Ethel Baraona linked this post about two giant dinosaurs structures on a stretch of Palm Springs’s Interstate 10. Two dinosaurs, 150 and 100 ton, called Dinney and Rex have been built from 1960’s to 1981 and are visible from travelers of the desert route from Phoenix to Los Angeles.
“The creation of the Cabazon dinosaurs began in the 1960s by Knott’s Berry Farm sculptor and portrait artist Claude K. Bell (1897–1988) to attract customers to his Wheel Inn Cafe, which opened in 1958. Dinny, the first of the Cabazon dinosaurs, was started in 1964 and created over a span of eleven years. Bell created Dinny out of spare material salvaged from the construction of nearby Interstate 10 at a cost of $300,000. The biomorphic building that was to become Dinny was first erected as steel framework over which an expanded metal grid was formed in the shape of a dinosaur. All of it was then covered with coats of shotcrete (spray concrete). Bell was quoted in 1970 as saying the 45-foot (14 m) high, 150-foot (46 m) long Dinny was “the first dinosaur in history, so far as I know, to be used as a building.” His original vision for Dinny was for the dinosaur’s eyes to glow and mouth to spit fire at night, predicting, “It’ll scare the dickens out of a lot of people driving up over the pass.”
Currently, within Dinney’s belly is located a museum promoting creationism. From wikipedia : “The current ownership has expressed a Young Earth creationist belief that most dinosaurs were created on Earth about 6,000 years ago – the same day as Adam and Eve. In stark contrast to that belief are Bell’s painted frescoes and sculptures inside Dinny, depicting a naturalist and evolutionary viewpoint. Bell’s paintings include representations of Cro-Magnon man (labeled “Cro-Magnon Man 30,000 [years ago]”) and Java Man (labeled “Java Man 400,000″). Bell’s historic displays now exist alongside information detailing the creationist viewpoint of the earth and man’s origins.”
Weird indeed.
Cabazon dinosaurs website
It’s Late article
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