The 70-foot brontosaurus sculpture off of Ellerbee Creek Trail is, to some, a relic of old Durham. But the triumphantly posed, weathered dinosaur can also be a reminder of a tight-knit community with an appreciation for history and oddity.

While the old “Bronto” has a long history of going through the wringer – decades of erosion, a thrashing hurricane, a decapitation and a re-capitation (thanks to fundraising spearheaded by Durham’s Northgate Park neighborhood), it has an even longer backstory.

‘Strains of history’

The Bronto, sculpted by Richard Wescott in 1964, was once part of a larger exhibit for the Museum of Life and Science: the “Pre-History Trail,” which opened in 1967. 

While it stands alone today in the woods behind a chain-linked fence, the Bronto used to roam among other plaster and fiberglass dinosaur sculptures, many of which Wescott also crafted. 

Wescott grew up in Essex, England and joined the British navy as a teenager during World War II. Then, Wescott married a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, who led him to their new home in Durham’s Northgate Park neighborhood as a war groom.

Wescott became involved in the museum in its early days. Founded in 1946 as a children’s museum, Wescott got hands-on with the outdoor dinosaur trail — which attracted more visitors from further than ever before.

The dinosaur trail exhibit, of 11 life-sized sculptures, is regarded as the brainchild of Wescott’s artistry and the most advanced paleontologic knowledge of the time. And the Bronto was the pièce de résistance. 

Visitors could traverse the trail and look up at the dinosaurs towering above them, imagining they were walking alongside the beasts in a North Carolina forest.

Mar Hicks, now an associate professor of data science at the University of Virginia, became fascinated with the Bronto in the 2000s while getting her Ph.D. in history at Duke University.

She said the dinosaur is an intersection of countless historical narratives: from the post-World War II migration of Europeans to the United States, to the rise of the new South, to North Carolina’s economic boom period after being one of the poorest states in the nation.

“All of these different strains of history — they’re represented in that old dinosaur. They’re the reason, not only why that dinosaur got built, but why it still exists and why people had the money to save it,” Hicks said.

Out with the old, in with the new

As scientific knowledge evolved, the exhibit’s dinosaurs required an update. In December 1992, the museum proposed a new dinosaur trail on another part of the property. The museum finished the trail construction in 2009, which is still an exhibit today.

The first dinosaur trail was left to erode as the museum focused on its own expansion in the early 90s. Overgrowth began to reclaim the old trail and its centerpiece, the Bronto, in the ‘80s and early ‘90s.

Then, in September 1996, Hurricane Fran devastated the state. 

While Durham residents’ first thoughts amid Fran’s wreckage were with their families, neighbors and homes, it became clear that the old dinosaur trail had not been spared by the storm. The fixture of local history was reduced to downed trees and green rubble. Only a few sculptures were left intact — including the Bronto.

The museum saw over $100,000 in damages from Hurricane Fran and officially closed off the old dinosaur trail due to safety concerns. Most of the remaining sculptures fell into disrepair, and the resilient Bronto faded into the brush, over time becoming less visible to passersby on the Ellerbee Creek Trail.

Local legend

When Hicks found out about the Bronto from a friend in 2007 during her time at Duke, she attempted to walk Ellerbee Creek Trail and spot it, but couldn’t see past the overgrowth secluding the sculpture. It wasn’t until she brought that same friend along that she found it — and was “totally entranced.”

“The fact that it was so hidden sort of added to the mystique,” she said. “Because, you know, we had walked by it without even knowing it, and then it was kind of this amazing little — not little — huge surprise when you knew exactly where to look and you went through the bushes.”

Alix Bowman, who has been a Northgate Park resident since 2007, said she has frequented Ellerbee Creek Trail since moving in. Even for a local, it was easy to walk right past the Bronto, Bowman said.

“You either knew it was there or you didn’t,” Bowman said.

In 2007, Hicks ventured back to the trail, this time into the brush, and found the remnants of what were once the Bronto’s neighboring structures. Hicks said the only other statue left standing that she found was a woolly mammoth statue whose face was “mostly a hole.”

