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Roadside Dinosaurs

Cabazon, California
April 17, 2006

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These giant beasts, originally built to draw tourists to a roadside souvenir shop (and featured prominently in the 1985 camp classic, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure), have been hauled into an improbable line of duty: helping to bolster creationist arguments held by the Orange County developer who has bought them. The gift shop inside the brontasaurus runs a video of a preacher explaining that these giants roamed the earth as recently as 200 years ago, while signs posted inside the T-Rex explain that the Earth is only 6,000 years old.

A boy feeding a pretty black-and-yellow lizard inside the T-Rex told us that this was the first day it had been open to the public since the builder finished it in the mid 1980s. Of course, based on the veracity of everything else the new managers told us, who knows.