Dubai - Visitors to the City of Arabia stand at the Arabian Travel Market are coming face to face with a relative of the Tarbosaurus, a dinosaur that lived 74 million years ago.
The Tarbosaurus is prowling the City of Arabia stand at Dubai International Exhibition Centre throughout this year's Arabian Travel Market exhibition, which runs from May 3 to 6.
Occupying a site measuring 20 million square feet at Dubailand, City of Arabia will feature The Mall of Arabia, predicted to be the world's largest shopping mall, and a breathtaking dinosaur theme park, The Restless Planet, developed in collaboration with the Natural History Museum of London.
Scheduled to open in 2008, the park will set a new standard for imaginative theme parks, with three rides, including a dramatic 'dark ride', which will use sound and images to recreate a prehistoric world of breathtaking clarity.
More than 100 lifelike, actual size 'animatronic' dinosaurs will thrill visitors to the park. And a scaled down version of one of them, a 7m-long Tarbosaurus, is already giving ATM visitors a taste of things to come at the City of Arabia stand in Hall 2/3 of Dubai International Exhibition Centre.
Adam Sanders, marketing and sales manager at London's Natural History Museum, said: "This model has been entirely manufactured and assembled by Kokoro Animatronics in Japan. It costs around $474,000 and is three quarters the size of an adult Tarbosaurus."
London's Natural History Museum is collaborating in the development of the 0.5 million square foot, fully air-conditioned The Restless Planet theme park, which will also feature a scientific exhibition with the fossil remains of real dinosaurs.
The mobile Tarbosaurus on show at this week's ATM in Dubai is seven metre long, four metre high, and it weighs 1.8 tonnes. It has a stainless steel frame covered with specially handcrafted foam.
A patented silicon layer covers the foam that resembles indented skin, which is daubed with shades of paint for a 'real life' effect. The frame is packed with a host of cylinders to facilitate movement - this is called the Servo System and helps the animal curl its lip, move its eyes, swing its head from side to side and even lunge forward.
Around 34 different species of dinosaurs, designed with scientific accuracy, will be programmed to move, roar, and roam around the theme park. Some will even be able to track passengers with their eyes. Tarbosaurus was a carnivorous dinosaur from the Gobi Desert of southern Mongolia. Like its close North American relative, Tyrannosaurus or T-Rex, it was one of the last surviving dinosaurs and belonged to the Efremovi species. Valued at Dh7.2 billion, City of Arabia will be a flagship development at Dubailand and will also include residential and office tower developments, and its own waterway.
© Khaleej Times 2005
