Recently, during a casual chat with fellow dinosaur enthusiasts, someone remarked, "Dinosaur encyclopedias these days really only feature dinosaurs." And now that I think about it, it's true that books that claim to be dinosaur encyclopedias but cover pterosaurs, marine reptiles, and even mammoths, like they used to, seem to be fewer. (Such books might be titled, for example, [Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Creatures].) While that's perfectly accurate, an encyclopedia that doesn't include plesiosaurs or pteranodons feels a little incomplete to me.

This time, I'd like to show you a shelf decorated with "aquatic creatures," primarily marine reptiles. In terms of sheer numbers, the long-necked plesiosaurs (a strange way to put it, I know) overwhelmingly dominate the rest. There are only two pliosaurids and five mosasaurids... but even all of them combined barely fill one shelf, which is a testament to their lack of popularity, and quite disheartening.

After all that preamble, it might seem odd to boast about a fish first, but the silver fish on the far right of Photo 1, which looks for all the world like a Silurian acanthodian Climatius, was actually something I found in a Chinese-made plastic bag "aquarium set" for about 300 yen, mixed in with sea bream and flounder, and then painted. What on earth went wrong there? It's a mystery. Such fun discoveries are things one wants to talk about, aren't they? Photo 1 also features a Kaiyodo-made armored fish Cephalaspis, a well-made Dunkleosteus garage kit from an independent manufacturer, Archelon and Clidastes sculpted by Mr. Araki, and Mosasaurus and Liopleurodon from the kit manufacturer "Endorphin" in Osaka.

Lying on the base of the ichthyosaur (also sculpted by Mr. Araki) in Photo 2 is, to my knowledge, the only 3D skeletal model of an ichthyosaur. It's a capsule toy (gashapon) from over 10 years ago, about 5cm in size. This series featured things you wouldn't find elsewhere, like 3D skeletons of Archaeopteryx and moa.
Finally, here's another kind of "aquatic item" (Photo 3). If you put it in a fish tank and connect an air pump, its mouth opens and closes, emitting air bubbles. It's probably Japanese-made from the 1950s, and I remember seeing similar things as a child. I acquired this one through an online auction in America. The fact that something like this made its way to America and was bought and sold at auction... it's quite profound, isn't it?