The great decapitation of ‘09

Then, a murder happened on May 31, 2009. A group of teenagers took a chainsaw to the Bronto, severing its head off at the base of its long neck. 

Pieces of the Bronto’s neck were left on the forest floor at the scene, but the teens took its head as a trophy. Durham Police later found the head in the woods of Durham County and returned it to the museum three days later.

But the teens’ power tool could only break the Bronto’s fiberglass-plaster skin, leaving a rusted steel beam jutting from its neck where its green exterior once was.

Police withheld the identities of those responsible, and the museum didn’t press charges. It’s not hard to imagine why; many Durhamites and non-local admirers still have a sour taste in their mouths when they speak about the Bronto’s mutilation.

Bowman, only half-joking, said it was a senseless act of violence and left a horrible sight.

“There was no good reason to vandalize it,” Hicks said. “It was just like, really gut-wrenching to see that, and then also seeing the like skeleton of it, seeing the steel substructure, it made you realize, ‘Oh, this is why it’s lasted so long.’”

Ro Rode, a spokesperson for the Museum of Life and Science, said that the museum opted to have the teens volunteer at the museum that summer instead of pressing charges. Because they were minors at the time, she said the museum thought that “everyone deserves a second chance.”

Bowman, while shocked, said she found it to be a classic teen prank. For this reason, she said the community didn’t want to see their names plastered everywhere.

Hicks suggested, however, that the Bronto’s decapitation may have been the best thing that could’ve happened to it. It put the last standing piece of a defunct, dilapidated museum exhibit, which had been locked behind a gate and hidden from the public, back into the spotlight.

Bringing back the Bronto

While a slow return to nature may have been easier to ignore under the cover of the forest, the Bronto’s sudden beheading seemed so senseless that the Northgate Park neighborhood couldn’t look away. They rallied together to launch the “Save the Bronto” campaign. 

Bowman said the neighborhood hosted a potluck picnic event that November to help raise money for the dinosaur to be repaired, complete with bounce houses, food trucks, bands and raffles. Over 300 attended, according to Northgate Park Neighborhood Association meeting minutes. 

Over 800 “Save the Bronto” t-shirts were sold and the community fundraised over $20,000 to repair the statue to its former glory. 

Sculptor Tripp Jarvis was able to re-capitate the Bronto and patch other holes scattered across its body, making its body-to-neck appear like they had never parted.

Bowman, who owned The Goat Patrol at the time, was invited to the pinic so that her pack of goats could chomp away the overgrowth secluding the Bronto.

“It cost a lot of money to get it restored, but at the same time, it was such a nice community event,” Bowman said. “When we had the picnic to raise the money, I remember it being one of those days where I really felt like I had made the right choice to move to Durham.”

The sculpture today: relic, landmark, reminder

The portion of the trail has since been renamed to Wescott’s Bronto Trail, marked by a sign near its entrance from West Murray Avenue.

The museum’s relationship with the Bronto today is tolerant; Rode said the sculpture has been “allowed to age on campus as a legacy item.” She also said it stands as a reminder of both the museum’s past and an unofficial landmark of a bygone era.

The museum still makes light patchwork repairs on the sculpture, Rode said, and maintains the surrounding fencing and landscape, but does not encourage visitors to venture too close for safety reasons. 

Durham continues to embrace the Bronto’s eccentric charm. Locals have recently taken to leaving little plastic toy dinosaurs around the area, which community members speculate to be an homage. 

Hicks said the Bronto lets people be part of something bigger than themselves, but also dwell on fond memories of the city.

“I think that the dinosaur was a symbol for old Durham in multiple ways, not just people remembering like the Museum of Life and Science and enjoying it as children — but the fact that we still had that old dinosaur hanging around, it was a symbol of the older, weirder, kind of artier, queerer Durham,” Hicks said.

Edited by: Tori Newby and Hannah Smith