Vault tales 83 COG African(?) Mammoth

Who makes it? This is another figure in the COG Prehistoric Panorama Mammals series. Most of that will carry over here, so I get to be brief!

When did it come out? Like the Arsinoitherium, 2008. But I’m pretty sure this one was definitely one of the re-released figures with the blind bags.

It’s a mammoth. But it really doesn’t look like the standard woolly mammoth.

Still available? I think so…if the blind bags are still around.

Where can it be found in my displays? Same place as the Arsinoitherium, on a shelf full of oddball figures.

View from the front. Again, those tusks are so straight. It really doesn’t have that wide curve of a woolly mammoth’s tusk.

How does it fit in the collection? As always, a small prehistoric mammal figure. I had to get the whole set.

Any story behind it? Nothing more than the story I told before! It was a weird series of 36 figures that I needed to track down. Which was really cool.

Notable remarks about this figure (a review that isn’t really a review): I am going to reiterate what I said before–the COG figures are adequate. Like some other figures in the set (someday I’ll discuss the ‘smilodon’) they are often labelled something kind of generic. In this instance it was labelled as a ‘mammoth’. Not necessarily a woolly mammoth, and with the lack of further descriptions or labeling, it could be kind of any of the species. And given the low profile and small, straight tusks, I tried to pick out of the species that exist, and kind of landed on the African mammoth Mammuthus africanavus. But I could be wrong. The head has a lower profile, and it has a fairly straight back instead of a slope. It could also be that the figure is poorly designed…an issue with some of their mammals and all of their dinosaurs to be honest.

Would I recommend it? Well, I again really like sets like these. Small figures, easy to put together and hard to break. It’s a good set for playing with, but works fine on a shelf as a curiosity. Individually, the mammoth (whatever species it is) is not as good as the Arsinoitherium and several of the other Prehistoric Panorama figures so I wouldn’t expect anyone to go running out for it. But it wouldn’t be terrible to have it!

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