On this day in 1995, the Walt Disney Company announced its plans to build a fourth theme park at Walt Disney World, then called Disney’s Wild Animal Kingdom. The new park would be the largest of all Disney parks at 500 acres. The original lands were to be “the real, the mythical, and the extinct.” To build the park, four million cubic yards of dirt were moved, seeds from 37 countries were planted, and 40,000 mature trees were placed at a cost of about $760 million. [30 years ago in 2025]