Cabazon Dinosaurs

Two dinosaurs stand off Interstate 10 in Cabazon, in the San Gorgonio Pass between Mount San Gorgonio and Mount San Jacinto, about 85 miles east of Los Angeles. The longer one is Dinny, an Apatosaurus 150 feet long and 45 feet tall, built of a steel skeleton under sprayed concrete. The taller one is Mr. Rex, a Tyrannosaurus 65 feet high. Anyone may photograph the pair from the parking lot without paying, and most travelers driving east toward Palm Springs see them before they reach the exit.

Inside Dinny, up Mr. Rex

Dinny’s belly holds a gift shop that sells dinosaur toys, jewelry, books, stuffed animals and Cabazon Dinosaur t-shirts. A second store of the same kind is in the museum building. Tickets are sold only at the door, $15 for adults, and they admit visitors to the grounds behind the two giants, which Visit California calls Mr. Rex’s Dinosaur Adventure. A path runs past the smaller figures. The park and Palm Springs Life put their number at more than 100, and Visit California counts more than 70. Most stand still, and a few move a little. Visit California notes that one fact along the path is that a T. rex could likely run only 25 miles an hour.

Mr. Rex is entered near the tail. Three flights of stairs lead to a small chamber in the head, where visitors look out through fenced-in teeth over the highway, the desert and the San Jacinto Mountains. Children dig in the Dino Dig, a sand pit; a rock with a dinosaur’s name on it can be turned in at the gift store for a prize. Bags of real gemstones and fossils, sold in the store, are run through a panning sluice. Pets must be leashed and carried. The park is open every day of the year except Christmas.

Bell’s family sold the property in the mid-1990s. The SPACES archive, which documents artist-built environments, records that Dinny’s interior was converted into a gift shop and museum dedicated to Young Earth Creationism. Visit California says new owners added the outdoor museum in the early 2000s. In 2023 the owner was Denise Kanter.

Santa Rex and a gray suit

Dinny and Mr. Rex are repainted for Valentine’s Day, Easter and the holiday season, when Mr. Rex becomes Santa Rex. On weekend evenings in the holiday season the park holds Dinosaur Nights in Lights: the grounds are strung with twinkle lights and Santa Claus meets visitors in the gift shop.

The dinosaurs appeared in the 1985 film Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, and the park’s own page adds The Wizard. In the film, Pee-wee and his friend Simone, played by Diane Salinger, sit in Mr. Rex’s mouth and watch the sun come up. Simone’s boyfriend Andy, played by Jon Harris, finds them there and chases Pee-wee through the park with an oversized dinosaur bone. Pee-wee gets away by jumping onto a moving train. Paul Reubens died in 2023, and that summer the owners dressed Mr. Rex in Pee-wee’s gray suit and red bow tie, with a heart and Pee-wee’s name painted on the chest. The costume stayed up until Oct. 30. Kanter told the Palm Springs Desert Sun that she had hesitated: “I was thinking, ‘Well, what do we do? Do we (do) something or don’t do something?’ Then I felt with requests coming from customers and interest on behalf of news organizations, we must do something.” Of the visitors, she said, “They know the movie, the dinosaurs, and they’ll comment, ‘We love Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.’”

Sand bears and freeway steel

The dinosaurs were built by Claude Bell, born in 1897. As a boy in Atlantic City he was 11 or 12 when a physician sent him to the beach for the summer to recover from surgery. He spent the time building sand sculptures of teddy bears. When he heard clinking behind him, he turned and found people tossing coins onto the jacket he had left on the sand, and the next day he brought a bedspread. His father was a glass blower on the boardwalk. “It wasn’t long before I was making more money than my old man,” Bell said. In 1906 an uncle took him by trolley to see Lucy, a building in the shape of an elephant, and Bell later named her as the source of his idea for the dinosaurs.

At 33, in 1929, Bell went on the road as an artist at fairs. He settled in California in 1940, worked at the Long Beach Pike, and then went to work for Walter Knott. He built statues for Ghost Town at Knott’s Berry Farm, among them a prospector and a mule and a 9-foot replica of “The Minuteman,” and he ran the Knott’s portrait-drawing studio for 35 years. In 1946 he paid $5,000 for 82 acres in Cabazon to build a home for his first wife, who had arthritis. She died, and in 1951 he married Anna Marie, also an artist. Bell built a truck stop on the land, the Wheel Inn, which Visit California says operated from the late 1950s until 2013. The hilly lot cost him nothing to level: the state hauled the incline away for gravel to build an overpass on the new freeway.

