T is for Ten-pins and Terrasaurs!

For which spell-check is desperate for me to use Pterosaur! Clever spell-check, but no humorous intellectual, not that I would claim to be eye'ther . . . eei'ther but you know what I mean; these AI algorithms improve with every generation (which according to Moor's Law is not long), but they'll never quite grasp the finer nuances of human idiocy.

Anyway, we're back to rubbers, and as I've had had various 'follow-up's' and 'again's' for erasers in the past I needed another title and its explanation has provided the lead-in paragraphs!

From four-quid to two-quid to a pound, and it's probably been halfway round the planet, maybe twice! Novelty shite . . . in one image, you have all the evidence you need for the potential end of human civilisation, it's now a race between whether we will poison the planet before the weather does for us! House of Holland clearance via TK Maxx.

The reason for my purchasing them - given my above opinion - is that A) they were there already, nothing I could do about that and B) you may remember I showed a bunch of mostly Christmas cracker bowling pins a year or two ago, and while the bulk of them were the same size, there were a couple of others, and in various materials - with more than two being a collection; these have increased the scope of that 'sub-' collection!

In the meantime a far easier to justify set of erasers winged its way to Small Scale World Towers via Brian Berke; Imperial Toys being the ultimate culprit for the supply of this particularly pure stash of addictive substance!

They appeared upon initial inspection to be a better version of the Wilko ones we looked at a while ago, but after studying them I decided they are probably all of the same origin.

They proved impossible to photograph so here are two shots, neither is that colour-true, to be honest, but they are (with the exception of the - always hard to shoot - orange) quite muted pastels anyway.

Wilkinson above and Imperial below, the colour reproduction is a little better but the orange has burnt-out. The differences are numerous, in that the dino's are different colours, the egg is slightly different in its base 'dent' and both the mix of dinosaurs and their dino-poses is different.

However the orange carnivore is both the same shade and the same moulding,the ceratopsians are also identical, the two-each of four colours 'rule' applies and so I think the differences are down to batch/contract, rather than any indication of another maker's copying.

The question is whether Wilko are getting theirs from Imperial, or if that they are independently both going to the same factory gate or shipping agent - these days as likely to be an Alibaba wholesaler's page as any of the old firms?

I might suggest that there's probably an eighth pose to find (maybe more?), and I've posed them with Airfix's Boy the 'dinoheard' from the Tarzan set to give you some idea of how very small they are.

Thanks as always to Brian Berke for adding another piece of the puzzle to the whole, which reminds me; he also sent a couple of Jig Toys which I added to that page last Thursday, nothing new, but interesting colour-way on the helicopter.