Extinction Along Interstate 10

L.A. Times Magazine acting editor Martin J. Smith sighs in this week's edition about what has become to the Cabazon dinosaurs on Interstate 10.

Made famous by 1985's "Pee Wee's Big Adventure," the dinosaurs were the dream of Claude Bell, who started building Dinny -- a giant apatosaurus -- next to his Wheel Inn restaurant on I-10. He then started work on a giant Tyrannosaurus, which he almost -- but hadn't quite -- completed when he died in 1989. Other dinosaurs on the drawing board were never built.

After Claude Bell's death, the Bell family eventually sold the land... and the dinosaurs were eventually hidden from view by new development. Now, the new owners are using the dinosaurs to crusade against evolution. Writes Smith:

Here's the thing about Southern California: Permanence is illusion. Legends wither. The past impedes the future. And so, sad to say, Claude Bell's mighty dinosaurs have practically disappeared in the nearly two decades since they first caught my eye.

Oh, they're still there, standing strong and proud as ever on the same patch of desert. But Bell's family eventually sold the 60 acres and the dinosaurs to an Orange County developer who wanted to make a mark of his own. In conjunction with a Christian group, the developer decided to use the dinosaurs as massive roadside billboards to help sell the biblical notion that life on Earth was a divine creation during God's one productive week rather than the result of millions of years of evolution. Bell's dinosaurs have found gainful employment as proselytizers.

But at the same time, the dinosaurs have fallen into a modern version of a tar pit. First came a two-story Burger King, which rose between the dinosaurs and the interstate and partially blocked them from passing motorists. Another restaurant went up, as did a gas station. The dinosaurs seemed to get smaller, sinking deeper and deeper into a creeping commercial swamp that Bell never envisioned. The most thrilling way to see them these days is in satellite photographs. The last time I drove past, I was so distracted by the traffic around the nearby outlet malls and the new 27-story casino resort that rises into the desert sky like a Kubrick monolith, I didn't even notice the concrete creatures that once so fascinated and inspired me.

The new owners plan to add a "water spray" park, fossil dig and museum, all in the name of debunking evolution and sharing their view that dinosaurs and humans lived together at the dawn of civilization. Check out their site here.