Playable Figure Over 40 cm Long, Made of Soft, Durable Material
A Vinyl Model of Plesiosaurus, a long-necked marine reptile that lived in the Jurassic seas.Made from safe materials that are gentle for small children to touch, it can be played with safely in the living room or children’s room.
Plesiosaurus
Classification: Sauropterygia / Plesiosauria / Plesiosauridae
Size: Total length3〜5 m
Period: Early Jurassic
A long-necked marine reptile that flourished from the Late Triassic to the Early Jurassic. It had a short, sturdy body and swam using four large, paddle-like limbs. Gastroliths were found between its ribs and are thought to have helped regulate buoyancy and balance. Its eyes were positioned high on the head like those of a ray, and when its mouth was closed, its sharp upper and lower teeth crossed one another outside the mouth, characteristics consistent with a fish-eating reptile.
Interview with Supervisor Kazunari Araki
- This is the first marine long-necked reptile in the Dinosaur Vinyl Model lineup. What was the concept behind the sculpting and coloring?
- Basically, I enlarged my Soft Model, but this version allowed me to reproduce details such as the interlocking upper and lower teeth that could not be expressed in the Soft Model. As a marine animal, I used ocean-like colors on the back and a lighter color on the underside, like the surface of the sea.
- Plesiosaurus is generally one of the best-known long-necked reptiles. What image do you have of it?
- Long-necked reptiles such as Plesiosaurus feel very familiar in Japan, where fossils of Futabasaurus were discovered early on. When I was a child, I seriously believed that the Loch Ness Monster was a surviving Plesiosaurus. (Laughs)
- Was there anything in particular you paid attention to when creating Plesiosaurus?
- Long-necked reptiles such as Plesiosaurus have a body plan unlike any living animal today, so I sculpted the wrinkles on the neck and the muscles of the flippers while imagining how they lived and moved.
- Please tell us about the highlights of this model and share your comments.
- Because it is a Vinyl Model, you can move the long neck and flippers freely while playing! Turn your room into a Jurassic sea!
Supervisor Profile
Kazunari Araki
One of Japan’s leading dinosaur model artists, he creates dinosaur reconstruction models for natural history museums and master models for dinosaur encyclopedias and other publications.