Tourist oriented roadside attractions (like Chester and Hester’s Dino-Rama) are a pretty uniquely American thing, and for a time, were extremely common on American highways. From the 1940s through the 1960s, before the completion of the Interstate Highway (we’ve all seen the Cars films), basically anyone who owned a business or land near a highway was looking for creative ways to get travelers to stop and spend money.
Common ways to do this was novelty architecture (The Brown Derby, Dinosaur Gertie’s) to to market the “World’s Largest” whatever. But an
extremely common theme in American roadside attraction marketing (perhaps second only to so-called “Indian trading posts”) was
dinosaur-related attractions. Some of this built on the oil industry’s dinosaur-related marketing (
Sinclair; “Dinoco”), and some is about the American tendency to see opportunity in exploitation.
So when Imagineers are building a theme park based on cultural relationships between humans and animals/the environment and set their sights on how to represent the United States in such a park, it makes a whole lot of sense to me that they might consider the kitschy nostalgia of one of the major ways Americans have related to their environment: exploitation.
In other parts of the world, when fossilized remains are found, the site is typically treated as public cultural and heritage site; they turn it into a park or move artifacts to a museum. In the U.S., if fossils are found on private property, we often put a fence around the site and sell admission and souvenirs.
