Dinosaur to do Battle in Jersey

  • Tamba Park to enter this year’s Battle of Flowers
  • New tourist attraction’s ‘Jurassic Park’ float to feature 30 ft long model tyrannosaurus
  • Video – interview with the park’s owner
  • Did you know? Check out our dinosaur facts below

BATTLE of Flowers spectators will have something new to get their teeth into this year – a 30 ft long tyrannosaurus rex.

Tamba Park, Jersey’s newest tourist attraction, will be entering a Jurassic Park-inspired float into the parade, complete with the roaring carnivorous dinosaur and a ‘live’ volcano.

Jonathan Ruff, who owns the attraction, which is on the site of the former Lion Park and features a number of animatronic dinosaurs, said that he was inspired to get involved with the annual parade after a chance meeting with this year’s Miss Battle, Chantelle Mundy.

Local entrepreneur Jonathan Ruff

The entrepreneur said that the ‘medium-sized’ T-rex, which weighs more than a ton, will ride in a trailer towed by a Jeep and will be joined by an erupting volcano that is being created by special effects artists.

A team from Secrets Beneath, which has run horror mazes at a variety of locations across the Island and also makes sets for Alton Towers, is working on the float.

Mr Ruff (34), who ran a string of online retail businesses and is also behind Ruff’s Kitchens, a charity which feeds 5,000 vulnerable children in Zimbabwe every day, said: ‘It is true we are doing a float and we are using an old Jeep Wrangler that we have Tamba Park-ed up.

‘There will be some flowers involved too – we’re covering the side in ferns.’

The businessman, who spent more than £600,000 on the park that is now ranked in the top 20 things to do in Jersey according to global travel website TripAdvisor, said Miss Mundy (19) encouraged him to get involved to ‘add something different’ to Battle.

‘I think it will really add to the event,’ Mr Ruff added.

‘We are going to put a “dinosaur on holiday” sign up in the park while he is away.

‘The idea is that it could be a permanent float and do tours and attend different events across the Island.’

Miss Mundy said that she was excited to see something new and added that she thinks that the dinosaurs ‘will appeal to everyone’.

  • 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.

Tamba Park features animatronic dinosaurs

  • 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.
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