"I Thought I Saw a Dinosaur" reads the welcome sign to Moscow, Texas, an unincorporated hamlet ninety miles north of Houston. There isn't much more to this place. Indeed, the number of dinosaurs residing in Moscow rivals the town's population, all thanks to a retired carpenter named Donald Bean.

Bean came up with the idea for the theme park in the late 1950s when he happened upon a similar roadside attraction in Oregon. "Soon as I saw that, I said 'That's what I want to do!' So I did it." It took Bean twenty years of planning and saving before he was finally ready to build his own park, which opened in 1981. The park cost the Beans nearly $100,000 to build, and when Dinosaur Gardens opened it was met with just about the level of enthusiasm one might anticipate for a dinosaur theme park in the heart of Moscow, Texas. The masses did not seem to share Bean's fervor for creatures prehistoric. There were no lines at the ticket office. "It kind of disappointed me," Bean says, wiping a spider web from Struthiomimus's mouth. "I don't know how many people I thought would come, but I thought there'd be quite a few."

There is a downside to this slow business, to be sure. Bean's wife of forty-three years had to come out of retirement and take a job at a nearby convenience store in order to help support her husband's dinosaur habit. But there's an upside, too. With visitors scarce, Donald Bean can spend as much time as he wants alone in his theme park pondering his dinosaurs.

Producer: David Isay / Supervising engineer: Caryl Wheeler / Funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the New York State Council on the Arts and the Corporation. Photograph by Harvey Wang.

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		intro
		transcript

		Holding On, a book with an oral history based on this documentary
		Jack Hitt's audio essay on the evolution of dinosaur exhibits, from This American Life (Act 2).
		"Dinosaur-oriented" Web sites from UC Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology.

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