"Plannosaurus Tyrannosaurs" model kit by Bandai. A fun and educational model kit.
Plannosaurus is a brand name for all other plastic dinosaurs that Bandai sells ("pla" prefix for "plastic"). Tyrannosaurs is the genus name. None of the packaged materials mentioned the species name, but I would like to think this is a model of the king, Tyrannosaurs rex.
The packaging advertised that no tools needed to assemble this kit, because Bandai managed to make the gates connecting the parts with the runners amazingly thin and brittle, such that the pieces can be easily snapped off. I still used a nipper, but I find that I didn't have to shave off the nubs as much, unlike most other models. Overall, it's very easy to assemble, except for the stickers. I always grumble when I had to apply stickers on Bandai models, because Kotobukiya usually would have included pre-printed parts for those kind of details.
The main reason why the stickers were included is because of the feather variation. This is actually two and a half kit in one -- you build the Tyrannosaurs skeleton first, and then cover those up with two different sets of skins: one oldschool featherless variant, and the other feathered variant that involved lots of stickers. Since my memories of dinosaurs were mostly from books printed before 1990s, these feathers were a new look for me. This and the various factoids sprinkled throughout the manual made this quite a learning experience*, not unlike the cup noodle model.
The building process has been fun and final assembled Tyrannosaurs looked decent. This is one dinosaur model that I would recommend.
* One of the things I learned is that Tyrannosaurs probably won't be able to bend their tails up the way Dinosaur Comics had it. That is to say the posability of this model is slightly disappointing. But I couldn't resist.
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