Dinosaurs arrive in St Lawrence – pictures and video

• New tourist attraction features animatronic dinosaurs
• Tamba Park is based on site of former Lion Park in St Lawrence
• Entrepreneur Jonathan Ruff has developed the park
• Proceeds from the park to go to charity

IT’S not quite Jurassic Park – but dinosaurs are roaming a new tourist attraction in St Lawrence.

Tamba Park, which features animatronic dinosaurs up to six metres tall, has opened on the site of the former Lion Park, which closed in 2013.

The new tourist attraction, which also includes mini boats that can be sailed across a pond, model remote-control boats, a children’s adventure park and a fish-feeding area, has been developed by local entrepreneur Jonathan Ruff.

The 34-year-old, who ran a string of online retail businesses, is also behind Ruff’s Kitchens, which feed 5,000 vulnerable children in Zimbabwe every day.

And all proceeds from Tamba Park, which Mr Ruff bought from home-shopping firm Flying Brands, will go towards supporting the charity and creating new outlets.

Mr Ruff, who spent £600,000 developing Tamba Park, said: ‘The park was a mess that had been left to ruin, but we’re hoping people will come to have a look.

‘More importantly, we hope they will keep coming back.’

The park, which has five full-time employees, also contains a café – described by Mr Ruff as a ‘pimped-out burger van’ – that serves gourmet jacket potatoes, hot dogs and ice cream.

And with 16 large dinosaurs which move and make noises, he hopes children will get a thrill from the ‘Dino Trail’.

‘The Spinosaurus is evil – it scares me,’ he said.

Mr Ruff added: ‘The factory the dinosaurs come from do a lot of work for Hollywood.

‘We’ve got a T-rex and raptors. They make a good noise.

‘But we’re not going to stop with the park. We’re going to look at other stuff in the entertainment industry.

‘I think there’s a gap for ten- to 16-year-olds in that there’s not much for them to do here.

‘My internet days are over – I’ve done it so much now and have been doing that since I was 16.

‘I want to do something different and I want to use the skills I have developed in building online businesses and working with property.’

• By the time he turned 21, he was one of the UK’s top independent eBay retailers, specialising in mobile phone accessories.
• In 2005, he launched MemoryBits, later Zoombits, from his bedroom in Lancashire and watched it grow into one of the biggest online accessory supermarkets in the UK. The company ceased trading in 2010 after being placed into liquidation.
• In 2011 he launched LED Hut which soon grew from being a small five-person start-up to taking a leading share in the online LED market in the UK.
• He also runs property development company JAJ Properties Limited
• A year after his first child, William, was born, he moved with his wife Heny from England to Jersey. Speaking to the JEP in 2009, he said: ‘I didn’t come to Jersey for the tax reasons – people always ask me that. I came here because I’d had enough of the UK. I wanted a place to bring up my children.

• Dinosaurs were reptiles that lived on Earth from about 230 million years ago to about 65 million years ago.
• Dinosaurs lived during a period of Earth’s history called the Mesozoic (“middle life”) Era. They lived during all three periods of this era: the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous.
• Meat-eating dinosaurs are known as theropods, which means “beast-footed,” because they had sharp, hooked claws on their toes. In contrast, plant-eating dinosaurs tended to have blunt hooves or toenails.
• No one knows exactly how long a dinosaur’s lifespan was. Some scientists speculate some dinosaurs lived for as long as 200 years.
• Dinosaur skulls had large holes or “windows” that made their skulls lighter. Some of the largest skulls were as long as a car.
• Scientists estimate that there were over 1,000 different species of non-avian dinosaurs and over 500 distinct genera. They speculate there are many still undiscovered dinosaurs and that there may be as many as 1,850 genera.
• Dinosaurs lived on all the continents, including Antarctica.
• Some dinosaurs’ tails were over 45 feet long. Most dinosaurs had long tails that helped them to keep their balance when running.
• The word “dinosaur” was coined by British paleontologist Richard Owen in 1842. It is Greek, meaning “terrible lizard.” Rather than implying that dinosaurs were fearsome, Owen used the term to refer to their majesty and size.
• The first dinosaurs that appeared during the Triassic Period 230 million years ago were small and lightweight. Bigger dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus and Triceratops appeared during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.
• The earliest named dinosaur found so far is the Eoraptor (“dawn stealer”). It was so named because it lived at the dawn of the Dinosaur Age. It was a meat eater about the size of a German shepherd. The first Eoraptor skeleton was discovered in Argentina in 1991. However, another dinosaur has recently been found in Madagascar that dates as being 230 million years old. It has not been named yet.
• The dinosaur with the longest name is Micropachycephalosaurus (“small thick-headed lizard”). Its fossils are usually found in China.
• Steven Spielberg’s 1993 dinosaur movie Jurassic Park was the highest-grossing film worldwide until 1997’s Titanic. It was followed by The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Jurassic Park III (2001), and the recently released Jurassic World.