I have an extensive collection of Aurora Prehistoric Scenes. All are built-ups that I'm in the process of restoring. My take on restoration is to return it to the unusual original plastic color and add color from there, taking advantage of Triceratops' gunmetal grey, T-rex's red, Sailback's bronze to make something nicely done but close to the wonderful plastic that came out of the box the first time it was opened.
The Three Horned Dinosaur is a real favorite! Got this for a song built, unpainted in box - but UPS smashed it during shipping. Arrived with limb-pins and horns broken, box crushed, part of base, instructions & other parts missing! I try to use the original Aurora color plastic in most of my PS built-ups, because I loved those bizarre colors. The gunmetal looks good on him. Unrealistic, but then so are the carnivorous teeth. Horns are on upside-down.
Triceratops is soul brother to the 3-horned Dino, as they both have the same pose, base panels and probably had the same basic body form in their prototype stages. He looks mad as heck! All-Aurora green plastic, with the exception of the Monogram tree trunk. With the kit's articulation, he was more of an action-figure to me in childhood than a display model!
I think everyone has The Cave. Looks like the Flintstones' pad from the outside, but has footprints and more accessories than you can use on the inside! I did some cave paintings and the interior colors based on the boxart. These pics don't show all the accessories, and the campfire is only partially painted.
T-rex's big, beautiful box!!!!, with a picture worth framing! MIB examples of this kit will come with a cardboard backdrop featuring a 3-color scene of a prehistoric landscape. Rarer still is the unillustrated JC Penney catalog box, seen in the second photo. Too small to accommodate the backdrop. My wonderful grandmother ordered it for me one childhood christmas, and was so disappointed in the plane box that she bought another in the litho box, saving the other for later years. Why the brown box? Well, the illustrated box is just in-store advertising to convince you to buy the kit. Why waste the expense on a fancy box no one will see for catalog sales? They also did it for many Mego and Kenner toys.
The Ankylosaurus. Rare, one of the last PS kits. Just the dino, base & nameplate - no plants to get lost! Bought built-up with dreadful gloss white paint smeared all over it's back and a missing tail. Tail comes from Monogram re-issue. PINESOL used to strip off the white paint. Burnt-orange plastic exposed in the way I preder my PS kits. I remember a mail-away offer for this kit on the side of a box of PomPom's (now called "Milk Duds") candy.
I really loved dinos and Godzilla-type monsters as a child. The Prehistorics were more toys for me than models - I could snap 'em together quickly and play with them! They actually stood up pretty well to the punishment, but my small childhood collection was given to a neighbor kid. . When I got out of college back in '91, I set about re-collecting my childhood favorites - Micronauts and Prehistoric Scenes. I bought a lot of boxes of junked kits, got some real winners on eBay with some lucky auctions, and even got a MIB T-Rex at an antique store for $50 (the most I've paid for any singe one) and eventually acquiring them all, including the Allosaurs with base. I still need the later Sabertooth with the larger base. I have a few boxes or kits that were boxed when I got them, but still need a few odd parts and instruction manuals (or copies).
In the course of it I've learned a lot about the different re-issues and different editions of the kits, and about stripping paint and glue from plastic safely - even polishing the old bare plastic back to a shiny glow. Most of the Prehistorics aren't colored very realistically fresh from the box, so it takes some forethought to combine the odd colors I loved so much in my unpainted childhood memories with the adult techniques I've developed for other kits (Japanese monsters & robots).
Ray Miller