According to Bell, the Los Angeles Times in 1986, SPACES and Visit California, work on Dinny began in 1964. The Times obituary places the start in the late 1960s. SPACES says Dinny was meant to draw diners to the Wheel Inn. The obituary says Bell first pictured restaurants and gift shops inside his figures, then came to think of them as “pets” whose backs children could walk or slide down. The materials came from the freeway. A flash flood had buried steel and cement, state engineering practice barred their reuse, and Bell got them in exchange for clearing them off state property. Dinny’s frame is rebar from freeway bridges and heavy girders from a defunct drive-in theater in Banning, welded and cross-braced in thousands of places and covered with 1,200 bags of cement. Since no one knows what color dinosaurs were, Bell chose a green-brown mix. He made the skin texture, something like an elephant’s, by running his gloved hands down the wet cement. He had no training as an engineer, and his only formal art training was a few night courses in figure drawing.

Bell told the Times in 1986 that Dinny took 11 years and $250,000. His obituary gives more than $250,000 and two decades. Palm Springs Life gives 11 years and $200,000, with the opening in 1975, when Bell was 78. Visitors entered through a doorway in the tail and climbed a stairway that had once stood in a Banning hotel to an 18-by-56-foot room, with an apartment high in the back above it. Bell had considered a cocktail lounge or a steakhouse for about 80 people, then dropped the idea so passers-by could walk through. “It’s too small for a restaurant,” said his daughter Ida Rowing, who managed the museum and gift shop placed there instead. In September 1975 Palm Springs Life described “a spry and somewhat unassuming septuagenarian named Claude Bell” behind the first counter, ready to point to a painting of a Tyrannosaurus on the wall as his next project.

A mayor, a blizzard and a turtle

The Times called what grew up around Dinny dinosaur lore. In the early 1970s the mayor of Cabazon is said to have thought Dinny an eyesore and pressed Bell to get an outside engineering opinion on its safety. The dinosaur passed the inspection, and the mayor was recalled. “We threw him out,” Bell said. “That’s the only one who said the dinosaur was in the way. The others were all for it.”

In January 1974 a blizzard closed the pass and stranded hundreds of motorists. A local newspaper reported that 150 people bedded down inside Dinny. Bell put the number at more like 25. “I got a lot of thanks,” he said. “We sat around talking there until pretty late.” That same year Payne Air Conditioning ran a national advertising campaign claiming to be the only company that had ever designed air conditioning for a dinosaur. The generator had to sit beside Dinny’s left rear leg, and Bell hid it under a 15-foot prehistoric turtle.

By 1986 the 1,400 people of Cabazon knew Bell as the “dinosaur man.” Dinny faced Palm Springs and frowned at motorists by day, and at night its red eyes glowed. Admission inside was 50 cents for adults and a quarter for children over 10, and a sign said the money would go toward building the rest of the garden. Inside were murals by Bell and his wife, one of three prehistoric men spearing a bear and one of a flying reptile. Bell’s busts of Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, Peking and Java Man stood there too, along with his collections of pottery, Indian jewelry, guns, arrowheads, foreign money and rare stones. “When I see something I like, I buy it,” Bell said. The stock ran from small rubber dinosaurs to $55 custom-made skunk-pelt caps. Ida Rowing said more than 200 people paid on a good day. Her husband, Denny Rowing, sat in a Naugahyde restaurant booth behind the counter. “You know what really hurts,” he said. “It’s when people come up those stairs, see that it costs 50 cents and turn around and walk away. They don’t think this man’s dream is worth 50 cents.”

Rex, and the mammoth that waited

Rex began rising in 1981. In January 1986 Bell, then 89, retired from the portrait studio to finish what he called his dinosaur garden. “The second one, there was nothing to it,” he said, though it cost more than Dinny. He was weighing a date-shake stand for the base. He had also built a channel into the tail that could be lined with Fiberglas as a slide, but he worried it might be too steep. A narrow winding staircase would climb to the mouth, 55 feet up, with room for one adult or two children. “It’s a thrill to get up there and look down and see your friends,” Bell said. “You can’t stick your head out but you can wave.” SPACES and Visit California date Rex’s completion to 1986. Palm Springs Life says the early 1980s.

Bell planned smaller figures 12 to 15 feet tall for children to play on, and next a woolly mammoth; he had never lost his liking for elephants. “You have to believe him because he’s always done what he said he’d do,” Anna Marie Bell said. He died of pneumonia in an Anaheim hospital in September 1988, at 91. “The dinosaurs aren’t dead and they never will be,” said his daughter Wendy Murphy of Costa Mesa. “He wanted to build a monument that would withstand the sands of time, and he has done that.” His obituary listed a giant mastodon and a saber-toothed tiger on his drawing board. Palm Springs Life recorded the plans as a woolly mammoth and a saber-toothed tiger, and says neither was ever built.