It might be a poor choice since no one "gets it," but it's a brilliant backstory.
Once upon a time, there was a rural, wooded area with nothing in it but a few fishing cabins, a small restaurant, and a gas station where you could also buy bread and milk and that sort of thing. A paleontologist happened, one year, to be there fishing, and stumbled across dinosaur bones. Immediately, he called all his paleontologist buddies and arranged grants, and they started buying up all the land in the area to set up a Very Serious Research Facility. The facility they built is called the Dino Institute, and they've also set up a sort of inside/outside museum (Dino Institute Queue and Cretaceous Trail), because museums are the only proper way to study dinosaurs. They're responsible for the many museum-quality skeletons around Dinoland (and yes, they are--that T-Rex? That's Sue, the most complete T-Rex ever found; the original is in the Field Museum in Chicago and the only other copy tours the country and you'd pay $30+ just to see that one skeleton).
As anyone who's worked in academia knows, scientists need underlings, so they've brought in a bevy of grad students to do all the grunt work (Grant Seeker, the one who sends you back in time on the Dinosaur ride, is one of them). Being students, they live in a dorm above the former fishing cabin (Restaurantosaurus), using the cabin as their cafeteria and lounge. (The lounge area is particularly a work of art, as is the student loft area, which is in the room where the fixings bar is.) Being students, they're also into practical jokes--they're the ones who spray-painted "osaurus" after "RESTAURANT" and shot the suction-cup arrows onto the water tower and put lawn chairs on the roof.
However. Remember I said there was a gas station? And that the scientists were trying to buy up all the land? Well, the owners of that gas station (that would be Chester and Hester) (1) don't think much of stuffy scientists and (2) in the great tradition of folks who find themselves next to the site of a great discovery, want to cash in. So they refused to sell their land to the scientists, and they converted their gas station into a gift shop and their parking lot into a carnival with rides and games, to make some money off the tourists who come to see the museum. They also think dinosaurs should be fun rather than dry and boring the way they're presented on the Cretaceous Trail, which explains all the wackiness--the Cementosaurus, the recyclables-covered T-Rex right by the gas station (which is a send-up of Sue, of course), the silliness of the rides and games, etc.
By the way, unlike at a real carnival, the games at Disney aren't rigged.
