially repainted Safari Ltd. Velociraptor and also partially repainted Mattel JW "Velociraptor"), and its only conspecific found on my shelf for now, Beasts of the Mesozoic juvenile Stenonychosaurus.
They were pack hunters in my own first encounter with them, in a comic I read as a kid in the 90's where they were portrayed as these ghostly predators that ambushed and killed a baby herbivore in a dark forest. The comic magazine it was part of had several dino comics like that with no dialogue and kind of nature documentary tone narration, but with that one I think I'd describe the tone more in line with Dr. Grant's story about 6-foot turkeys to the digsite kid in Jurassic Park. It was the 90's, so they weren't feathered yet either, were probably very shrinkwrapped, and though I don't have a very clear image of their design anymore (but I'd love to find the comic again someday), I do remember a panel boasting about their stereo vision, that had a Troodon looking directly at the viewer with a piercing gaze that I found really scary-looking (probably would find it unnerving now, too, but also I was a kid). This comic's Troodons, which felt to me like a creepier version of already scary JP "Velociraptors", would probably be pretty proud of the genus' depiction in JP:TG as their legacy, is what I'm saying. But they were still depicted as carnivorous animals more than horror monsters, and I was curious about what more there is to them.
Turns out, a lot of things I found interesting. For one they were a lot smaller than I expected from the comic, and that wasn't disappointing. Some of my favorite children's books were about tiny animals and other small things, living their own lives relatively unnoticed right under the noses of humans and other supposed main characters of their environment. That's what modern birds' ancestors (troodontids' close cousins) were like, too, and they survived when the giants didn't.
Troodon is considered to have been pretty intelligent among non-avian dinosaurs, with a large brain relative to its overall size. This has brought about some interesting and also some hilarious speculations of its capabilities, like how they may have continued to evolve if not for the K-Pg extinction event. They probably would not have ended up looking like this. But while we're mentioning Jurassic Park, you know the speech Dr. Grant gives in JP3 about how if not for their extinction, (JP's version of) "Velociraptors", being so smart, could have become the dominant species on Earth instead of humans? That was basically the theory accompanying that dinosauroid statue, except in real life it was about Troodon. But that aside, maybe Stenonychosaurus and/or Latenivenatrix was at least capable of some creative life hacks akin to what's seen among modern corvids, if not quite to that degree.
This animal has gone through quite the transformation in the time I've been aware of it, and every change and new bit of information has made it more interesting to me. I met them as scaly boogeymen, got to know them as crafty little guys, and now there's two of them by another name, they have feathers and wings, and they were crafty little guys I can easily picture having been real animals that once lived.
Anyway, this post was going to be about a toy figure. Despite all the criticism I'm giving it, I do think it's a good feathered raptor figure, or I wouldn't have wanted to have it. I nitpick because I care.
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