Eccles Dinosaur Park – July 24, 2008

For lack of anything too much more exciting going on, Adam, Cassie, Jason, Amber, Brenda and I took Luke and AJ to Dinosaur Park in Ogden (I know, the adult to baby ratio is a little high, but Adam and I take a lot of supervising too.) The museum on the inside is pretty darn cool if you ask me – lots of fossil replicas and touchable things like the Triceratops skull that Bren and Luke are admiring. I will admit though that the jewel section upstairs seemed a little out of place to me – maybe someone donated a bunch of precious/semi-precious stones and the management of Dinosaur park felt like they had to display them.

Oh wait, was I insinuating that Dinosaur Park is not exciting? Who am I kidding? The highlight of the indoor museum is, of course, the audio-animatronic triceratops and allosaurus (I think) upstairs. It’s almost scary to think that all that is between you and a semi-fierce, clunky-moving, almost scary dinosaur is a chain link fence and some cable that is cleverly labeled electrified. The picture aside, the cable is not really electrified. I guess dinosaurs are like cows – somewhere along the way, we discovered that you don’t have to really electrify cables to stop dinosaurs – cut pretend to, just like you can paint the cattle guard on the road and the cows won’t cross it.

Now the real horror comes into play when you go outside. Paper-mache-esque dinosaurs! Occasional growls from scratchy speakers! The much fabled (and over-hyped) “Golden Dinosaur Cave” or something like that. This poor duck-billed dinosaur fell victim to the ravages of a carnivorous dino and (so it would appear) the lawn-mower since a good chunk of his tail is mysteriously gone. Notice it’s not half eaten – it’s just gone. There’s quite an assortment of stoic dinosaurs – big ones, little ones, ones that play on rocks! Overall though, I have to say that the Mystery Trail was the highlight of the “park” part of Dinosaur Park – and not just because it was in the shade! No, my favorite part of Mystery Trail is the mystery of what’s so mysterious about it. There was no overt sign of Scooby-Doo style clues. There was no visible crime scene. In fact, the only thing that was mysterious about it at all was the fact that the trail wasn’t paved – it was high quality dirt! Please post in the comments what you think the mystery is – I’m curious if I missed out on some deep symbolism or something. More pictures (including an exciting shot of Adam talking on his cell phone!) are available on Flickr. Check them out in the Summer 2008 Set.

Well, now with two solid entries on here, I feel good enough about this to send the link to my family friends and introduce this blog to the world! I really promise this time – I will update! I want to make this a great way to keep people in the know! Watch for an update on Michigan soon!