Color-coordinated T. rex and Brontosaurus greet visitors to Dinosaur Park.

Dinosaur Park

Rapid City, South Dakota

Concrete monsters lord over a city in South Dakota. Generations of children have climbed steep, rocky stairs to visit the hilltop Dinosaur Park, imagining that when dinosaurs walked the earth, they looked like this!

Sculptor Emmet Sullivan and some of his artist models.

Well, maybe not quite. There's an undeniable cartoony style to these primitive early sculptures, yet the green dinosaurs above Rapid City still satisfy legions of Thunder Lizard fans.

The sculptures were a 1930s project cooked up by the Rapid City Chamber of Commerce, who saw them as a way to make jobs for unemployed men, get the government to pay for it, and capitalize on visitors traveling to the nearby Badlands, rich in prehistoric fossils. Back then it was rare to see even a single dinosaur statue along a roadside. The idea of several of them together as a tourist attraction was something bold and new.

Dinosaur Park's denizens were build solid, and have survived generations of scrambling kids.

A search for an artist qualified to helm the project turned up Emmet A. Sullivan, a Rapid City lawyer who carved Native American heads as a hobby and who claimed to have had some vague, never-verified connection to Mount Rushmore. Interviewed 25 years later, Sullivan recalled that when asked if he could create dinosaurs, his answer was, "I can do anything."

2020s upgrades made it easier to climb to the 1930s dinosaurs.

The dinosaurs, five of them, were fashioned from concrete over iron pipe frameworks atop treeless Hangman's Hill, 300 feet above the city. It was claimed that the 80-foot-long Brontosaurus, standing on the highest point, could be seen from 35 miles away. The other dinosaurs were placed along walkways straddling the ridge and down the dusty slope to the parking lot.

The free public park was supposed to be completed in 1937, but construction was delayed when Sullivan kidnapped the T. rex's teeth and refused to return them until he was paid. It finally opened in June 1938. Sullivan went on to build other concrete colossi, including the big brontosaurus at Wall Drug, the Christ of the Ozarks in Arkansas, and the dinosaurs at John Agar's Land of Kong.

We first visited Dinosaur Park as tykes on a family trip, and sprawled over the Brontosaurus tail, climbed onto the Stegosaurus back, and may have attempted to pry loose the horns from the Triceratops. This family-friendly free-for-all approach is one that the park has maintained since its earliest days, and while it wears down the skin of the dinosaurs, it's nothing that a regular coat of new paint can't remedy.

The T. rex's dagger-like teeth disappeared permanently in the 1990s, but otherwise the inhabitants of Dinosaur Park, gleaming in the sun, look as lively as ever. The park itself, now studded with trees, was given a makeover in 2024 at a cost far exceeding that of its original construction. There's now a new set of stairs, and a less-strenuous ramp that leads from the parking lot to the summit, and pavement lights that illuminate the Brontosaurus at night.

From here you can glimpse the Badlands and the Black Hills, but most visitors just want to look at the dinosaurs.

A time capsule with the names of everyone who helped to build Dinosaur Park was sealed inside the leg of one of the dinosaurs back in 1938. It was expected to remain there until the concrete eventually wore away and exposed it. Despite the efforts of countless tough-loving kids, that's something that Rapid City is unlikely to let happen for many years to come.