NATURAL BRIDGE — These dinosaurs obviously are not real. For one thing, they evolved.
Four years after a fire forced Dinosaur Kingdom to close, the roadside amusement park is emerging from its temporary extinction.
Like the old park, a new one under construction will mix the prehistoric with the historic – dinosaurs and Civil War figures, made from Styrofoam and Fiberglas.
The park’s creator, Mark Cline, explained the process in a workshop cluttered with dinosaur parts, where he is building the likes of Tyrannosaurus Rex, Spinosaurus, Abraham Lincoln, Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and the strange world in which they clash.
Some of the dinosaurs survived a 2012 fire that destroyed Cline‘s Haunted Monster Museum at Natural Bridge and forced the closing of the adjacent Dinosaur Kingdom. Others are being hatched anew for a tourist attraction that Cline promises will be better than the last.
“Building a park like this is like putting together a symphony, ” he said. “I’ve got the horn section over here, I’ve got the strings over here … even a harmonica guy over there. They are all coming together and it’s all going to happen at one time.”
A harmonica in a symphony?
If you had to ask, you probably don’t know Cline and his work.
Sometimes called the P.T. Barnum of the Blue Ridge, Cline can make just about anything – from chickens to politicians – out of foam, Fiberglas and a fertile imagination. He sells the kinds of sculptures that turn heads to amusement parks, restaurants, mini-golf courses, convenience stores and other places up and down the East Coast that want to get noticed.
And now, his dinosaurs are coming back to Rockbridge County.
Cline‘s current project, Dinosaur Kingdom II: Back From Extinction, is expected to open in mid-June on U.S. 11, across the highway from the Natural Bridge Zoo.
The entrance to the park will be through a wrecked train car with a snarling T-Rex perched on the top. After stepping into the car, visitors will learn that other angry dinosaurs have escaped and are stomping through the nearby forest.
From there, visitors will walk through a time tunnel that transports them to an 1864 mining town, where the story begins: A family of paleontologists has come across a hidden valley that is the home of living dinosaurs.
The Union army gets wind of the discovery and commandeers the ravenous reptiles to use as weapons of mass destruction against the South.
In a twist sure to please those still loyal to the Confederacy, the dinosaurs turn against their Yankee captors.
The chaos that ensues will be witnessed by visitors as they follow a trail through the woods. Dinosaurs will be placed in 18 scenes along the way, some of them motorized to make their teeth gnash and their tails lash. Music, growls and shrieks will accompany some bizarre sights: There’s Abraham Lincoln wrestling with a lassoed Pteranodon, which has the pages of his famous speech clutched in its jaws as it tries to fly away.
“We can explain why the Gettysburg address was so short, ” Cline said.
And there’s Stonewall Jackson – armed with a bionic arm – fighting off an albino Spinosaurus. It turns out that Jackson’s death, reportedly by accidental gunfire from his own troops, was a hoax designed to catch the Union troops off guard.
“The Yankees are using the dinosaurs as weapons of mass destruction against the South, ” Cline explains. “And if they have a secret weapon, the South has to have a secret weapon, which would be Stonewall Jackson.
“Other scenes depict a Union soldier using a tree stand to mount a dinosaur with Gatling guns strapped to its neck and a pack of Coelophysis dinosaurs descending into a pit where Northern troops are trapped.
Suspension of disbelief starts at the ticket booth of this park. But there’s still some commentary to be had.
As he walked along a trail that will soon feature skirmishes between giant lizards and men caught up in a war that tore the country apart, Cline remarked: “It’s going to be totally outrageous.”But then again, isn’t war?”
For Cline, the observation was a rare departure into the darkness of war. This is not a scary show, he stressed. He’d rather make people smile.
“There’s the kid inside of everybody that I like to bring out, ” he said.
That much is obvious at least once a year, when Cline pulls off his annual April Fools Day prank. This year, it was an octopus that he floated on Lake Robertson near Lexington. Previous larks included placing flying saucers occupied by aliens landing on a hillside and Foamhenge, a replica of Stonehenge built from Styrofoam that has become a landmark off U.S. 11.
The jokes come so fast that Cline can’t constrain them to one day a year.
When his work was exhibited at the Taubman Museum of Art in 2012, he caused a bit of a stir at a gathering of high-brow patrons when he insisted they all sit on Whoopee cushions in unison.
“Everybody had a chance to know what it was really like to be artsy-fartsy that night, ” he said.
In January, after the Rockbridge County Board of Supervisors approved a rezoning request that allowed Dinosaur Kingdom II to move forward, Cline had his wife, Sherry, hand out Payday candy bars to the supervisors and county staff seated at the dais.
And in last month’s edition of The Rockbridge Advocate, Cline placed an official-looking notice that informed readers of a temporary halt in the construction of Dinosaur Kingdom. Seismographs have detected what appear to be subterranean movements beneath the park, possibly from “some kind of life dating back as far as the Jurassic period,” the advertisement stated.
“The nature of these disturbances must be pinpointed and corrected so sudden sinkholes don’t appear and devour the families who come out to enjoy our park, ” the notice continued. “However, we still expect a mid-June opening.”
By then, it should be obvious to everyone that what happens at Dinosaur Kingdom is based as loosely on fact as Cline‘s work is to fine art.
“I’m not a trained artist, ” Cline said, a common refrain during a two-hour, rapid-fire interview last week that veered into another direction whenever he came across a different creation while wandering through his workplace, the Enchanted Castle Studio.
“I’m more of an entertainer who builds props.”