Corydon Dinosaurs

The Corydon Dinosaurs are the work of a local creator who built large dinosaur figures and placed them where highway travelers would see them, turning a stretch of rural roadside into an impromptu prehistoric scene. Set against the backdrop of farm fields and open sky, the sculptures have a wonderfully incongruous quality that draws people to stop and take a look.

Unlike a formal attraction, this is a homegrown piece of roadside folk art, the kind of thing an inventive person builds for the pleasure of surprising strangers. That spirit is part of its charm, and the dinosaurs have become a favorite photo stop for families and a well-known landmark for anyone who regularly drives this corner of southern Iowa.

The Corydon Dinosaurs join a rich Iowa tradition of oversized roadside attractions, from giant statues of animals to unusual homemade wonders, built to lure travelers off the highway in the age of the family car. Part of the joy of a drive across the state is spotting these creations one after another, each a small monument to local imagination.

These attractions were rarely built for profit or prestige. More often they sprang from one person's enthusiasm or a small town's desire to be remembered by passersby. Over time they have become genuine landmarks, treasured precisely because they are so unexpected, and the dinosaurs are a fine example of the type.

The town of Corydon is the seat of Wayne County, a small southern Iowa community with a historic courthouse square. Corydon holds a place in outlaw history as the site of a daylight bank robbery attributed to the Jesse James gang in the 1870s, a story still told at the local heritage museum on the square.

The surrounding county is a landscape of rolling hills, pasture, and timbered creek valleys near the Missouri border, a quiet region of family farms and small towns. Travelers who stop for the dinosaurs often find the historic square and the slow back roads of the area a pleasant reward in their own right.

South-central Iowa is the ancestral homeland of the Ioway, for whom the state is named, along with the Sauk and Meskwaki peoples who lived and traveled across these prairies and river valleys. Their descendants remain part of Iowa today, with the Meskwaki owning their Settlement to the northeast near Tama.

Long before roadside dinosaurs or courthouse squares, the tallgrass prairie and timbered valleys here supported Native peoples and vast herds of game. The settlers who plowed this land in the nineteenth century built the towns and farms that define it now, but the deeper human story of the region reaches back thousands of years.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.