Reign of the Dinosaurs.  Dinosaurs would reign from the end of the Triassic Period for the next 160 million years, through the Jurassic Period--remember Jurassic Park (1993)?--and even into the Cretaceous Period where some would make an evolutionary right turn enabling them to fly above the treetops, sit on power lines and become the main ingredient in Chicken McNuggets.  If prehistoric man had arrived on the scene a bit earlier, and if he had used a primitive spear to skewer a dinosaur, he would undoubtedly have reported that it tasted like chicken.

Dinosaurs found.  In 1981, paleontologists began digging up fossils of early dinosaurs in the adjacent Petrified Forest National Park.  In 1984 they uncovered the bones of a two-meter-long creature that they nicknamed "Gertie."  Gertie was called a mystery because it shared characteristics of both reptiles and dinosaurs.  Eventually, Gertie was classified as the dinosaur Chindesaurus bryansmalli.

Chindesaurus means "Chinde lizard." It is now said to be the first dinosaur to live in North America.  Gertie would have been a meat eater, and on the smallish side for dinosaurs.  She measured only about 6 ½ feet long, was just over 3 feet tall, and weighed in at 66 pounds.

Concrete brings dinosaurs to life.  The Petrified Forest National Park made casts of Gertie's bones and put them on display at the Rainbow Forest Museum in the southern end of the park.  Dinosaur Park enlarged on the modest display in the neighboring national park.  They made larger-than-life concrete models and placed them around the roads in their park.  For some reason, the more impressive creatures have ended up close enough to Interstate 40 to be highly visible form the road.

T-rex is in the gift shop.  The dinosaurs around the park look much like Gertie and her contemporary, the similar though larger Herrerasaurus found in South America, and the larger still Allosaurus which came much later.  They do not look much like the dinosaurs we known and loved from the movies, such as the Tyrannosaurus rex.  For a one specimen taste of those creatures one must visit the gift shop where a life size, rubber skinned T-rex dominates the shop.