As I have noted on here before, the Japanese really do love their toy dinosaurs and produce really high quality models on a regular basis and of all kinds of obscure and wonderful critters. So when a couple of weeks back I got a cryptic e-mail from Matt Lammana of the Carnegie about having a gift for me from China connected with one of ‘my’ dinosaurs, I did have to wonder if, just possibly, there might be a Zhuchengtyrannus out there. Last night I found out that indeed there was. It had arrived through the post while I was away at SVPCA (more to come there) and well, how can I not be more chuffed. There’s a real toy Zhuchengtyrannus!!
It’s tiny (just 10 cm or so) but obviously well modeled and the paint job ain’t too bad either. Rather obviously taking the lead from Yutyrannus, it’s on the fuzzy side of feathering too. Now obviously the holotype is incomplete to say the least, and so we’re left with a rather typical tyrannosaurine for a model really. Still, I *know* it’s a Zhuchengtyrannus as, if you look closely, you can see it’s written on the base.
My thanks of course to Matt for this wonderful little present, made my day to say the least. On a not entirely unrelated note, there’s a palaeoart event going on at the NHM next week in conjunction with the Dino Art book launch. See here for more details. I hope to be in attendance but Luis Rey, Bob Nicholls, John Sibbick and others will be there.
Fantastic!
Glad you like it Dave! :-)
How could i not be utterly delighted?! If it looked like a melted pig standing on it’s back legs with a long tail stuck on I’d be happy as long as they’d written ‘Zhuchengtyrannus’ on it. O.K>, maybe not happy as such, but I’d still think it was cool they did it.
That’s pretty awesome! Hopefully we’ll find more of Zhuchengtyrannus in the coming years so we can flesh out what it really looked like.
Slightly off topic, but do you know when we’ll see the papers on the tyrannosaurid that was found jumbled together with Zhuchengtyrannus, Dave? Been very curious about this sucker.
There’s an abstract at SVP on this second taxon and the paper is being worked on, but slowly. I’m not the lead author on that so can’t really say, but the plan is to submit this year.
Looks cool. The first photo is giving an error btw.
Ok, not anymore I see.
Zhen, while it would be great if we knew more about Z. magnus, it’s safe to assume it had the same basic morphology as D. torosus or T. rex. As toys/replicas go, I’ve seen better. The distal end of the tail looks chewed, the arms and teeth don’t look great and the tail should’ve been better fused to the body so the line of attachment isn’t so obvious. I don’t think you could call it museum quality. Also, there’s no evidence of feathers in late K tyrannosaurs, just scales. But if you like it, great. :)