Extinct Attractions – TriceraTop Spin
Welcome to Extinct Attractions. This week, I went down memory lane with an attraction that you could be Dory and still remember since it closed so recently.
Yesterday, Epcot International Flower & Garden Festival began its 2025 iteration. Debuting in 1994, the festival helps bring Epcot to life with some beautiful topiaries and plenty of kiosks at which to eat and drink. Yes, the festivals are practically in Epcot all year long at this point, but as someone who only gets to visit the park every few years, I love strolling around the booths and trying food and drinks that I can’t find every day. At the last D23 fan event, I even purchased a cookbook with different recipes from festivals at both Disneyland Resort and Walt Disney World Resort.
Via Tampa Bay Times
The festival itself has been around longer than Disney’s Animal Kingdom has been open, with the park’s 1998 opening making it the fourth Disney theme park in the Orlando area. Once it opened, it had a similar issue to the previous Walt Disney World expansion of Disney-MGM Studios in that there simply wasn’t enough in it to justify spending an entire day in the park. To help remedy that, Disney immediately started looking for ways to elongate the experience, especially for families. Children love dinosaurs, so one of the first thoughts was to build Chester and Hester’s Dino-Rama, ingeniously designed as a play on the experience of DINOSAUR, right next door.
The legend goes that Chester and Hester noticed all of the excavation going on in the area that they decided to build their own knock-off version as a kind of tourist trap. As the centerpiece to their experience, they built Primeval Whirl, a spinning wild mouse coaster that took riders “back in time" just as the nearby attraction DINOSAUR did. But the entrepreneurs needed a bit more to help complete their carnival feel, so they added some games known as the Fossil Fun Games as well as TriceraTop Spin. It’s important to note that while there were multiple triceratops that spun, the title was singular, something that always tripped me up.
Another interesting note on the attraction is that it actually opened before the rest of the Dino-Rama, calling the park home on November 1, 2001, about four months before the rest of the area was ready to go. Usually, you see the land opening with attractions unfinished, so it was fascinating that it worked the other way here.
TriceraTop Spin was pretty much exactly what you’d expect - a Dumbo-style spinner geared at being something to do for younger guests at the park. Many of the attractions at Animal Kingdom have a bit of a height requirement, so the spin was a perfect fit to help families feel like they were able to make the most of their experience. I actually found myself riding it quite often because it almost never had more than a five-minute wait, so it was perfect for those times when I was just looking to get on something.
The writing was on the wall when Primeval Whirl never returned from the pandemic, though TriceraTop Spin and Fossil Fun Games both managed to hang on all the way until January 12, 2025, a pretty amazing run with the headliner attraction of the mini-area already closed. Last week, Disney officially completed demolition of TriceraTop Spin as we get closer and closer to the debut of Tropical Americas with its Indiana Jones and Encanto-themed attractions. I liked Dinoland USA, but it was in desperate need of a refresh, so I’m excited to see what comes of the space.
Via Instagram
As always, don’t forget to check out my interactive maps of the Disney Parks throughout the years where you can watch or learn more about all the attractions from every Disney park around the world.
Thanks for reading and have a magical day!