If you hear thunderous roars, guttural growls, and high-pitched shrieks coming from a patch of woods in Fayetteville, don’t be alarmed — it’s just the dinosaurs.
At Sweet Valley Ranch — a working farm with more than 350 animals — dozens of prehistoric creatures roam through a primitive forest known as Dinosaur World, where giant reptiles move, breathe, screech, blink, and, if you’re not careful, spit venom at you.
“It depends on what kind of mood he’s in,” says Fred Surgeon, owner of Dinosaur World, of the park’s fearsomely lifelike Dilophosaurus, an approximately eight-foot-tall, 17-foot-long dinosaur that spits venom at its prey, just like in the movie Jurassic Park. (It’s really only water, of course — and just for the record, the real creature didn’t spit anything when he roamed the earth about 186 million years ago.)
Anita & Fred Surgeon photograph by Andrew Craft
The mercurial Dilophosaurus is one of nearly 70 prehistoric animals found at Dinosaur World, a quarter-mile paved trail at Sweet Valley Ranch, and their ranks continue to grow.
Dinosaur World opens June 1 for its fourth summer as a tourist attraction. Surgeon — an avid entrepreneur who owns more than 10 businesses — and his wife, Anita, bought their 300-acre property in 2016 and began filling it with animals. They started simply, with a few horses, goats, and ducks, but before long, their menagerie expanded to include more exotic critters, like camels, llamas, cranes, iguanas, pythons, a zebra, and much more.
Sweet Valley Ranch officially opened to the public in 2018. In 2021, Surgeon decided that his attraction needed, ahem, a Jurassic spark. “I was a big Jurassic Park fan, so I started thinking about dinosaurs, and I found a place where I could buy all these different kinds of life-size animatronic dinosaurs,” he says. “We put them along a trail in a natural habitat, and when people walk by and get close to them, they move and make sounds — they’re very realistic.”
Many of the dinos at Sweet Valley Ranch — like the Dilophosaurus — help visitors imagine what Earth was like millions of years ago. photograph by Andrew Craft
The names of the dinosaurs on display are fun to try to pronounce: Tyrannosaurus. Allosaurus. Ankylosaurus. Brachiosaurus. Stegosaurus. The Pterodactyl is pretty pterrific, too. “We also have one that looks like a huge alligator,” Surgeon says, referring to the approximately 23-foot-long Deinosuchus, whose name means “terrible crocodile.”
In addition to the dinosaurs, the attraction includes a 2,000-square-foot fossil museum and an Ice Age Cave that features a 15-foot-tall woolly mammoth, a dodo bird, and falling snow, among other sights.
This year, Surgeon is also adding a “Land of Enchantment” that includes some new dinosaurs, as well as gigantic animatronic spiders and insects. “We’re trying to add something new to the attraction every year,” he says.
Indeed, that’s the sort of approach that will keep Dinosaur World from becoming extinct.
Sweet Valley Ranch
2990 Sunnyside School Road
Fayetteville, NC 28312
(844) 622-3276
sweetvalleyranchnc.com
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