The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: Plesiosaurs, pliosaurs and whatever this is!

 

It's time for the weekend post, and I decided what I wanted was an extra dino blog post. This time around, it's another post on dinos that aren't actually dinosaurs, specifically the marine reptiles. They are along with the pterosaurs and perhaps Dimetrodon (see the Diener post) among the most frequently mislabeled prehistoric creatures, though at least they are related to dinosaurs and from the same time instead of a creature that lived 70 million years earlier and is literally more closely related to humans. To kick off the lineup, here's the one that very possibly started this, a copy of a Marx Kronosaurus previously sighted in the Marx clone post.

This might be the earliest "dino" that has a personal history for me. When I was very young, I spent time at a grandparent's house where there were a few of what I now know to be Marx dinosaurs lying around. This one in articular ended up as a bath toy, which in hindsight was a hair-raising risk. I saw it a few more times in later family visits, but I don't recall if I ever got a chance to hold it again. At some point, I figured out that it was not just a Marx dino, but one of a group of three that Marx retired because of production difficulties. (Another is the glorious Brontosaurus, which I featured way back in the patchisaurs post.) I kept an eye on online sales, but every one I ever found like the one I remembered was far beyond my normal price range. Even the wonky MPC copy can command a high price. Eventually, I found this one, apparently from an early 1990s reissue set. I was very pleased with it. The only issue I could find was that it looked a little roughed up, something that might or might not show in the pics. (I know the lighting is worse than usual.) I concluded that this was at least in part because the new manufacturer tried to replicate Marx's "marbling" process, which clearly didn't age nearly as well as the originals. Here's a couple more pics.

The big mystery that has cropped up around this creature is how on Earth Marx arrived at the design. It is labeled as a Kronosaurus, a "real" marine reptile that lived in the early Cretaceous. What it really represents, however, is a strange hybrid of two separate lineages, the plesiosaurs and pliosaurs, of which the former had the iconic long necks and the latter sacrificed t for a larger head. The best theory (unfortunately laid out in sources that seem to have dropped off the net) is that this was influenced by the art of Rudolph Zallinger, particularly a 1955 publication The World We Live In, itself compiled from a series of articles previously published in Life magazine. There is indeed something like the Marx Kronosaurus in the artwork (see Kumtuks Tahlkie), except that it's really a background creature only visible in part. That leaves us particularly at a loss to explain the very odd flippers. The counter-hypothesis that rises in my mind is that the Marx designers figured out that a realistic plesiosaur would require an even larger mold and be quite likely to break. That also would explain the very stout "buds" supporting the flippers. And that brings us to the next item, a vintage plesiosaur.

As far as I recall, I saw and bought this item last year after it came up in an automated feed, after doing enough research to confirm what it was. It's a product of Invicta, a pioneer of semi-scientific dino collectibles, dated 1978. (See the Dinosaur Toy Blog for a more detailed review.) It appears to have been made in two or three different colors, all shades of blue. Typically for the manufacturer, it had limited detail and no paint. The specimen clearly had condition issues, but on the other hand, it was cheap, and big. Here's a couple more pics.

This is one that's good enough that there's not a lot more to say. This is what we imagined the plesiosaur looked like, portrayed with more elegance than usual. It also incidentally captures the further "myth" of the Loch Ness monster as a plesiosaur, which in hindsight was a rationalistic gloss over the actual sightings. And that's a good introduction to the last entry in the lineup, which I really couldn't capture except in closeup.

The provenance on this one is that I picked it up free at a street fair event in ca. 2007. To my best recollection, it was being handed out at a booth for a museum or some kind of geologists' club. There would probably have been other dinos from the same source, but this must have been the only one that stood out then or since. The most noteworthy thing about it is that it has articulated fins, unusual for a toy that is both this small and cheap. Otherwise, it preserves the same classic lines as the 1970s example, with a gnarlier (and actually relatively accurate) head. Once again, science can move on, but it is the cheap toys that continue to capture the imagination.

And to wrap this up, here's one more lineup to show just how these would have looked in the vintage toybox. Included are the Galaxy Laser Team commander, an MPC astronaut/ space guy, the Timmee nuclear guy, and for the heck of it, Audrey. They may not look big against the action figures of the 1980s onward, but in the days of toy soldiers, they truly towered. Go big, or go home.

That's all for now, more to come!