The Cabazon Dinosaurs

Claude Bell worked for Knott's Berry Farm, where he built theme park sculptures for a living. In nineteen sixty-four, he started building something for himself: a concrete Apatosaurus beside the Interstate Ten near Cabazon, at the western edge of the Mojave Desert. He worked on it for years. Then he started a T-Rex.

The larger dinosaur, the Apatosaurus named Dinny, was big enough to put a gift shop inside its belly. Bell worked on the two sculptures for more than twenty years. He died in nineteen eighty-eight while still adding to the T-Rex.

In nineteen eighty-five, Tim Burton filmed the scene in Pee-wee's Big Adventure where Pee-wee Herman dances on the dinosaur here at this location, giving the attraction its single most famous cultural moment. The dinosaurs were roadside folk art: idiosyncratic, obsessive, built by one person with a vision and no institutional support.

By two thousand five, the property's owners had turned it into a creationist attraction.

The new owners installed exhibits inside the dinosaurs arguing that humans and dinosaurs coexisted, that carbon dating is an unreliable method for measuring geological time, and that the fossil record is consistent with a six-thousand-year-old Earth. The gift shop sells young-Earth creationism literature alongside dinosaur toys.

This is the same object: Claude Bell's personal art project, a Tim Burton film location, and an anti-evolution museum. You do not get to pick which version is the real one. California contains all three simultaneously, along the same stretch of highway, in the same concrete shell.