Long before this summer's Jurassic World, Arkansas was the place to see a dinosaur theme park.
The now-closed Dinosaur World just outside Eureka Springs was a 65-acre park, home to 100 life-size cement sculptures of dinosaurs, cavemen and prehistoric bugs.
It became known as actor John Agar's Land of Kong with the addition of "the biggest monkey on earth," a 42-foot-high gorilla, in the mid-1980s, according to RoadsideAmerica.com. The park's other attractions included a giant spider. Agar battled an even bigger arachnid in the movie Tarantula (1955).
A glimpse of the park remains in the movie Elizabethtown (2005), with Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst, filmed in and around Eureka Springs. The movie poster is a collage of images and includes the park's bright green, grasshopper-looking Tyrannosaurus.
Also come-and-gone from Eureka Springs: the Museum of Earth History, which mingled dinosaurs and Bible stories.
Style on 07/19/2015