Brontosaurus and Mastodon: Palmer Plastics Inc., of Brooklyn, New York, made these two prehistoric creature skeleton kits.
Scalemates date both of these kits to 1959, but there do not appear to be any dates on either the boxes or the instruction sheets.
The American Mastodon (Mastodon americanus), an elephant-like mammal with enormous tusks:
This was Palmer kit number No.110-1.00, which meant catalogue number 110, retail price $1.00. No scale is given on the box, but the model was 10 inches long.
One side of the box has a panel giving details of the Mastodon, which states that they were 15 feet long. That would make the 10 inch long model about 1/18th scale.
The box top art-work showed the skeleton, which is what you got in the box, along with a smaller view of a live Mastodon. It is described on the box top as an 'All Plastic Scale Model Assembly Kit', and 'Scaled From American Museum Restorations'.
The oblong box has a lift-off lid. One side has a panel showing the other kit in this series, the Brontosaurus.
There were 43 pieces in the kit, including the base, all moulded in a suitable bone coloured plastic. The tusks and larger bones were moulded in two halves.
At some point (probably in the 1960s or 1970s) a company called Natural Science Industries, of Far Rockaway, New York, re-issued this kit. I am not sure if they actually produced the kit themselves, or if the kits were made by Palmer, and just sold in NSI boxes.
NSI made a wide range of educational and craft toys, so these educational Palmer kits would have fitted in with their other product lines. Both firms were based in New York City.
The NSI boxes were nearly identical to the normal Palmer releases, and used the same box art, with the addition of the NSI logo and address. The original kit numbers were retained, but without the price suffix, and now just said No.110.
There seem to have been three, slightly different versions of the Mastodon box.
Palmer logo and address.
Palmer logo with NSI address (this looks to be a sticker)
NSI logo and printed address
Scalemates do not mention this NSI version, and it seems the Mastodon kit has not been available for many years. As a kit subject the Mastodon has not fared too well, being over shadowed by the Mammoth.
Ten photographs from Worthpoint.
Paul Adams from New Zealand
Great work here Paul. I adore the boxes, works of art all of them. I remember finding a die-cast metal skeleton years ago, which I thought was a Mastodon/ It was really heavy too but quite small. I have your NSI articles too, so I'll post them soon.
ReplyDeleteBoy oh boy, I remember this kit like it was yesterday! Great to see it again! SFZ
ReplyDeleteI had a Mammoth skeleton kit in the 90s but I suspect it was a reissue of a previous model. The sculpt was different to this Mastodon. There's been a lot of reissuing in the plastic kit business. I have a 1/6 scale Neanderthal skeleton kit which is moulded in canary yellow polythene (now with a decent paint job!) I suspect it may have originally been a styrene kit, but I have no idea who originally released it. It came with a generous clear plastic display tube that it now shares with my 50 year old Airfix 1/6 (homo sapiens) skeleton.
ReplyDeleteI missed out on a very old Neanderthal kit last Summer at a German car boot. So wish I hadn't dithered. Just 4 flippin Euro!
DeleteBuilt one of these in the late 60s. FYI. the neck is on upside down.
ReplyDeleteThank you - I had not realised that the neck was upside down. I have never actually seen one of these kits, or built one, the illustrations coming mainly from a site called Worthpoint.
ReplyDelete