Anybody got a favorite animal figure?

[sbell]

I still have my MBA white shark! From 1993!

It hung in my high school locker. Alongside a first release Carnegie Mosasaurus and Elasmosaurus. Have them too

I had one in my youth as well but donated it long ago, when I was a foolish teenager. I found my current copy in an antique store for $5. Couldn't say how old it is though, I wouldn't know the difference between the production runs. Same story for the Elasmosaurus.

Elasmosaurus is easy to tell. If it's blue, it's a late version.

If the neck is high and upright, it's original.

I mostly know mine are original releases because they both came out in 1991, and I had mine in 1993 (maybe 1992... that's when I started the last year of high school)!

There are a couple different brown Elasmosaurus though and I cannot remember which is older.


Thanks for the rundown @JimoAi, I could tell it had a lot of issues but since I don't have it in-hand I didn't feel like scrutinizing it further.

They adjusted the sculpt in 1996 to lean the neck more down and forward. The earliest ones have the fully upright swan neck in the style of the Charles Knight painting!

[Sim]

Analysing the Papo great white shark shows how wrong it is...  I had only noticed its face looked off...  Its jaw seam also looks terrible.  I'm not too surprised by all this though as I imagine it was one of Papo's first marine life figures.  Papo has improved a lot since that figure.

I would add the Toymany 8-piece shark set great white shark as one of the best versions of the animal.

[NSD Bashe]

I have a lot of favorites, but the Safari LTD anglerfish, dragonfish and loosejaw were the very first deep sea figures I got and in a way they are the most iconic to me for that reason (besides being incredibly cool designs).  Before that I had numerous dinosaurs from various garage sales, thrift stores etc. but didn't have internet back then and had no knowledge that figures of deep sea fish even existed.  While I sadly no longer have the exact copies I had as a kid I've since obtained them again along with eventually the other three in the set I'd never known about in childhood and can only imagine what my excitement would have been if I'd come across them way back then.



As a side note my return to collecting began with searching for these in particular