Their machine-aided designs are less apt to upset a generation with more knowledge of paleontology. The familiar Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and T-rex are now in a Lost World of new species - Avimimus, Tsintaosaurus, Pachycephalosaurus - that are faster, sleeker, better promoted. Compared to the old dinosaurs, frozen in space and time, the new breed are manufactured somewhere else and can be hauled away when the rent goes up or ticket sales go down. The blockbuster 1993 movie Jurassic Park and the arrival of dino-configurable robots triggered a wave of modern dinosaur parks, where at least some of the creatures twitch and roar cinematically. I wanted something that was going to show up.' Another said, 'I didn't want them accurate.

One dino creator told us that drab camouflage would be pointless on something 60 feet long. Dinosaur Land claimed in its brochure that its dinosaurs 'were as true as you are alive,' while Dinosaur World hedged its bets by stating that, 'much of what is said about dinosaurs is theory and interpretation.' The excuse that dinosaur knowledge is constantly evolving gives dinosaur builders a lot of leeway, particularly when it comes to crazy color patterns and skin tones. And while some dinosaur park creators tried to be as accurate as they could, others just made it up. There's usually at least one scene of dino-on-dino carnage, lurid with splatters of red paint. Ambassadors from the Time of Dinosaurs, they still seem pretty solid.ĭinosaur parks were, and often still are, built in empty, sun-baked fields, without much primeval forest atmosphere. A number of them today simply stand by the roadside, unprotected by their dogged, long-extinct human builders or admission gates. The largest of these pre-fossilized saurians sometimes took years to complete.

What they lacked in refinement they made up for in dinosaur-quality bulk, surviving decades of weather and clambering children. Dinosaurs are everywhere in America, breaking the horizon with their petrified silhouettes, luring travelers to stop for a look-see, even in places where thunder lizards never stomped the earth ( Florida) or where they may have hung around for only a few days ( Noah's Ark).ĭinosaurs are freaky enough to be a forgiving project for someone learning on the job, and there's an antediluvian allure in the older, cartoon-art-version dinos with skeletons of iron and skin of cement. And starting in the 1930s, roadside dinosaurs and dino parks became familiar, nationwide shrines to our prehistoric progenitors. The USA has embraced giant lizards ever since its first one was dug up in New Jersey in the 1850s. Prehistoric Gardens, Port Orford, Oregon.

Crazy dino park robots