NOTE!! NEW to YOU. - Marx Dump Dinosaurs were never, ever, sold retail. All my dump Dinos have had only three owners: The Louis MARX Toy Company, the gentleman plasteontologist who unearthed them and myself.

This PARASAUROLOPHUS has had only three owners. The Louis Marx Toy Company, the man who dug it up from the West Virginia dump and myself. It is from THE Dump. It is dirty (I don't clean my dump Dinos, you may choose to clean yours).  It is pretty much as it was when Marx "dumped" it. But remember. It has spent 50+ years fending for itself. It is feral. It is ferocious. It is not your domesticated little painted turtle that lives in a terrarium down the street and uses the box. It is veritably pristine. In the same condition as coming from the manufacturer... only with a slight (50+/- year) delay for interment.

What you are bidding on here is a (1) Dump MARX PARASAUROLOPHUS from the Second Series Mold Group (PL-1083, 1961). It is from the fabled MARX Dump (see way below). This dump figure is as much at least fifty-two-plus years old. This comes in  a basic Flat plastic Robin's Egg Blue with only a little West Virginia Dump dirt. The flat plastic gives it a production date between 1961 and 1963 giving it a mere two-year production window, adding to its rarity. But wait... there's more.

The Louis Marx Toy Company produced thousands of plastic/rubber toys until it closed its doors in 1979. One of the most popular toys that it produced were a series of twenty- three (23) Dinosaurs. These figures were produced in groups or sets of what were referred to as "mold groups," each mold group consisting of five to eight different figures.

The PARASAUROLOPHUS is from the Second Series Mold Group (PL-1083 1961) which was the last of the mold groups of "Dinosaurs" first created by MARX in 1955. In 1963 Marx switched from a "flat" finish plastic to a shiny, waxy plastic they called "Heritage Plastic." The great majority of Marx figures are in this latter plastic. Marx switched because the new, "Heritage" plastic had much better reliability in casting and in homogeneity of color from batch to batch.  The flat plastic varied in color from shipment to shipment and thereby violated The Marx Company's need for sameness and perfection. I have rarely seen a Heritage Plastic Dump-dino. This is in the early, flat plastic.

This PARASAUROLOPHUS is very interesting. It is just about perfect in casting, there is a little flash down the mold line of the front (left) leg  and a small out thrust of flash at the front of the mouth, looking like a tongue thrusting outward. The odd, or "off" aspect is the color itself, a bluish, somewhat darker than in the accompanying pictures (an artifact of my Sony Cyber-Shot, no doubt) referred to as "Robin's Egg," color. This is clear but subtle and far outside acceptable parameters for the perfectionist Louis Marx Toy Company.

Your MARX PARASAUROLOPHUS is ~4.5 inches inches long and stands ~3.375" in height The original Cretaceous (75mya) model on which this is loosely based was bigger at about 28 feet (it is imprinted on his tail) and perhaps 2+ tons.

My camera cannot always capture the subtlety of the coloration here but it is quite evident in person. The dump is in West Virginia so you can't say this guy hasn't been anywhere. On the other hand it ran free in the dump for more than fifty years or so it wasn't all that easy to capture in the first place.

This is in Mint or at least near-Mint, "new-to-you" original condition especially when considering it is from a dump, was buried for at least four decades and was dug up with a shovel. Given all that what kind of shape do you think you'd be in? Utterly unchewed or otherwise modified by little children. This auction is for the single PARASAUROLOPHUS shown.

More information about the Marx Dinosaurs can be found here:

http://www.dinosaur-toys-collectors-guide(dot)com/Marx-Toys.html
http://www.dinosaur-toys-collectors-guide(dot)com/louis-marx-and-company.html
http://www.dinosaur-toys-collectors-guide(dot)com/marx-playset-monograph.html
http://www.dinosaur-toys-collectors-guide(dot)com/marx-playset-monograph-Part-2.html


Your PARASAUROLOPHUS will be carefully prepared to stalk you with the help of the USPS (Priority Mail), with reasonable assurance it will leap out of your mail box within four days of receipt of payment.

Please note. Now that eBay charges fees for the entire purchase price, including shipping, I considered just offering "free" shipping and folding the S&H into the item price. This, however, would preclude me from offering a combined shipping discount, so I have forsworn doing so. This does leave me at the buyer's mercy in the DSR ratings so if you have a question about my S&H please feel free to contact me regarding it. Thank you.

This item may not be mailed to Italy. If you are in Italy please contact me prior to bidding.

  Caveat Emptor?:   Not really, more 'buyer be aware.' I am a private collector and a personal consumer. I am NOT a retailer. I do not have a stock of "inventory" or buy things wholesale. Everything I sell, whether as New, Used or 'Other' has been bought and paid for at retail and often with taxes and/or shipping as well. I price at close to what I paid and so do not have much of a margin. Everything I sell must be considered as pre-owned and comes as-is. I provide a photo, will gladly provide more and give a full and accurate description of each item including any known defects. I do not have a return policy because I am NOT a business, just a private person, and simply cannot afford to deal with returns. My shipping department is me and three cats who are shiftless and lazy and have the finest union contract on earth with free food, board and 100% medical. Their motto is "knock it under the sofa and fuggedaboutit." I ship everything within 24 hours of receipt of payment (unless received the day before a Sunday or holiday) because that is what I want for myself. I usually ship USPS Priority and always include a tracking/confirmation number; you will invariably receive your item in less than a week, CONUS.

