'Pre-Cambrian Park' Fails to Meet Expected Visitor Numbers

In a bitter blow to investors and a previously enthusiastic board of directors, 'Pre-Cambrian Park', a Florida-based theme park featuring flora and fauna brought back from pre-Cambrian fossilized DNA, has failed to draw even one-tenth the number of visitors its founders hoped for in their first year.

Aiming to capitalize on the success of the series of blockbuster 'Jurassic Park' books and films, and also on recent advances in cell engineering technology that make Jurassic Park's former fiction a possibility today, Mark Ryder and Pete MacElwain, Pre-Cambrian Park's founding duo, opened their sprawling three-thousand acre site in August of last year.

"We had such high hopes," MacElwain confided to The Daily Scoffer. "But, for some reason, folks just don't seem that interested. We need to go back to the drawing board."

Critics of the park, however, say that the reasons for the team's failure are easy to understand. Rachel Bloom, spokeswoman for 'People for the Ethical Treatment of Scrubgrass', explained, "Basically, Ryder and MacElwain have just planted a lot of ferns and palm trees in the middle of Florida. They also have some horseshoe crabs in a small pond near the parking lot. Sure, all of these species are technically genetic relics from the Pre-Cambrian era, but the founders seem to have failed to realize that those species are abundantly common today, too. Maybe if they'd resurrected some giant ground sloths or gargantuan leviathans of the deep they'd have had a bigger draw, but..."

Ryder and MacElwain, while dismissing Bloom's criticisms as "mammothwash", do concede that their pricing strategy may have to be re-evaluated.

"It's come to our attention," Ryder said, with more than a touch of sarcasm, "that $89.95 for one day's worth of unlimited fern- and horseshoe crab-viewing may be more than we can expect of the average Pleistocene-headed consumer."