Those of you with long memories will recognize this pistol as essentially the rebirth of an old Taurus model, the PT58.  The PT58 made it into the Taurus catalog in what must have been at least twenty years ago, but to the best of my knowledge was never a huge seller in the USA, and has been discontinued for a very long time. 

I should also mention that the PT58 was essentially a copy of the Beretta Cheetah.  Not an exact copy by any means, but modeled after that pistol.  This of course goes back about five decades when, after Beretta's contract with the Brazilian military ended, and Beretta sold their Brazilian factory, their tooling, everything, to Taurus. 

Taurus, having everything in place including a trained work force, began making close copies of Beretta pistols at that time.  Our Kim Foster could comment on a couple of the Taurus and Beretta pistols from experience, as I know he has owned both the Taurus 92 and Beretta 92. 

Here are picture of the old Model PT 58 and new model 58.  When you compare them, the similarities are very obvious: