‘Dinosaur experience’ could give Vancouver its own Jurassic Park
Stanley Park could soon have a touch of Jurassic Park thanks to a request from the Vancouver Parks Board for companies to submit ideas to install up to 30 life-sized robot dinosaurs as part of a plan to draw thousands of new visitors.
News of the proposal to bring a “dinosaur experience” to the 400-hectare park in downtown Vancouver caught some off guard yesterday, including members of the board itself.
Parks commissioner Spencer Herbert, a member of the Coalition of Progressive Electors municipal party minority, said he first heard about the idea from the media.
“[That's] why it boggles my mind so much,” he said in an interview, speaking for himself and the other COPE member on the seven-member board.
“It could be a good proposal. It could be a bad one. But I think that when we’re going forward as leaders, we should be talking to the community first,” he said.
The request calls for proposals from “experienced proponents” to install 25 to 30 life-sized animatronic dinosaurs and related educational exhibits near a miniature 1.5-kilometre railway ridden by about 200,000 people each year. The deadline for submissions is Oct. 12.
The project would include a building of about 102 square metres for displaying skeletons, fossils and other dinosaur exhibits.
The parks board is looking for a three-year contract. The Dinosaur Experience is to open in 2008, the document says.
It says the park would charge admission to the site. The board is estimating attendance of between 300,000 and 400,000 in the exhibit’s first year, and will be looking for media and corporate sponsors.
Korina Houghton, vice-chairwoman of the board and a member of the majority Non-Partisan Association party, said the idea came up informally in talks with Dinosaurs Unearthed, a Vancouver-based company that sets up exhibits featuring animatronics, fossils and full-sized skeletons. The company, launched about a year ago, has displays at the Toronto Zoo among other sites.
Sonny Wong, a company principal, said he recalled some general discussion on the idea about three months ago.
Patricia Thomson, executive director of the Stanley Park Ecology Society, which offers programs to highlight the park’s natural qualities, said she understands the appeal of dinosaurs, and the need to draw visitors to the park, but that the emphasis should be on connecting people to actual living things.
“I do have a concern that if [the dinosaur experience] is not handled in a very sensitive way, it could end up being rather theme-parkish,” she said,
The project, she said, “wouldn’t be our first choice, that’s for sure. We understand it’s hard to make a draw of amphibians or flying squirrels that can compete with the cachet of dinosaurs, but that’s a big challenge we still want to push forward on.”
