Qualla: Cabazon Dinosaurs

Cabazon Dinosaurs: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Binksternet, CC BY-SA 3.0. Claude Bell ran a diner. The Wheel Inn sat just off the new Interstate 10 in Cabazon, halfway between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, and in the early 1960s Bell watched in slow horror as drivers blew past his exit at seventy miles an hour. He needed something they could not ignore. A billboard would not do. So in 1964, at the age of sixty-eight, he started building a 150-foot-long Brontosaurus in his parking lot. He would work on it on weekends, by himself, mostly with welded steel and shotcrete, for the next eleven years. By the time Dinny was finished in 1975, traffic was stopping at Cabazon whether Bell needed it to or not.

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Image: Binksternet | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cabazon Dinosaurs: One Man, Eleven Years, One Brontosaurus

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Binksternet, CC BY-SA 3.0. Bell was a sculptor by training. He had spent years carving the giant figures at Knott's Berry Farm and had a reasonable idea of what it took to build at heroic scale. Even so, Dinny was extraordinary. The body is a welded steel skeleton wrapped in expanded metal lath and finishe...

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Image: Binksternet | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cabazon Dinosaurs: Then He Built Another One

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Binksternet, CC BY-SA 3.0. Dinny was not enough. In 1981, Bell started on Mr. Rex - a 65-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus rex he intended to install a slide in, exiting through the mouth. He was eighty-five years old. Construction stretched until 1986, and the slide never quite happened, but the second dinosaur did...

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Image: Binksternet | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cabazon Dinosaurs: The Pee-wee Effect

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CityMorgue, CC BY-SA 4.0. Most Americans of a certain age know the dinosaurs from a single scene. In 1985's Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Pee-wee Herman and waitress Simone watch the sunrise together from inside Mr. Rex's open jaws - the scene was recreated on a Warner Brothers soundstage, but the exterior sho...

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Image: CityMorgue | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cabazon Dinosaurs: Changing Hands, Changing Stories

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jllm06, CC0. Bell's family sold the property in the mid-1990s to new owners, who in 2005 reopened the gift shop inside Dinny with a creationist museum theme - young-Earth exhibits, signage suggesting the dinosaurs had walked with humans, and so on. The reinvention drew a strange mix of curiou...

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Image: Jllm06 | CC0

Cabazon Dinosaurs: A Monument to Stubbornness

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CityMorgue, CC BY-SA 4.0. What is striking about Cabazon, once you stand under Dinny, is how little of him is funny up close. The proportions are right. The skin texture is patient, careful work. The teeth are individually shaped. Bell could have done this faster and cheaper. He chose not to. A sculptor n...

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Image: CityMorgue | CC BY-SA 4.0