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Model projects

Triceratops migration

July 4, 2025

A big bull leads a family of triceratops on the summer migration. (Various manufacturers, mostly dollar store, repainted)

Stegosaurus and young

June 16, 2025

An adult stegosaurus and her young in a Jurassic landscape. (generic toy store models)

The last day in the life of a Pachyrhinosaurus

April 20, 2025

The last day in the life of a Pachyrhinosaurus. The Pachyrhinosaurus is probably my favourite among the Ceratopsidae, even though it may not seem as attractive as triceratops or Styracosaurus. That’s because back in 1990, I covered the announcement of the discovery of the Pachyrhinosaurus bone bed near Grand Prairie Alberta in what is called […]

Microraptors

September 13, 2024

Photographs of a pair of toy microraptors, one from PNSO and the second Zabwaka Figurka. The microraptor was a unique four winged dromaeosaurid dinosaur from the early Cretaceous, related to later larger Dromaeosauridae like the movie favourite Velociraptor. The microraptors were abundant in the period 125 to 120 million years ago. Examination of the fossils […]

Knight’s 1897 hadrosaur

August 9, 2024

In the 1950s, the Louis Marx toy company based its toy hadrosaur on one of Charles R. Knight’s first dinosaur images for the American Museum of Natural History, painted in 1897. The toy looks nothing like our modern understanding of the hadrosaur, although the image was still prevelant as late as the 1950s. Knight created […]

Sloth v sabre tooth

August 5, 2024

The next in my project series recreating Charles R. Knight paintings using the Louis Marx toys from my childhood. In this case, a Sabre-toothed Cat or smilodon stalks a ground sloth (probably Megatheriidae) Of all the toys I have painted for this project, for some reason the brown paints did not adhere completely in the […]

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