Image via It's Late
If you've been out to Cabazon or seen "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure," you've probably seen the giant dinosaurs at a place called (naturally) the Worlds Biggest Dinosaurs (warning: the web site is very loud!). Here's Dinny out behind Cabazon's Wheel Inn restaurant sometime back in the 1960s or 1970s (construction on Dinny started in 1964 and took 11 years). The dinos--Dinny and a nearby buddy, Mr. Rex--are made out of steel skeletons covered in spray concrete. They were built by Knotts Berry Farm sculptor Claude K. Bell as advertisements for the Wheel Inn, but Bell had even awesomer plans that never materialized: Mr. Rex's tail was supposed to be a slide and Bell told a newspaper in 1970 that Dinny was going to spit fire. Sadly, the dinos were drafted into Creationism in the 90s, after a development company bought them from Bell's estate for $1.2 million. The bellies of the beasts now hold a young earth museum and creation-promoting gift shop. (The LA Times visited in 2005 and found toy warnings that read "Don't swallow it! The fossil record does not support evolution.") Dinny, an apatosaurus, is 45 feet tall and 150 tons; Mr. Rex (a T. rex, of course) is a lightweight at 100 tons.
· Venturian Dinosaurs [It's Late, via Blogging.la]
· Adam, Eve and T. Rex [LAT]
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