Two giant concrete dinosaurs are rising out of the California desert off I-10 and the story gets weirder

California’s most bizarre freeway exit

You’re driving through the Sonoran Desert on Interstate 10, somewhere between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, when two enormous shapes rise out of the scrubland on your right. One is the length of half a football field.

The other towers six stories overhead. You’re not imagining them.

They’ve been there for decades, and the story of who built them, and why, is stranger than the dinosaurs themselves.

These giants stop traffic from a mile away

Dinny the Apatosaurus stretches 150 feet long and stands 45 feet tall. Mr. Rex, the Tyrannosaurus, reaches 65 feet into the desert sky.

You can see them from the freeway before you see the exit sign, and that’s exactly what they were built for. They rank among the most recognized roadside attractions in the country.

Drivers have been pulling off the highway to crane their necks at them for more than 60 years.

One man built both of them by hand

Claude K. Bell wasn’t a construction crew. He was a sculptor and portrait artist who spent years at Knott’s Berry Farm creating concrete figures for Ghost Town and running a portrait studio at the park from 1951 to 1986.

But as a boy growing up near Atlantic City, he visited Lucy the Elephant, a six-story elephant-shaped building in Margate City, New Jersey.

That visit stuck with him for the rest of his life, and Bell spent the better part of his savings trying to top it.

Bell bought the land and got to work

Bell bought the Cabazon land in 1946 for $5,000 and opened a restaurant called the Wheel Inn there in 1958. Six years later, at nearly 70 years old, he started building Dinny to pull more customers off the freeway.

He used steel and concrete salvaged from the construction of Interstate 10 itself and built his own tools to do it, including a steel bender and an elevator rigged from an old truck. Dinny took 11 years to finish.

Dinny was meant to walk right in

Bell didn’t build Dinny as a sculpture. He built her as a building.

The entrance runs through the base of her tail and opens into a gift shop inside her belly.

He once planned for her eyes to glow at night and her mouth to breathe fire, but neither idea made it off the drawing board.

What did make it in were some of his original frescoes and artwork, which still hang inside her. Bell called her “the first dinosaur in history to be used as a building.”

Mr. Rex came 17 years later

Bell broke ground on Mr. Rex in 1981, and the T. rex was standing by 1986.

Bell had plans to add a slide down Mr. Rex’s tail, then a woolly mammoth, then a full prehistoric garden. None of it happened.

On Sept. 19, 1988, Bell died at 91.

He had spent more than $250,000 of his own money and more than two decades building what he started with a piece of salvaged steel and a dream he’d carried since childhood.

Tim Burton put them on the map

The dinosaurs had been a freeway fixture for years when the 1985 comedy Pee-wee’s Big Adventure made them famous nationwide.

Director Tim Burton filmed Pee-wee Herman watching the sunrise from inside Dinny’s mouth, and the scene became one of the movie’s most recognized moments.

The dinosaurs also showed up in the 1989 family film The Wizard and in the Tears for Fears music video for “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

When actor Paul Reubens died in 2023, Mr. Rex was repainted to match Pee-wee’s grey suit and red bow tie.

Climb three flights to Mr. Rex’s open jaws

If you pay admission, you can enter Mr. Rex near his tail and climb three flights of stairs to a small chamber inside his head. His jaws are open, and a fenced-in platform sits behind his teeth.

From up there, you look out over the highway, the flat desert floor, and the San Jacinto Mountains rising in the distance.

It’s the kind of view that takes a second to process, mostly because you’re standing inside a 65-foot T. rex when you’re doing it.

More than 100 dinosaurs wait beyond the two giants

Once you’re through the gate, the property opens up into an outdoor trail with more than 100 dinosaur figures spread across the desert landscape. Some are fiberglass.

Some are robotic. Educational signs along the path identify each species, so you can walk the whole thing at your own pace without a guide. Kids tend to disappear into it.

Adults, it turns out, do too.

Let the kids dig for dinosaur bones

A sand pit called the Dino Dig lets children hunt through the sand like real paleontologists. Find a rock with a dinosaur name stamped on it and you can trade it in at the gift shop for a prize.

For a few dollars more, you can buy a bag of sand at the shop and run it through a gemstone and fossil panning sluice. Visitors have turned up shark teeth, malachite and small garnets.

Bags run about $15.

The dinosaurs never look the same twice

Dinny and Mr. Rex get repainted for holidays throughout the year.

For Valentine’s Day, Mr. Rex has shown up in a tuxedo holding a heart reading “Be Mine,” while Dinny went bright pink. Easter brings festive colors and themed egg hunts.

Come December, Mr. Rex transforms into Santa Rex, and the park runs Dinosaur Nights in Lights with twinkling displays and visits with Santa Claus.

Regulars make a habit of stopping just to see what the latest look is.

A roadside tradition older than the interstate

The Cabazon Dinosaurs belong to a lineage of oversized American roadside attractions stretching back to the 1800s.

Bell’s own childhood inspiration, Lucy the Elephant, is now a National Historic Landmark and the oldest surviving roadside attraction in the country.

The Wheel Inn restaurant that Bell built his dinosaurs to promote ran from 1958 to 2013, then got demolished in 2016. The dinosaurs outlasted it without breaking a sweat.

You can park, walk the lot and photograph both giants from the outside without spending a cent.

Visit the Cabazon Dinosaurs in California

You’ll find the Cabazon Dinosaurs at 50770 Seminole Drive in Cabazon, just off Interstate 10, about 20 minutes west of Palm Springs and roughly 90 minutes east of Los Angeles.

The park is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekends.

Admission to Mr. Rex’s Dinosaur Adventure runs $15 for adults, $13 for kids ages 3 to 12, $11 for seniors and military, and free for children under 3. Tickets are cash or card at the door.

Parking is free for cars, RVs and buses.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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