The links will take you to diorama showing figures from this period. The site A and site B icons will take you to the home pages for more selections.
There were lots of interesting extinct animals but not many toy figures. The links will take you
to diorama pages associated with the period you are interested in seeing.
The site A and B icons will take you to the specified Home page or you can use
your the back arrow on your browser. 
In the
Precambrian we have the first mutlicellular animals. In the Vendian period 680-543 Million years ago, there was the Edicara fauna of Australia. The animals are all soft bodied
and fossils are only created in rare instances. The sea appears to have
been inhabited by creatures that look like thin mattresses that were filter
feeders. Stephen Gould in his book 'Its a Wonderful Life', suggested that these organisms were
not directly
ancestral to modern forms and were essentially a dead end. I recommend the
book highly, it is very readable but dated.
The Cambrian
520 million years ago, opens with a bang called the Cambrian explosion. The Burgess Shale in
Western Canada has provided a glimpse into first flowering of complex life
forms. It is the time of the Weird Wonders. All the known
phylum of great families of animals are here plus the weird wonders, the designs that died out.
The dominate carnivores are Anomalocaris and its close relatives. They
appear to be unrelated to any living animals and are only one of surprises. The Cambrian and following Ordovician are characterized by the
proliferation of Trilobites and a fauna dominated by filter feeders. The
Royal Ontario Museum in Canada has produces a series of figures from the Burgess
Shale. The choice of the Burgess shale as a subject for candy
premiums by both the Cadbury Yowie and Kaiyodo Dino Tales series had been a
pleasant surprise. I recommend the Discovery Channel program Origins:
Battle for the Planet as a good introduction to the early seas.
In the Silurian and Devonian 409 million years ago, the fish begin to
diversify and become more important. The first well known sharks are
found. There is a general trend towards creatures that are mobile and
active consumers as opposed to the sedentary filter feeders.
SRG produced
the earliest prehistoric fish figure 
Dinichthys now better known as Dunkelostes.
The French Starlux company produced a few early fish figures but the series has
always been hard to obtain. Only recently with the Yowie and Kaiyodo Dino
Tales series do we get many prehistoric fish figures. In the Devonian Carboniferous land flora and
fauna develop and it is called the 
age of amphibians. Paleozoic fauna at
sea
continues to decline as modern families evolve. The BBC documentary Chased by Sea Monsters has a nice Dunkelostes episode. The evolution of calcified bones is though to be related to spread of early
vertebrates to fresh water environments. 
In the Early
Permian 286 million years ago, reptiles dominate the land. Dimetrodon the
king of the Paleozoic toys lived in this time. Dimetrodon and its relative Sphenacodon were regular members of Marx Dinosaur play sets even though they are
more closely related to mammals. While Sphenacodon has fallen on hard
times being excluded from most dinosaur sets, Dimetrodon even shows up in the
JP toy line though not the movie. With a little a paint both creatures can blend into modern sets it is a good Retro Classic project. Edaphosaurus the plant eating fin back
and has not been reproduced often. The Starlux, Bullyland and Deiner are the only
figures I know of for the animal. In the Late Permian a modern
land ecology starts to develop. The Russian Late Permian strata are traditionally divided into the Ufimian the Kazanian, and the Tartarian The period sees pulses of extinctions of old
families and adaptive radiations of new families while the environment becomes
increasingly arid. The oldest of the proto mammals sometimes called mammal
like reptiles are found in the the Russian province of Kazan hence the name Kazanian. after an extinction the proto mammals
diversified again in the 
Tatarian. Known as the mammal like reptiles in older
publications, the relatives of mammals dominated the Late Permian and survived
into the Triassic to produce mammals. While Moschops was a stalwart
of Marx, MPC and more recently Playskool this period has largely been ignored
except by Starlux and the JP toy line. Ral Partha did a couple of
theraspid figures. Again it is the new candy premiums like the Choco Egg
Dino Tales that have produced the most interesting figures. The Permian and the Paleozoic end with the greatest of all
extinctions. The Period ends with the greatest Extinction known.
Recommend reading is Dr Bob Bakkers Dinosaur Heresies for a good feel of the
period. The BBC documentary Before the Dinosaurs and the Discovery Miracle Planet visit the whole paleozoic.
