Cabazon Dinosaurs

A sculptor's decade-long side project

Claude Bell, a theme park sculptor who ran the Wheel Inn diner along Interstate 10 near Cabazon, California, began building Dinny in 1964, hoping a giant dinosaur would lure travelers off the highway. The 150-foot steel and concrete brontosaurus took about eleven years to finish and was built largely from material salvaged off the nearby interstate construction project. Bell later added a second, more aggressive figure, a roughly 65-foot Tyrannosaurus rex. He built both by hand, welding rebar frames and shaping concrete skin himself, without formal training in engineering or sculpture.

From diner gimmick to film icon

The dinosaurs might have stayed a regional curiosity if not for Pee-wee's Big Adventure in 1985, which placed Pee-wee Herman inside Dinny's hollow body watching the sunrise through a window in its belly. The scene turned the statues into one of the most referenced images in American road trip culture, and the figures have since appeared in films, music videos, and countless travel blog pilgrimages.

What is actually there now

Dinny's interior now holds a gift shop, and the surrounding lot has grown into a small open air attraction with a fossil panning sluice and a dino dig sandpit. The dinosaurs get seasonal costume changes, a Santa suit, a tuxedo, that keep them circulating on social media decades after Bell's death. The mystery here is not paranormal. It is the scale of what one obsessive, self-taught builder left behind on a stretch of desert highway.

Located just off Interstate 10 in Cabazon, between Palm Springs and Los Angeles. The gift shop and dino dig attractions inside and around Dinny charge separate admission; the dinosaurs themselves are visible for free from the parking lot and highway.