Bell was a sculptor by training. He had spent years carving the giant figures at Knott's Berry Farm and had a reasonable idea of what it took to build at heroic scale. Even so, Dinny was extraordinary. The body is a welded steel skeleton wrapped in expanded metal lath and finished in shotcrete - the same technique used for swimming pools, sprayed on by hand and shaped while wet. The finished dinosaur stretches 150 feet from nose to tail and stands 45 feet tall at the head. It has a gift shop inside its belly. Bell paid for the project by selling concrete burros to neighbors and tucking earnings from the diner into the construction fund. He never took out a loan for it. Friends would drop by on Saturday afternoons to find him welding ribs to a spine fifty feet up in the air, working alone.

Dinny was not enough. In 1981, Bell started on Mr. Rex - a 65-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus rex he intended to install a slide in, exiting through the mouth. He was eighty-five years old. Construction stretched until 1986, and the slide never quite happened, but the second dinosaur did. Mr. Rex stands a short walk from Dinny, head tilted back, jaws open. Bell died two years after finishing him, in 1988. The two dinosaurs together remain almost certainly the largest sculptures ever completed by a single artist working alone in his own backyard. They are also, in a peculiar way, an act of advertising that outlasted the thing it was meant to advertise: the Wheel Inn diner closed in 2013. The dinosaurs did not.

Most Americans of a certain age know the dinosaurs from a single scene. In 1985's Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Pee-wee Herman and waitress Simone watch the sunrise together from inside Mr. Rex's open jaws - the scene was recreated on a Warner Brothers soundstage, but the exterior shots show both dinosaurs clearly. The sequence is brief and shows almost the whole site, diner and all. The Cabazon Dinosaurs were already locally famous when the film came out, but Pee-wee turned them into a national one - the kind of place a generation of kids insisted their parents pull off the highway to see, and then, twenty years later, pulled off the highway themselves to show their own kids. The dinosaurs have also appeared in The Wizard, several music videos, and uncountable car-commercial drive-bys. Their pose on the desert horizon has become a kind of visual shorthand for the American road trip.

Bell's family sold the property in the mid-1990s to new owners, who in 2005 reopened the gift shop inside Dinny with a creationist museum theme - young-Earth exhibits, signage suggesting the dinosaurs had walked with humans, and so on. The reinvention drew a strange mix of curious visitors and pointed criticism, and after about a decade the displays were quietly removed. Since 2017 the site has operated as a more straightforward roadside attraction again, with a paid walking area featuring smaller dinosaur sculptures behind Dinny and Mr. Rex. The two original giants are still free to look at from the parking lot, which is the way Bell always intended. He built them to be seen from the freeway, after all. Pulling in was always optional.

What is striking about Cabazon, once you stand under Dinny, is how little of him is funny up close. The proportions are right. The skin texture is patient, careful work. The teeth are individually shaped. Bell could have done this faster and cheaper. He chose not to. A sculptor near retirement age decided his last serious works would be two of the largest dinosaurs in the world, built by hand, on a corner lot in the desert, mostly for the benefit of strangers who were driving past on their way to somewhere else. The Wheel Inn is gone. Bell is gone. The interstate is busier than ever. The Brontosaurus is still there, looking exactly the way one man, working alone on Saturdays for eleven years, decided it should look.