Fans of “Jurassic Park” will finally be able to have a place to spend a day like famous paleontologist Alan Grant — Sam Neill’s character in the film — as they walk through a park full of dinosaurs and try to make it out alive. And the best, about an hour from the south of the city of Rio de Janeiro.
This is the new attraction in the municipality of Miguel Pereira (125 km from the capital), Terra dos Dinos, which promises to be the largest dinosaur park in the world. The opening is scheduled for the second half of this year.
In a reforested area of 1.4 million square meters (or 140 hectares) with typical Atlantic forest vegetation, the park should host trails, activities such as zip-line and tree climbing and other themed attractions, such as a ghost grotto and the legend of how a “meteorite fell on the spot” and so revealed the creatures buried there.
The protagonists of the themed place will be the approximately 40 animated models of dinosaurs — called animatronics — of different species distributed throughout the park, in addition to mascots dressed as dinosaurs running along the trails to create an atmosphere of “Jurassic jungle”.
The park occupies an area of an old farm in the region known as Vale do Café, in the Serra Fluminense, whose previous use was as an open-air dump. In recent years, there was a project for reforestation and recovery of the forest at the site, and the dump was closed.
According to Márcio Clare, real estate entrepreneur and main investor in the project, the proposal of Parque dos Dinos is to get away from the merely exhibition sites that already exist in the country. “We don’t want those robots or replicas standing in a row, as if we were going to see them in a museum. The idea was to create a different experience, that’s why the trails, the animated models, the ghost grotto [detalhes da atração serão revelados próximo à data de inauguração]”, said.
The idea of creating a park in Miguel Pereira came from the city hall itself, which was looking for an attraction similar to the dinosaur parks in Gramado and Canela, in the south of the country.
According to Clare, who is a fan of theme parks, nothing that exists from the old farm will be destroyed, on the contrary. “We are going to build everything on top of the existing ruins, and only put the replicas and animated robots of the dinosaurs in places where there is nothing. We are not going to take a single tree, it is in the contract with the city hall”, she explained.
In the contract signed between the Municipality of Miguel Pereira and the creators of the park, no tree can be removed from the space as it is a place where there has been a reforestation process in recent years. In addition, the farm itself, as it is an old area, has a series of restrictions and needs to maintain part of the original structure.
Among the dinosaur species that will have replicas in the park is the tyrannosaurus rexfamous carnivore protagonist of “Jurassic Park” (although the theropod, the name given to the carnivorous dinosaurs of the group, lived 66 million years ago, in the Cretaceous).
Other animals include representatives of the Mesozoic fauna of the region that is now South America, such as the Argentinosaurus, the largest sauropod ever discovered for the continent at 30 meters in length, and the Brazilian dino. Gnathovorax cabrerairepresentative of the most ancient terrifying reptiles that inhabited the Earth.
Pterosaurs, the flying reptiles that colonized the skies from the late Triassic to the late Cretaceous, will also play a role in space. The curatorship of the animals, by the way, had the scientific advice of the director of the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, paleontologist Alexander Kellner.
Because of this, the idea is also to bring information about the different species and the moments in which they lived on Earth.
Clare did not reveal how much has already been invested in the project, only that it was a good investment. According to her, the project will also include technological attractions, such as the use of augmented reality and the metaverse.
The bet on dinosaurs, however, must pay off. The expectation of the businessmen — in addition to Clare, Sávio Neves, president of the Corcovado Train — is to receive up to one million visitors a year.
“Initially, we thought of having an audience of 300 to 400 thousand people, but we are confident because we saw the interest aroused in the public, and we haven’t even opened yet. dinosaur script that never gets old,” laughs Clare.
