New stuff from Dragonblood Miniatures. Very, very nice. I hope this (and the mount from their earlier Hunter sculpt) do become available au naturel.

Old stuff from Archive Miniatures available until the end of the month from Discount Hobby.

TMP has set up a discussion board for Prehistoric gaming. One interesting titbit I picked up there is that the rights to DZ Miniatures mammals have been acquired by Stratagem who are/will be making them in resin. Which would be great if Stratagem weren’t one of the most disorganised and uncommunicative outfits around.

Did anyone else see the recent BBC programmes on dinosaurs? The Truth About Kill Dinosaurs from last month was so-so. I have serious doubts about the validity of some of their “scientific” tests. The materials used to create the artificial dinosaurs looked like they had very different properties to actual bone and muscle. The second programme was more interesting as it covered Velociraptors and Ankylosaurs rather than the tired out T. Rex vs Triceratops duel of the first programme. Much more entertaining was the very silly T-Rex: A Dinosaur in Hollywood show on Wednesday.

Three way tie between Wash, Kaylee and River. (Decided by the dinosaurs of course). Hmm. Not sure about that - the Kaylee and River parts, but I am so totally Wash.

You scored as Hoban ‘Wash’ Washburne. The Pilot. You are a leaf on the wind, see how you soar. You have a good job, and a stunning wife who loves you (and can kill people). Life is good, which is why you can’t help smiling. Now if you can just get people to actually listen to your opinion things would be perfect.

Kaylee Frye		75%
River Tam		75%
Hoban 'Wash' Washburne		75%
Zoe Alleyne Washburne		69%
The Operative		69%
Capt. Mal Reynolds		56%
Inara Serra		56%
Simon Tam		44%
Shepherd Derrial Book		38%
Jayne Cobb		25%

Which Serenity character are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

The ever excellent Back of Beyond Times has a gallery of very nicely painted dinosaur miniatures. They’re all from the 1/35 Tamiya Mesozoic Creatures set (unless the T-Rex and Oviraptor are the Copplestone Casting clones, but I don’t think so).

We got a very nice daylight bulb lamp plus magnifier thingy as a wedding present. I must find the time and space to do some painting. Time and space. Sigh.

And even if I did my efforts wouldn’t be as nice as these. Double sigh.

Reaper Minis have released a pic of some Dennis Mize sculpted Raptors.

Quick update on some previously mentioned dino-mini-goodness items:

Jeff Valent Studios have a cool pic of a painted version of their T-Rex.

Dragonblood Miniatures now have The Hunter on pre-sale. (I’m hoping the promised riderless version materialises.)

From TMP news item, there’s a great new dino miniature coming from Dragonblood Miniatures. According to comments from the manufacturer, a version without the rider is planned.

Last week I picked up a copy of The Times on the train (as you do). There was a short article about a newly described short necked sauropod by someone called Mark Henderson (hmm, that name seems familar).

Here I’d like to rant about the crapness of The Times web site, about how the search feature directed to towards a so-called print friendly version of the article (hello, 2005, print CSS) - complete with (presumably) print friendly banner ads, and about how the very nice illustration from the paper version are entirely lacking from the web site.

Anyway, Brachytrachelopan mesa is a south american sauropod with a short neck, in fact it looks superfically rather like a hadrosaur (see the pic at the bottom of this post on Palaeoblog). As the hadrosaurs were mostly (entirely?) northen hemisphere residents it makes sense that some sort of southern hemisphere dinosaur would evolve to fill the same ecological niche and sauropods are the only major group of plant eating dinos in the southern continents.

But The Times claims that “the short neck of Brachytrachelopan appears to be an adaptation for feeding on shrubs and grasses”. Um, no. Grasses didn’t evolve until millions of years after the dinosaurs went extinct. None of the other sources carrying this story made this mistake so I guess that this Henderson fellow is at fault, I wonder where he learnt his science?

(Mark, if you read this, sorry if I come across as being a bit mean. For all I know the mistake was a sub-editor’s not yours, and maybe The Times even published a correction on Friday.)

Bought yesterday at Salute:

• Two Cyclops Battle Tanks and a Spider Tank, in a three for the price of two offer from Urban Mammoth - £35
• Deinonychus, Gallimimus and Young Tyrannosaurus from Copplestone Castings - £15
• Pack of ten 28mm SF figures from Trent Miniatures - £8
• Land Rover from S&S Models for use with my UNIT troops - £8
• Four Kryomek Drones - £7.98
• Stegosaurus, two Triffids, six (should have been five but there was an extra one in the box) Ichthyosaurus and two Platecarpus from HLBS Co - £28

Plus the freebies: St George and the Dragon and a Revenge of the Sith Clone Trooper.

So that’s £101.98 on miniatures, plus £8 entry and £2.90 train fare.

Running total is now £506.65

So Salute comes to the end of its six years at Olympia. From one floor in 2000 to four floors this year. I think this year was one of the good ones - lots of happy looking people, lots of interesting games and a good buzz in the air.

Top games in my opinion were the 1/1200 Battle of Trafalgar and the 28mm Pirates of the Caribbean. Hmm, a naval theme there. There were very few “traditional” periods being gamed - not a lot of ECW, ACW or Napoleonics. In fact I’d say that ancients and the 20th Century were there in force the periods in between were slightly under under-represented.

Dinosaurs (oh you didn’t think I wouldn’t mention them at all?) appeared in several tables, but the promised Bog-A-Ten 2.0 was absent (though another club was running original Bog-A-Ten). The Gloranthan HotT game featured some cool dinos as part of one army. One interesting new mini I saw was a very nice 28mm scale Mammoth labelled as “Coming Soon” from Baker Company.

My photos all came out crap. But there’s a gallery of photos over at Rotten Lead.

The John Winter sculpts from Iron Wind Metals that I mentioned a while back have been released. It looks like the Mini-Rex is smaller than I imagined. Smaller even than a Nanotyrannus. Might work well in 15mm or 10mm.

Potentially useful for La Brea type dioramas are the Bubbling Ooze.

I’ve created a page listing various 25/28mm Dinosaurs and other prehistoric miniatures. It’s a work in progress and but will probably grow into some sort of monster listing with pics and reviews.

This is the first time I’ve used the Page feature in Word Press and I’m sure I’m missing out on all sorts of features I could be using to make it better.