Prehistoric Postcards

One of my favorite books is The New Roadside America: The Modern Traveler’s Guide to the Wild and Wonderful World of America’s Tourist Attractions (1986) by Mike Wilkins, Ken Smith and Doug Kirby. The book profiles a variety of roadside attractions circa the mid-1980s  – including Prehistoric Forest in Marblehead.

The side-splitting description makes it clear that the goal of Prehistoric Forest was to entertain. The authors noted, "At the Prehistoric Forest in Marblehead all pretense of history and education are abandoned. Tram riders are issued miniature M-16 rifles and are instructed to "kill the monsters." A prerecorded tour guide panics repeatedly and screams, "To the left! To the right! Shoot! Shoot!!!" whenever one of the feebly nodding dinosaurs comes into view. The forest echoes with the chatter of toy M-16 fire spraying in all directions. The tram driver remains unaffected by the mayhem, smoking cigarettes and sipping coffee as the tram slowly chugs along.”

That’s why it was so strange for me to discover a nice series of postcards issued by the owners of Prehistoric Forest in Marblehead that seemed, well, downright educational.

Here they are. The mail panel side of each postcard included a nice description of each “monster” and what it ate.

Ankylosaurus

Anticamelis

Corythysauris

Diatryma

Dimetrodon

Ornithalestes

Stegosaurus

The owners of Prehistoric Forest were probably hoping that its visitors would collect the whole set of postcards. (There might be more than those shown here, these dinos were “poached” from Ebay over the last few years.)

I’m not sure if we had any of these postcards, but I do remember coming home from Prehistoric Forest with little plastic dinosaurs much like you often found in a cereal box in the 1960s. This blogger has a collection of them and has a nice write-up of how he came to have them.