Dinosaur Park
| Dinosaur Park | |||
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| National Register of Historic Places | |||
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| location | Rapid City , South Dakota , United States | ||
| Coordinates | 44 ° 4 '40.9 " N , 103 ° 14' 42.4" W | ||
| Built | 1936 | ||
| architect | Emmit A. Sullivan | ||
| NRHP number | 90000956 | ||
| The NRHP added | June 21, 1990 | ||
The Dinosaur Park is an outdoor museum in Rapid City in the US state of South Dakota .
Opened in 1936, it is considered the oldest dinosaur theme park in the United States and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1990. It contains seven models.
history
In the 1930s, Rapid City's municipality invested more money in projects that promoted tourism in the region. The then President of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Cleophas C. O'Harra, came up with the idea of a park in which life-size dinosaurs can be seen. The aim of the park was to give people a realistic picture of the prehistoric creatures. The city decided to take on the financing of the facility and commissioned the sculptor Emmit A. Sullivan as well as Frank Lockhart and George McGraw to build the dinosaur models. The paleontologist Barnum Brown was brought in as an advisor. The selection of dinosaurs was based on fossils and footprints found in the Black Hills area . The park opened in 1936.
Exhibits
Since the exhibits in the park were built in the 1930s, they represent the state of knowledge about the shape and way of life of the dinosaurs at that time and are therefore not up to date with today's science. The facility was opened with five dinosaurs: Apatosaurus , Edmontosaurus , Triceratops , Tyrannosaurus and Stegosaurus . The exhibition was later expanded to include Protoceratops and Dimetrodon , a synapsid .
Others
Rapid City residents were unhappy with city politics in the 1930s as many community issues were neglected in favor of new tourist attractions. So the Dinosaur Park initially met with little approval and received the derisive nickname Dam Eye-Sore Park (eye-sore: for example eyesore or eye pain ).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Federal Writers' Project (Ed.): The WPA Guide to South Dakota . # 40: The Prairie State. Trinity University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-1-59534-239-3 , pp. 155, 158 (English, limited preview in Google Book search).
- ↑ a b Randy Moore: Dinosaurs by the Decades: A Chronology of the Dinosaur in Science and Popular Culture . Greenwood, 2014, ISBN 978-0-313-39365-5 , pp. 198 f . (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).