Mysticeti - Baleen whales (or was it whales with a moustache?)

[AwkwardNar]

my very own comes in the mail tomorrow or so. CollectA has done it again.

[Hercules beetle]

I am dieng for a bowhead whale.
My favorite figures are the schleich grey whale, i got it with the young.
and my blue whale, which i cant find the brand on it, but its a shiny dark blue color and it has like sprinkly patterns dotted on its back.

[brontodocus]

Thanks for reminding me about this thread (which unfortunately hasn't received any update in a long time) Hercules Beetle! Since you mentioned Bowhead Whales, which are my favourite baleen whales, too, 2014 brought us two really good figure representations of this species...

one by Safari Ltd / Wild Safari Sealife (my personal favourite):


...and the other by CollectA / Sea Life:


So together with the smaller Play Visions and Kaiyodo Red Data Animals, there are now at least four Bowhead Whale figures.

[Hercules beetle]

I might get the new schleich bowhead, it might actually be safari but oh well, basically, i am going to add a bowhead whale to my collection soon.

[bmathison1972]

there is an older Kaiyodo bottecap bowhead whale too (I think it has water coming out of its blow hole); I've seen it on ebay but never played close enough attention to the aquarium/series. It only caught my eye because it's a popular critter on this forum

edit: immediately after posting this I did a search and here it is; an Atlas Anima 3D figure: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Kaiyodo-Aquatales-Deep-Sea-Bowhead-Whale-Figure-Nice-/190454972663?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2c580040f7

[brontodocus]

Ah, right, I forgot about that one. However, I've never been interested in it. The only figure I liked from the Atlas Anima 3D set was the Melanocetus johnsonii.

[sbell]

I might get the new schleich bowhead, it might actually be safari but oh well, basically, i am going to add a bowhead whale to my collection soon.

CollectA makes a really nice one as well.

[sauroid]

sorry to revive this old thread but since i recently got my own red data bowhead whale, i have to praise the beauty of this figure and also to compliment Dr.Andre's beautiful photos.

[brontodocus]

sorry to revive this old thread but since i recently got my own red data bowhead whale, i have to praise the beauty of this figure and also to compliment Dr.Andre's beautiful photos.

Thanks, sauroid, it's perfectly fine! And it's still one of my favourites, too, even after this year's Safari Ltd and CollectA releases.

[Hercules beetle]

I need that figure.

[postsaurischian]

Kaiyodo presents Aquatales Polyresin - 2nd series #2-005











                         

                         

                         

                         


























....... next to Colorata's Right Whale from the Marine Mammals DX box:

[sauroid]

WOW! great photos

[brontodocus]

Oh, wow, even better than I had expected! Now I regret that I haven't bought it together with the ones I bought a few weeks ago. So the flipper "membrane" around the digits is transparent then? I was hoping it was.

[Jetoar]

Awesome figure  .

[brontodocus]

Now that I received mine a week ago - even such high quality resin figures can be defective. Mine was missing the left lower jaw, box was in perfect condition and unopened and the jaw bone was not inside the polybag or anywhere else in the box. Luckily I bought from HLJ and after contacting them they sent a new one as a replacement which should be here within a few days.

[Jetoar]

Other images of Mysticeti  .



Bullyland Fin Whale.



Maia & Borges Minke Whale.



AAA Right Whale.



AAA Humpback Whale.



Schleich Blue Whale-2012.



AAA Blue Whale.



Schleich Northern-Right Whale.



Collecta Blue Whale.



Collecta Humpback Whale.

[brontodocus]

Warning - image heavy!

Finally, Kaiyodo gives us a Blue Whale model in scale with many 1/35 to 1/40 scale dinosaur figures!