Special note to fixed price (buy it now) buyers.
Ebay now requires all 'buy it nows' to pay for each of the items immediately… unless you put them in your "shopping cart" first, then pay for the cart all at once.
The cart is in the upper right hand corner of the page.
If you are buying multiple items at a fixed price please follow that direction.
Yes, I know….

THE DUMP, a Short Essay:

The dump is/was in fact, a dump. A landfill. Not so much garbage as in banana peels, egg shells and old tin cans (oh, we can't throw those away anymore?) but more in the line of rejected plastics. (What? We can't through those away either?)

The Louis Marx Company, purveyors of plastic toy figures for two+ generations had what can only be described as "very strict" standards for their product. In fact they practiced what today would be called a "zero tolerance" policy. They also did not bother to waste energy by burning or melting down production errors. They simply threw them out. Now production errors ranged from the obvious "mutant" miscasts to very subtle non-standard color variations. There was a specific range of grey, green and brown (and other colors, but those three for Dinosaurs) that encompassed acceptable and anything outside of those parameters got rejected.

One thing that you might not be aware of is that the Marx 'engineers' would often experiment with colors, mixing different colors to see 1) what they got and 2) would they be able to reproduce it. Quite often the different colors would cool at differing rates, resulting in warped figures, or melt at slightly different temperatures, resulting in incomplete figure (molten plastic failed to fully flow into the mold). In other cases the colors simply wouldn't blend as in the mottled figures. Keep in mind that if even one figure in a mold-group casting was bad, the entire casting would be rejected. Therefore some dump figures appear virtually perfect, they are victims of their casting siblings. Others are perfect except for the colors which were un-reproduce-able.

Rejection took the form of simply being tossed in a barrel, the full barrel thrown on a dump truck, the dump truck would drive out to the factory landfill, and whoosh, slide 'em off to be covered by a grader or a bulldozer. Everyone at the factory and most everybody in the surrounding area knew about the dump but it was privately owned, land owned by the Marx company, and off limits to any and all. Of course environmental restrictions were pretty much non-existent at the time (1950s, 60s early 70s) and did not include the Marx products anyway. It was a cheap and easy way to dispose of what would not be going to market. A very small percentage of total product regardless. The plastic itself did not lend itself to re-melting and re-use and so this form of disposal was as good as any, and  better than most. Even better for our purposes today.

After Marx went under the land became public and someone(s) began exploring the dump site. It was hard work digging out the figures but, at least, when you found one you tended to find a great many in the same immediate area. The trick was to find the sweet spot. Not merely Dinosaurs but modern animals, circus, soldiers, civilians and every other figure made by Marx can be found. If you work hard enough.

As for the Dinosaurs. Prior to 1963 Marx used a 'flat' plastic and the color variation was fairly extensive, varying notably from one lot to the next. In 1963 they switched to what they called the "Heritage Plastic", a waxier, shinier plastic that presumably cast more efficiently and very few of these latter are found in the dump.

Prior to 1963 however Marx did a fair amount of experimenting. One experiment was the creation of "mottled" figures. This involved the mixing of two (or more) colors of raw plastic and creating what was supposed to be a visual representation of the animal in the forest/jungle, a mottled color effect. Quite often this went wrong.

Sometimes the plastics would mix and blend, producing a totally off color, non-standard and unacceptable for retail sale. Other times the mixing resulted in a non-blended result, a spotted creation, two or three toned, and likewise non-standard and unacceptable. Sometimes the two color plastics didn't really work at all, not mixing properly and cooling at differing rates warping the figure after it was released to cool. This could also result in an unacceptable level of flash on the figure as it didn't release from the mold quite right- a comparatively common occurrence with the pre-1963 flat plastic anyway.

So yes- every "dump" figure was individually dug up out of the West Virginia earth. While I personally didn't someone else did.

The Robin's Egg color (for instance) is simply non-standard. Marx I suspect recognized that if they had just a very few singularity figures on the market, in a color that they could not readily reproduce in quantity (some colors were as a result of Marx engineers experimentation- never meant for the public anyway) they would be creating a skewed market for what they wanted to be selling to the general public.

Many of these figures, as the result both of the combination of colored plastics and chemical reactions from years spent in the good Earth, are quite beautiful in multiple shades of browns, grays, greens and blues. Each and every one is totally unique.  

Remember that for the first few years these were sold individually, out of bins in Woolworths and toy stores, only later as carded sets and in the big playsets. They were looking to mass market these, not create a specialty niche. Yes, they are often quite pretty, and certainly very unique, but none are reproducable for the mass market.

I am selling off my rather extensive collection of Marx and other Dinosaur figures because I like to eat. Keep your eyes open for more figures being released almost everyday.