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Free family fun
with concrete monsters at one of the Black Hills original tourist attractions,
open to the public since 1936! Dinosaur Park is located on a ridge of
sandstone that encircles the Black Hills. Along this ridge dinosaurs
of the Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous have been found. Not far from
the park dinosaur footprints have been found. |
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Two Dinosaur
statues outside of the Gift Shop |
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Below: Lee Duquette climbing up the start of many stairs to Dinosaur Park. |
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The five sculptures
were a Depression-era project cooked up by the Rapid City Chamber of
Commerce, who saw them as a way to make jobs, get the government to
pay for it, and capitalize on the flood of visitors to nearby Mount
Rushmore. Emmit A. Sullivan is credited as the sculptor; the same artistic
genius who created the Christ of the Ozarks and the dinosaurs at Dinosaur
World in Arkansas. The dinosaurs were dedicated on May 22, 1936, on
the crest of a hill overlooking the city. The five figures, an Apatosaurus,
Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Brontosaurus, were
fashioned from concrete over iron pipe frameworks. |
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Standing on Dinosaur
Park with spectacular 100-mile views and looking to the east, the South
Dakota Badlands can be seen. Most rocks of the Badlands are too young
to have dinosaurs preserved, but fossil mammals are superbly represented.
To the west and north of the Black Hills, dinosaurs have been found
in great abundance in the basins of Wyoming and on the Northern Great
Plains. |
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AFTER you have seen all of the above sites in South Dakota,
