Residents of a Southern California neighborhood devastated by wildfires earlier this year didn’t take it lightly when their community suffered a loss earlier this week: Their beloved 50-pound green fiberglass dinosaur had been stolen.
Many sparked a storm around the long-necked imaginary herbivore named Claire after she was snatched in the middle of the night from her perch outside a gas station in Brentwood, California on September 27. They called the local news, held a memorial in his name and posted footage of the brazen theft on social media, where outrage went viral.
It was probably this outpouring that helped reverse the trend toward the destruction of dinosaurs. Claire returned 10 days later, wrapped in a cloth and carrying an apology.
“I’m sorry I stole Claire!” the one who returned it wrote in a message stuck to the back of his neck. “Please don’t press charges! Thank you.”
History proved to John Fawcett, 65, owner of the gas station, that in his star-studded neighborhood, Claire’s fame exceeded that of others.
Mr. Fawcett has owned the gas station for decades. But when the station moved to a Sinclair Oil franchise seven years ago, a regular customer asked if he would consider getting one of the company’s fiberglass dinosaur statues, once common at Sinclair gas stations.
Sinclair has used DINO in its marketing since 1930. It first flew as a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1963 and was displayed at the New York World’s Fair the following year. But over the decades, the statues have become rarer.
He told the customer, Keith Salmon, that he “would love to get one, but they are so hard to find,” Mr. Fawcett recalled. “You can’t get them. The company doesn’t have them.”
Mr. Salmon responded by inviting Mr. Fawcett to his production company’s office in Santa Monica.
“I’d love to show you something,” Mr. Fawcett recalled. “So I went to his office and there was Claire.”
Mr. Fawcett didn’t find out how the customer ended up with a five-by-eight apatosaurus (or perhaps a brontosaurus—Sinclair says he is aware of the conflicting opinions among paleontologists), but he happily accepted Mr. Salmon’s gift.
Mr Fawcett took the prehistoric creature to the petrol station, painted it green and installed it next to the sign announcing the price of fuel. He gave her the name Claire, a variation of Sinclair. Since then, his wife and clients have taken turns dressing him for holidays and other occasions.
Claire became beloved by the community, Mr Fawcett said. Over the years, he said he thought it might be stolen as part of a prank, perhaps a bet between students, and then returned.
But he couldn’t have predicted what happened at 2:30 a.m. on a Saturday in late September, he said. Security footage showed a person with their jacket pulled up, cutting the metal that kept them secured to the ground, then loading them into the back of a white van.
The cashier who arrived for her shift that morning and discovered Claire missing called Mr. Fawcett to tell him the bad news. He was devastated.
“Obviously she’s not real,” Mr. Fawcett said. “But it was just sad to think that she’s not here. She’s not on the corner where she belongs.”
Mr Fawcett said the theft appeared planned, based on the footage. He suspected the person who took it of wanting to sell Claire. Sinclair’s website considers the dinosaur “one of the most popular icons of American Petroliana,” or gas station collector’s item. Online, the fiberglass statues are listed for sale for more than $1,500.
But the community intervened and footage of the theft ended up on social media, where it was reposted by actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who lives in nearby Pacific Palisades.
“Hey, are you really with your luxury truck?” she captioned the video on Instagram. “You have to steal the dinosaur in front of the Sinclair gas station? Really? Not cool man. Not cool!”
The story spread so widely that Mr. Fawcett received a call from the Los Angeles Police Department, where a police officer asked him if he wanted to file a report. He thought Claire had left for good and hadn’t gone to the police.
When Claire arrived on Tuesday – dropped off in the early morning, wrapped in a cloth, the same way she had been taken – the residents of the neighborhood rejoiced.
“There were so many people here, it was wild,” Mr Fawcett said, adding that some “just parked their cars in the street”.
He unwrapped it in front of the crowd and found that it was in good condition.
“She’s going to need a spa day,” Mr Fawcett said. “She had a few nicks and a few scratches. »
But Claire is back, and that’s what matters.
On Wednesday, Mr. Fawcett gave the telephone interview from his car, parked right next to Claire, who was wearing Los Angeles Dodgers blue, a hat and party balloons. He saw nearly a dozen people come over for more than half an hour to take photos with her.
Maygol Mohammadi, 22, who stopped by her mother’s house, said she grew up in the Pacific Palisades, seeing Claire walking to the store after college.
“Every day after school I would go to the country store and we would always see this dinosaur,” Ms Mohammadi said. When she discovered that Claire had been stolen, Ms. Mohammadi said, it resurfaced an emotion she had last felt during the January fires, that a part of her childhood had been taken away from her.
Ms Mohammadi said: “I’m just happy she’s back. »
Mr Fawcett echoed this sentiment. He said he still didn’t know who took her and that he would do what was asked and not press charges.
