Two Kinds of Dinosaur, and Only One of Them Was Ever Here

There are fifty-seven dinosaurs in this index, spread across twenty-eight states, and they fall into two piles that have almost nothing to do with each other.

The ones that are actually there

Dinosaur Ridge outside Morrison, Colorado is a road cutting through a hogback where a highway crew in 1937 exposed a bedding plane covered in footprints. You walk along a pavement and the tracks are in the rock beside your head, at eye level, because the whole formation has been tipped on end.

Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill, Connecticut exists because a bulldozer operator clearing ground for a state building in 1966 turned over a slab, saw what was on it, and stopped. There are around two thousand tracks under the dome. The building project was cancelled.

Holyoke, Massachusetts has footprints in a riverside ledge that were recognised in the 1800s — a period when the leading local theory held that they had been made by enormous birds, which is closer to right than it sounded at the time.

These places share a quality: nobody chose the location. The animal chose it, a hundred and fifty million years before there was a state to put a park in.

The ones somebody built

Then there is Cabazon, where a restaurant owner spent years building a concrete Brontosaurus beside Interstate 10 so that traffic would stop for lunch. It took over a decade. A Tyrannosaurus followed. The restaurant is gone and the dinosaurs are still there, which is the usual ratio.

Dinosaur Land in White Post, Virginia. Dinosaur Gardens in Ossineke, Michigan, begun in the 1930s by one man over about twenty years. Galleta Meadows in Borrego Springs, California, where a landowner commissioned metal sculptures and scattered them across open desert — not only dinosaurs, but also a sloth, a mammoth, and a serpent several hundred feet long.

And Dinosaur Park in Rapid City, South Dakota, built by the Works Progress Administration in 1936. Five concrete animals on a hill above the town, put up as public works during the Depression, and now old enough to be documented by the Library of Congress as architecture.

The part that connects to the giants

Some of the fibreglass ones have a family resemblance to something else on this site, and it is not a coincidence.

International Fiberglass of Venice, California — the company that turned one Paul Bunyan mould into hundreds of cowboys, Vikings and muffler-holding lumberjacks — also made dinosaurs. Sinclair Oil used a Brontosaurus as its trademark, and needed one outside a great many petrol stations. The same workshop, the same material, the same period, the same reason: something large enough to be seen from a car at speed.

So a roadside dinosaur from the 1960s and a Muffler Man from the 1960s are often siblings. They were sold by the same salesman, out of the same catalogue, to people with the same problem.

Which pile is worth the detour

Both, for different reasons, and it is worth knowing which you are going to before you arrive.

A trackway is a genuinely strange experience: an animal walked across wet mud one afternoon and the mud is still there, still holding the shape of the afternoon. Nothing about it is designed for you.

A concrete Brontosaurus is the opposite — entirely designed for you, by somebody who needed you to pull over. That is its own kind of honest.

The mistake is arriving at one expecting the other.