Take a Jurassic Road Trip To These 13 Dinosaur Parks - Atlas Obscura Lists

Take a Jurassic Road Trip To These 13 Dinosaur Parks

Prehistoric roadside attractions line the highways of Oregon to Massachusetts.

Dinosaur statue parks were all the rage at one point. In 1851, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’ dinosaur sculptures at London’s Crystal Palace exhibition drew crowds in the thousands. Theme parks where young and old alike could walk between the legs of a T-rex and admire a pack of charging (albeit stationary) velociraptors appeared everywhere from Cuba to Mongolia in the century to come. In America, these were particularly linked to the growth of the highway system.

But by the time Jurassic Park had enthralled millions of budding paleontologists, many dinosaur parks were all but forgotten, crumbling away in forests and swamps. Yet some of those behemoths of concrete and fiberglass are still out there along our interstates. Here are 13 roadside attractions in the US where you can see dinosaurs “in the flesh,” so to speak. Many more are just waiting to be dug up. Know of a dinosaur park we’ve forgotten? Add it to the Atlas!