It's not dead yet . . .
. . . in fact, it's feeling much better
Revived 2024.09.14
Mystery Dinos - the house is full of this stuff; honestly I
haven't the foggiest idea where most of it came from
My, how tempus fugits. It looks like I wrote this site several decades ago. Hard to believe.
Realm of Rubber Dinosaurs was my first real website, "real" meaning that I bought (actually, more like rented) a URL and uploaded the whole thing to a real web host. For an old New England skinflint like me, this was all quite a milestone. The site was a work in progress (but aren't they all?) so parts were obviously unfinished, but they were gradually augmented as I had the time and energy reserves to do so.
But then . . .
The URL registrar let the name rubberdinosarus.com lapse (or perhaps I did; I prefer to blame the registrar), and some grub snapped it up and later tried to sell it to me for a couple of thousand $$$. Hell with that. I eventually replaced it with a new URL, rubberdinos.com.
Then I suffered a sudden and very serious medical affliction. I was put on a drug regimen intended to avoid a recurrance; it didn't succeed terribly well, and had side effects which kept me seriously zoned out for several years. After recovering (a bit) from that interlude, I thought of reviving the Realm, but a survey of the market showed that there was all sorts of new stuff out — and much of it quite expensive, bearing in mind that we're talking about little lumps of plastic, and the cost was really unjustifiable for someone who was never going to "use" any of it just for the sake of having "the latest thing". (By "use" I mean grab a figure in each hand and bang them together while going "GRRRRRR GRRRRRR". I'm more than a half-century too old for that stuff.)
Time passed. Life ground along its inevitable course. The unavoidable desire to "downsize" arrived, and I started to throw stuff out. Endless boxes of "bucket 'o dinos" types went off to the town disposal area, to the amazement of the operators, who always had the same story when I offered to give them a bunch — "My son loves dinosaurs but my wife would kill me," etc. (All of which reminds me — who was the twit who decided that dinosaurs are "kid stuff", anyway?)
It all added up to quite a pile — I had complete sets of these things, drugstore and Walmart and local bookstore type stuff, including in many cases the display box for the batch. Damn, there were a lot of them — far more of than I remembered buying. I put a lot out on the curb, too, where they were immediately snatched up by casual passers-by. But fear not, none of these were my "good" dinos, such as the inhabitants of the Realm. And I did have a lot more space after they were gone; space for the vast piles of non-dino crap I also have to throw out.
All this sparked reminescence about my old site. In maturity I've fretted far too much over superficialities, such as the obvious fact that most of the "dinosaurs" on the market aren't dinosaurs at all. This is a big deal, me being more of a Paleozoic man myself. But after further reflection, I came to a profound realization — SO WHAT? I eventually decided that, though very outdated, Realm of Rubber Dinosaurs still has its interesting points. Besides, I never titled it The Complete Realm of Rubber Dinosaurs so I can't be fairly criticized on that score. So here it is again, after a hiatus of some twenty years.
I haven't rewritten anything. The taxonomy of the Glypodontae may need a bit of rearranging. The rubber dino field has grown somewhat in the last two decades. A few new figures were added to the Battat line; I have them but only a terminal optimist would wait around for me to describe and picture them. The Schleich figures were just looming on the horizon when I originally wrote the site. More Carnegie and Safari figures have appeared. Some of the Marx info is incorrect, such as my statement that the original T. Rex, the one apparently modeled after Zallinger's Age of Reptiles mural, was never reissued. I might even have a reissued specimen, I don't remember for sure. Ditto for the Marx Kronosaurus. Speaking of Kronosaurus, it looks like I never posted the page describing how that big skeleton got to Cambridge. Fortunately I don't have to, as this Harvard Crimson article from 2019 tells all. Another 2019 item, also from Harvard, has some info about the Lady in Red in that famous Kronosaurus photo. Since I originally wrote the site more online info has become easily available, such as Wikipedia entries on the Carnegie line.
So, for what it's worth, here is the original Realm of Rubber Dinosaurs again.
Not quite so mysterious - at least I remember
when these ones followed me home
This entire site is researched, written and © copyrighted by me. Material from elsewhere is properly attributed, where possible. (Some random photos were cribbed from various Internet sites, where as usual on the Internet their original sources were unattributed.) So I would be much obliged if you lazy ratbags would go steal material from somebody else.
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