Cabazon Dinosaurs: Built from Freeway Scraps
Near Palm Springs, California
Those two giant shapes you can see from the freeway are not props or theme park relics. They are the life's work of one man.
Claude Bell spent decades as a sculptor at Knott's Berry Farm before deciding to build something of his own beside his Wheel Inn restaurant near Cabazon. Starting in nineteen sixty-four, he constructed Dinny the dinosaur, a one hundred fifty-foot brontosaurus, almost entirely from salvaged concrete and steel left over from the construction of Interstate Ten itself. It took eleven years and three hundred thousand dollars. Then he started a sixty-five-foot tyrannosaurus rex in nineteen eighty-one, and Bell died in nineteen eighty-eight with other planned sculptures still unfinished.
Today both dinosaurs stand as a recognized California roadside landmark, visible to millions of drivers each year. They are exactly what Bell intended: impossible to miss.