So here is a walk-around of the Kaiyodo Mega Sofubi Advance MSA-004 1:35 Blue Whale, Balaenoptera musculus (Linnaeus, 1758). It is a hollow vinyl model and ridiculously huge, measuring 758 mm from the tip of the lower jaw to the notch in the fluke. Since the model is gently curved dorsoventrally it would be slightly longer if it was fully stretched out, approx. 780 mm, so the scale would be anywhere between 1:26 and 1:43 for a mature individual. The "official" scale of 1:35 would make this a 27.3 m long animal, while 1:40 would make it represent a 31.2 m long one. For world record size, 33.6 m, the scale would be 1:43. The tail fluke spans exactly 200 mm. The sculpt is wonderfully detailed with a paint job to match, light gray streaks and mottles on a bluish gray background. Some seams are a little more obvious, i.e. those were the fluke and flipper pieces are inserted or the oval-shaped insert on the underside. There are also a few irregularities, most notably at mid-length of the back where the left side next to the spine is stronger depressed than the right side, resulting in a shallow but significant groove. This appears to be the case even on photos of the prototype. The model is leaner than most other toy figures representing the species but still quite bulky. For comparison, scale models of an adult and calf Blue Whale in the Natural History Museum, London, are still much more gracile (yet they are not as detailed) but this can also be interpreted as representing a different nutritional state. Something rarely seen on a rorqual figure is that the number of ventral pleats (the longitudinal grooves at the throat) lies within the range recorded for blue whales and is about 76 on a level just behind the eyes. The model comes with two black support pieces cast from resin, these are sufficiently heavy (150 g each) to provide a stable display stand.

The Blue whale, largest of the rorquals and largest animal known to science (including both extant and extinct animals) has been hunted to the brink of extinction, especially during the first half of the 20th Century, with only an estimated 1,000 - 3,000 individuals remaining in the 1960s. Since then the global population has recovered to an estimated 10,000 to 25,000 individuals which is, however, only 3 to 11% of its estimated population size prior to hunting (Taylor & Notarbartolo di Sciara in IUCN 2008) and the Blue Whale is therefore still considered "Endangered" by IUCN.

And now we come to the photos!




























Photos of the box and how the model is packaged:





Bonus: What really makes this Blue Whale figure so interesting for us figure collectors is that it is about the same scale as many other figures of very large animals, especially dinosaurs. So here are some comparison shots...

This is a comparison of the largest (i.e. heaviest) extant bony fish, the largest extant cartilaginous fish, and the largest extant animal. At 1:40 this scene would show a 3.2 m long Sunfish, Mola mola (Wild Safari WS Sealife, total length 80 mm), an 11.2 m long Whale Shark, Rhincodon typus (paper model by Taiwan designer Civi Cheng from his book "Make My Own Ocean Animals" (length 281 mm), and a 31.2 m long Blue Whale.


Comparison of the Mega Sofubi Advance Blue Whale with the Paleocraft "Indricotherium" = Paraceratherium transouralicum by Sean Cooper, shoulder height 119 mm, so at 1:43 we see a comparison of a world record size Blue Whale (33.5 m), with a Paraceratherium of 5.1 m shoulder height (estimates of P. transouralicum give approx. 4.8 m shoulder height of the reconstructed skeleton so with soft tissue added the animal may be just a little larger than that), and a 1.85 m tall human (Schleich scale figure from the ReplicaSaurus series, height without base 43 mm).


...and of course this Blue Whale is the perfect figure for Museum series sauropod figures, e.g. here the Safari Ltd Carnegie Collection Diplodocus, total length 740 mm, so this would (at 1:35 scale) show how a 25.9 m long Diplodocus would look like compared with a 27.3 m long Blue Whale.

The Mega Sofubi Advance Blue Whale was officially released on 2015-03-25 and it seems supplies have already become quite scarce. So if you don't want to miss on this one the time to get it is probably now! It is expensive and international shipping from Japan can cause immense postage costs due to the size of the package (mine was delivered in a 110*45*40 cm parcel!) but it's also something many serious collectors have been waiting for. For me, this one has become an instant favourite!

Edited 2017-02-04: Fixed broken image urls - now hosted on postimage.org

[sbell]

Very cool figure--I'm admittedly not a marine mammal collector but it's really cool to see a company do something so large and impressive.

[Jetoar]

Awesome  .

[brontodocus]

Many thanks, Sean and Jetoar! I am so glad I didn't miss to get this one, I already noticed people are having problems getting one. The shop I bought mine from (HLJ) has it already listed as "discontinued".