History Ahead: Turn at the Mammoth

Until August, the stucco dinosaurs near Cabazon were the only prehistoric behemoths that roamed the dusty earth along Southern California’s desert highways and lured gawkers. Now, an iron giant stalks the dry, boulder-strewn hills of Riverside County: the Jurupa Mammoth.

The 25-foot-tall beast stands halfway up a hill next to the Pomona Freeway just west of Rubidoux, peering at passing traffic. Recently, a red Santa hat appeared on its head, lashed in place with a yellow rope.

From the road, it’s not immediately obvious why the mammoth is perched on that particular ridge. Drivers craning their necks to get a better look can easily miss the brown-and-white sign near the Pyrite Street exit announcing the Jurupa Mountains Cultural Center, a natural history and crafts museum that features an outdoor menagerie of life-size dinosaur models.

“We put it up there so the world could see it,” said Klaus Duebbert, the ironwork artist who sculpted the mammoth. “You can see this thing from all the way across the valley.”At a distance, the behemoth -- twice the size of an actual mammoth -- looks like a solid hulk that was hammered into shape out of a rust-colored iron shell.

Up close, though, it looks more like something that Disney Hall architect Frank Gehry and iron sculptor Richard Serra might have cobbled together. There are vertical gaps between the uneven edges of the long, foot-wide iron strips welded to the skeleton of the mammoth’s body. Two panels were bent into flaps for ears, crude holes were drilled into the mammoth’s face for eyes, and iron rods were coiled tightly together to build its raised trunk and tusks.

The 2-ton beast is the largest sculpture that Duebbert, who comes from 17 generations of blacksmiths in his native Germany, has ever made. The Santa hat, which Duebbert made with the center’s office manager, is dwarfed by the creature’s massive cranium.

“It looked big on the floor, but now it looks kind of puny,” he said. “Like a party hat.”

The mammoth, constructed in two halves and dragged up the hill by a bulldozer, took seven months to complete. Duebbert spent several afternoons at La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, taking measurements from the fossil collection there and making anatomical sketches.

“The hardest thing was getting the proportions right,” he said.

A laconic 52-year-old with flowing gray hair, Duebbert has worked at Jurupa since the private technological history museum he ran in San Bernardino, the Century History and Technology Museum, closed down two years ago. He teaches iron-working classes out of a small forge he built at the center, and has worked on floats for the Rose Parade and the Los Angeles County Fair.

Mary Burns, the center’s executive director, said she asked Duebbert to create the mammoth as a step toward creating an ice age exhibit to complement the dinosaurs, which are part of an educational program for elementary schoolchildren.

“No dinosaur ever walked in Jurupa, but mammoths did,” said Burns, who has directed the center for four years. “That’s what was here, but the average person who visits Jurupa doesn’t understand the difference between the Ice Age and the age of the dinosaurs.”

Burns is at pains to remind visitors that dinosaurs never roamed Southern California, which rose from the ocean after dinosaurs were already extinct.

The dinosaurs at Jurupa were made in 1964 by Sam Kirkby, a civic patron who donated the first of the center’s 86 acres to build a museum for his collection of fossils and natural gems.

The dinosaurs -- garishly painted models that pay only loose homage to the fossil record -- started as a craft project, said Burns, who worked on them when she started volunteering at the center in the 1970s. The beasts became the centerpiece of walking tours designed to educate children about where oil comes from.

Kirkby eventually built 10 dinosaurs, constructing them out of junk that included old telephone poles, used gunny sacks procured from local coffee importers, and even old butter bowls -- inverted to become eyes.

About the same time, Claude Bell, a statue builder at Knott’s Berry Farm, started working on his kitsch “dinosaur garden” in Cabazon, 40 miles east of Jurupa. Nearly 40 years later, Dinney and Rex -- the only two beasts Bell completed before his death in 1988 at age 91 -- have achieved cult status in Southern California, and get about 100,000 visitors each year, compared with the 20,000 Burns estimates come to Jurupa.

Along with the mammoth, Burns asked Duebbert to build an iron Tyrannosaurus rex to replace the tattered original one. He is also at work on a pachycephalosaurus, a 20-foot-tall creature with horns around its domed head.

Duebbert said he enjoys bringing creatures out of extinction.

“That thing will stay up for 300 years,” he said. “In this heat, it won’t ever rust. It will outlive us.”