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The Roanoke
Times
June 30, 2008
http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/167675
NATURAL BRIDGE -- The dinosaurs sound hungry.
They roar and growl as we tread along the gravel footpath. A fence separates
us from the bellows in the woods. We're too shielded to see anything, but in
the open enough for the shrieks and snarls to conjure images of big creatures
with big claws and big teeth.
We pass fence-mounted fossils and museum-style explainer signs and hear
ominous music. For anyone who's ever walked through the Jurassic
Park section of Orlando's Islands of Adventure, it's slightly
reminiscent.
That feeling ends right about the time we spot our first dino -- what appears
to be a vicious velociraptor in a field.
Enter the first of many anachronisms. The dino is playing nicely with fellow
fiberglass cows and deer.
"And inexplicably," notes Jerry Elkins, who is visiting Natural Bridge's
Dinosaur Kingdom with his family. "There's a
monkey with a purple hat."
High above where Elkins' two daughters take shelter in hatched dinosaur
eggs, hangs out-of-place creature No. 2: A stuffed gorilla wearing a cowboy
hat.
He's looking angrily at a caveman below, who is shaking a stick. We conclude
Donkey Kong has snatched the caveman's pants, which are draped over the
gorilla's fuzzy arm.
In reality, we learn later from park creator Mark Cline, the pantsless one
is not a caveman. Rather, he's a Union Army solider just awoken from his tent.
"It's all Union and dinosaurs,"
Cline explains. "No cavemen."
Thanks, Mark. That clears up everything.
The explanation seems almost natural coming from Cline, a 47-year-old from Waynesboro who's spent the past 25 years crafting
fiberglass dinos for museums and parks from Florida
to Branson, Mo.
The Dinosaur Kingdom
is just one of a series of odd tourist stops on this rural stretch of U.S. 11
-- featuring Mother Nature-crafted Natural
Bridge and a Styrofoam replica of Stonehenge (aptly named Foamhenge, also created by
Cline.)
Opened in 2005, the dino park's story takes place in 1863, when a family of
paleontologists on a fossil-excavating mission discover a hidden valley filled
with living dinosaurs. Meanwhile, the Union Army learns about the big lizards
and attempts to round up the dinos to use as weapons of mass destruction
against the South.
There's no subliminal messages here, Cline explains. Every story needs a
good guy and a villain. Because it's the South, the Yankees get the bad-guy
title. No one from up North, Cline adds, has ever complained.
There are nearly 30 fiberglass dinos in the park, outnumbering those
bad-intentioned Union guys. In fact, Cline says his original idea was creating
a ride-through Civil War park. But the more he researched, the more expensive
the idea became.
He wanted something cheaper and a way to incorporate his fascination with
dinosaurs. The park's theme is based on the 1969 movie "The Valley of
Gwangi" where cowboys find dinosaurs in Mexico.
The dino park neighbors Professor Cline's Haunted Monster
Museum, also created by
Cline. It's a blood-and-guts-free haunted house full of dark mazes, thumps and
bumps. It's unique in that visitors can watch a video of their tour afterward
-- with the option of purchasing the DVD.
"It's like Disney on speed," Cline says.
For the Elkins family, on vacation from Maryland, the dino park came on a day where
they also visited Foamhenge and the wax museum.
"We kind of excel at finding weird places," Jerry Elkins
explained.
But to keep the place slightly less weird, Cline has a few changes in mind.
He plans to add a Yankee flag to the soldier's tent, hopefully clearing the
caveman confusion.
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