My Ice Age Collection (Update: 3/1/2019... Customized Wild Republic figures)

CWGross wrote:

Roger wrote:

We can't complain too much about lack of diversity during these days. Every year lots of new figures representing species never released before are launched. Both in prehistoric, wildlife or whatever. Obviously with the huge amount of extant and extinct species that exist and are found, toy industry will only be able of covering a small part of it. So, considering your collecting interests, it was a good decision to use existing moulds and to customize them to represent these non featured species. You did a great work.

Personally, I think my list of top most-wanted figures would make some pretty good ones... Columbian mammoth, short-faced bear, giant beaver, stag moose, and the different ground sloths... At least it would be better than the constant remakes of woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, Smilodon, and the Common Toy Sloth.  

Undoubtfully your list is much more interesting than the usual releases. I only think things today are much better than some years ago when prehistoric mammals were almost rare in toy shape safe some exceptions.

Your repaint looks amazing! I actually admire your dedication to education over collectibility. It could certainly inspire some very unique species choices.

I've been wanting to make a teratorn figure for a while... Teratorns were massive birds that lived during the ice age. In North America they mainly lived in the US Southwest, in California (most known specimens are from the La Brea Tar Pits) and in the Pacific Northwest. No company has yet made a teratorn figure, probably because there's still dispute over what exactly it might have looked like. Originally they were conceived as being massive scavengers like a condor or vulture. More recent analysis has found that they were really ground stalking birds, and in the Pacific Northwest they might have even fished.

My teratorn figure is meant to represent Teratornis woodburnensis, found in Oregon in 1999. It had a 14 ft (4 m) wingspan and was found in 12,000 year old deposits alongside the remains of mammoths, mastodons, ground sloth, and archaeological evidence of early Native Americans. For my base figure I used Papo's bald eagle, which is HUGE, and added a crest with Friendly Plastic. The crest and the black and red paint job I gave it are based loosely on depictions of the Thunderbird in Pacific Northwest Native art. I wouldn't commit to it definitively, but I think there is a good case to be made that Thunderbird legends could be cultural memories of teratorns.

To start, with his little cap of Friendly Plastic applied...
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The finished product... The crest is a bit crude, so eventually I might try giving it some texture with thicker daubs of acrylic paint...
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And here he is hanging out with his buddies from coastal British Columbia...
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I also finally had to expand and rearrange my collection. Now that my book on the Ice Age in Western Canada is finished and ready to go off to a publisher, I've taken an interest in Eastern Canada. That means I'm going to be accessioning some beluga, narwhal, and things of that sort. Plus it was getting REALLY crowded. So now I've rearranged some books and expanded from two shelves to three. The top shelf is Beringia and the mammoth steppe ecosystem, the middle shelf is the mastodon forest and mountain areas (and Ogopogo), and the bottom shelf is coastal BC and (soon) the Champlain Sea (the arm of the Atlantic that filled what is today the St. Lawrence Lowlands of Canada and the US).

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Nice repaint

I got another delivery of Safari figures!What's in the box?!...

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First up, an arctic hare...

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Followed by that ridiculous porcupine figure that I've made fun of all year. Yeah, I broke down and got one, because it is one, at least. It's also HUGE.

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Next up is the Monterey Bay Aquarium gray whale figure. What is really neat about these guys is that they dredge up crustaceans and things from the sea floor with their baleen, filtering out the muck and eating the good stuff. This largely restricts them to the continental shelf. But during the ice age, much of that shelf was dry land, suggesting that gray whales actually have a lot of flexibility in their diet and habits when they need it.

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And now the SASQUATCH!! This is a joke in my collection, like the Ogopogo figure... A Sasquatch would be a very distinctively ice age sort of creature, basically a megafaunal hominid ape that would fit well into a world populated by mammoths and mastodons. Unfortunately, not only is there no reliable physical evidence, but the existence of a Sasquatch would contradict what we already know from the fossil record. Alas. But he looks cool, and this figure is HUGE. Check him out compared to the Carnegie woolly mammoth!

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I've also added a few other things in the mean time, bought at stores, like the Safari wolverine. I already had the smaller Schleich one, but I like the quality of Safari's figures so much more, for the most part.

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And a new Safari lion to replace my Schleich one...

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American lions were about 25% larger than African lions today, and this figure shows that nicely. I'm thinking about painting the spots on the legs and hind quarters that an American lion probably had.

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I also got the Schleich polar bear and arctic fox for the burgeoning Champlain Sea part of my collection.

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And now here's the gang all together... The top shelf is the mammoth steppe grassland ecosystem. The middle shelf is forest and mountain to the left and Beringian immigrants to the right. The bottom shelf is coastal BC to the left and the Champlain Sea to the right.

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Nice again

So I recently purchased the Wild Republic river animal tube. Wild Republic is pretty laughable at the best of times, but it had a few animals in it that I wanted and thought I might be able to fix up. So we begin with the raw great blue heron, beaver, trout, salmon, turtle, and river otter. First, I'm going to work on the great blue heron, beaver, and salmon...

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Great blue heron. There was a frog sculpted into the base, which I turned into a Northern leopard frog, an endangered species of frog up here in Canada...

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Next the beaver, which is the one I'm most pleased with and think is one of my best custom jobs ever...

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And then the salmon. It looked most like a sockeye salmon in its spawning phase, so that's what I based my custom job on...

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Lovely repainting skills! They look a thousand times better than before. It is quite sad the quality of the Wild Republic Tubes these days. They have definitely downgraded the paint work.