Spring Hill pink dinosaur turns 50
SPRING HILL –
Most Hernando County residents take it for granted. Motorists see it in their peripheral vision while driving along Commercial Way but never take a second look.
However, the pink dinosaur remains a popular roadside oddity for those people visiting the area or just passing through.
For those not familiar with the history of this ever-present statue, it’s celebrating its 50th birthday.
Back in 1962, a man by the name of Jacob Foxbower owned a roadside tourist attraction called Foxbower’s Wildlife Museum. Inside one could find a multitude of specimens of animal bones, weird-shaped eggs, skeletal remains of all sorts of critters, bottled amphibians and even a genetically deformed squirrel with two heads. It was sort of like a miniature version of Ripley’s Believe It or Not of the animal world.
The story goes that he and his brother built the dinosaur to attract motorists to his roadside attraction. According to the lady at the reference desk at the West Hernando Branch Library the dinosaur stands 22 feet tall, and is 58 feet long. It was built to look like a Brontosaurus, but if you look at pictures of these prehistoric creatures, the pink dinosaur seems to have been fashioned wearing a Stegosaurus vest (the ridges on top of his back).
Though paleontologists revised the name from Brontosaurus to Apatosaurus, in the case of the pink dinosaur, it really doesn’t matter. The statue did what it was supposed to do for a couple of decades, which was to bring in curious visitors to the museum.
At The Barber Shop located behind the pink dinosaur many people passing by have made U-turns to stop in, not for a haircut, but to inquire about the dinosaur.
Tim Reed, a barber there for three years, said he has fielded many questions about the giant statue.
Mostly, they usually ask about what it represents, he said.
Reed launches into a brief explanation while snipping away at a customer’s hair, telling them it was once a wildlife museum and there was a taxidermy shop next to that.
From inside the barber shop, chair No. 1 has the best view of the landmark. Although the view is shrouded with Spanish moss from the trees, the pink color sticks out from the natural greens of the grass and trees set against the blue sky.
While the windows are partially tinted, Reed said he can see people stop their cars, get out and take pictures.
Jani Wagner, of Hudson, was waiting for her father Rudolph Boggs, of Spring Hill, to get a trim. She was born two years after the dinosaur was built but remembers it when she was a little girl.
Commercial Way was just a dirt road called U.S. 19.
“There was nothing out here,” she said, which made the dinosaur even more noticeable.
Over the years the dinosaur weathered all sorts of elements, but it took a big hit in 2000 when vandals struck. Marked with graffiti and a couple of holes in its tail, the dinosaur was feeling the effects of modern day society. However, a good Samaritan came and repainted the concrete creature.
The new paint brought with it a new name. Somehow the dinosaur was now being called the Pepto Bismol pink dinosaur.
All over the World Wide Web you could search pink dinosaur and numerous page would come up citing the peculiar landmark among other roadside attractions. Spring Hill was on the map for those seeking the strange and odd.
According to one posting on RoadsideAmerica
.com, the Hernando County Historical Society has deemed the statue a “historical site” never to be removed.
