Dinos in Pop Culture - Animal Kingdom: Ticket Booth, Tree of Life, and Misc.

Main Entrance Ticket Booth

During one of our recent trips to Walt Disney World last, we hit up one of the four main parks, Animal Kingdom. Animal Kingdom, as the name suggests, it dominated by animals (shocker!), but they also have a section of the park called "DinoLand U.S.A.". The inclusion of Dinoland U.S.A. means that there are actually A LOT of dinosaurs to be had at the park (non-avian dinosaurs for the pure hearted if you will). I know I didn't capture all of them but I definitely got as many as I could. We are going to go through the park, attraction by attractions starting with the front gates.

The main entrance to the park has a big sign that says Animal Kingdom and a skull of an elephant on it. However to the left and right of that sign are skulls of other animals that are meant to be represented within the park. On the right side is the skull of a Triceratops. 

For comparison, here is a Triceratops from Chicago's Field Museum. One thing I notice immediately are that the horns over the eyes are much bigger on nearly every specimen of Triceratops that I am aware of in real life versus what was presented on the Ticket Booth model.

 And on the left side is the skull of a dragon. Even though they never actually created any of it, the park was supposed to have an element of fantasy animals being the trifecta along with the real animals and the dinosaurs. Coincidentally enough, this element of the park has now coming to fruition with the opening of the Pandora land. And I have to include dragons under the dinosaurs of Disney because my love of dragons as possibly being influenced by dinosaurs.

Tree of Life

At the center of the park is what is known as the Tree of Life. This is a concrete tree with "carvings" of animals located all over it. If you look closely though you may find a dinosaur or two included with them. Here I found an Ankylosaurus. I feel like there was more but I couldn't find them at the time. Maybe next trip?

Miscellaneous

 And to top it off, I found these images which are remarkable similar to trace fossils that I worked on for my PhD research termed "graphoglyptids". 

Cosmorhaphe from the Palaeocene-Lower Eocene of Poland.

Spirorhaphe from the Late Cretaceous of Tanzania.

For the next entry, we will delve into Dinoland U.S.A. itself.

You can find all of my Dinos of Disney compiled on my website at Dinojim.com.