Koala subspecies and Schleich figures

Hi friends,

We recently talked about marsupials and I read that the Koala from Southlands Replicas was a northern female. Well, I did not know there were several different koala subspecies so I decided to check it on wikipedia.

Here is what I found :

Wikipedia wrote:

Traditionally, three distinct subspecies have been recognised: the Queensland koala (P. c. adustus, Thomas 1923), the New South Wales koala (P. c. cinereus, Goldfuss 1817), and the Victorian koala (P. c. victor, Troughton 1935). These forms are distinguished by pelage colour and thickness, body size, and skull shape. The Queensland koala is the smallest of the three, with shorter, silver fur and a shorter skull. The Victorian koala is the largest, with shaggier, brown fur and a wider skull.

After reading this, I searched in my storage boxes and excavated an old figure I had removed from my main collection after replacing it by newer renditions. I am talking about the 14303 Schleich koala from 2002 : [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

This is a very nice figure and I had to struggle with myself to replace it because I liked it very much and thought it was looking good enough to stay in my main collection. But it did not fit well with my newer koala pair as it was significantly bigger and had a different colour so I had to remove it. Well, I think I can now make it return as a different koala subspecies :
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Indeed, the Victorian koala is supposed to be larger and a have a wider skull than the Queensland koala, just like the older Schleich model is larger and has a bigger head than the newer figure. Moreover, the Victorian koala is supposed to have a brown fur while the Queensland has a greyish one. As a consequence, my theory is that the older version represents a Victorian koala while the newer one is a Queensland koala, just like the Southlands Replicas model. Anyway, that's how I am going to use my koalas and I am quite happy about that because the old Schleich koala is still very nice and definitely not obsolete-looking enough to be considered as "vintage".

What do you think guys ?

Yes, that seems to be a good fit. I would do the same thing in your place. But for sure, Schleich didn´t made them so different with the target to present different species.
As I were in Australia and have seen Koalas in Wildlife and Zoos (where I learned about the different subspecies), I can say that the difference between the subspecies isn´t as easy as wiki tell us

Of course it is not. It is often very difficult to tell a subspecies from another as there can be more variation between individuals within a subspecies than between subspecies.

Let's just say those two figures represent typical representatives of each subspecies

I found this interesting picture, just the southern koala is fully grown while the northern seems very very young.

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Excellent picture Kostas, indeed these koalas are not the same age but the comparison is still interesting as far as fur colour is concerned. You could seriously believe Schleich took inspiration from this pic to make its two different figures !

This is very very interesting

Indeed, very, very interesting I may now reclassify my koalas!