Residents of a Southern California neighborhood devastated by wildfires earlier this year did not take it lightly when their community sustained a loss earlier this week: Their beloved 50-pound green, fiberglass dinosaur had been stolen.
Many stirred up a storm over the long-necked, make-believe herbivore named Claire after she was taken in the middle of the night from her perch outside a gas station in Brentwood, Calif., on Sept. 27. They called the local news, held a memorial in her name and posted footage of the brazen theft on social media, where the outrage went viral.
The outpouring was probably what helped reverse the dino-knapping. Claire was returned 10 days later, bundled in cloth and carrying an apology.
“I’m sorry for stealing Claire!” whoever returned it wrote in a message taped to the back of her neck. “Please do not press charges! Thanks.”
The tale proved to John Fawcett, 65, the owner of the gas station, that in his star-studded neighborhood, Claire’s fame rose above the rest.
Mr. Fawcett has owned the gas station for decades. But when the station switched to a Sinclair Oil franchise seven years ago, a regular customer asked if he planned to get one of the company’s fiberglass dinosaur statues, which were once common at Sinclair gas stations.
Sinclair has used DINO in marketing since 1930. It first flew as a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1963 and was exhibited in the New York World’s Fair the following year. But over the decades, the statues became rare.
He told the customer, Keith Salmon, that he “would love to get one, but they’re 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 office in Santa Monica.
“‘I would love to show you something,’” Mr. Fawcett recalled him saying. “So I went over to his office, and there was Claire.”
Mr. Fawcett did not find out how the customer had ended up with the five-by-eight apatosaurus (or maybe brontosaurus — Sinclair says it is aware of conflicting opinions among paleontologists), but he gladly accepted the present from Mr. Salmon.
Mr. Fawcett took the prehistoric creature to the gas station, painted her green and installed her next to the sign advertising the price of fuel. He gave her the name Claire, a spin on Sinclair. Since then, his wife and customers have taken turns dressing her up for holidays and other occasions.
Claire became beloved to the community, Mr. Fawcett said. Over the years, he said he thought that she might be stolen in a prank, perhaps a bet among college students, and then get returned.
But he couldn’t have anticipated what happened at 2:30 a.m. on a Saturday in late September, he said. Security footage showed a person with their jacket hood up, cutting the metal that kept her secured to the ground, then loading her in the back of a white pickup truck.
The cashier who arrived for her shift that morning to discover Claire missing called Mr. Fawcett to deliver 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 out on the corner where she belongs.”
Mr. Fawcett said the robbery looked planned, based on the footage. He suspected the person who took it had wanted to sell Claire. Sinclair’s website calls the dinosaur “one of the most popular icons in American petroliana,” or gas station collectibles. Online, the fiberglass statues are listed for sale for more than $1,500.
But the community stepped in and footage of the theft ended up on social media, where it was reposted by the actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who lives in nearby Pacific Palisades.
“Hey, you with your fancy truck, really?” she captioned the video on Instagram. “You need to steal the dinosaur from in front of the Sinclair gas station? Really? Not cool dude. Not cool!”
The tale spread so wide that Mr. Fawcett got a call from the Los Angeles Police Department, where an officer asked him if he wanted to file a report. He had thought Claire was gone for good and hadn’t gone to the police.
When Claire turned up on Tuesday — deposited in the early hours, wrapped in cloth, much in the same way that she had been taken — area residents rejoiced.
“There were so many people here, it was wild,” said Mr. Fawcett, adding that some “just parked their cars in the street.”
He unwrapped her in front of the crowd to find she was in decent condition.
“She’s going to need a spa day,” Mr. Fawcett said. “She got a few nicks and some scratches on her.”
But Claire is back, and that’s what counts.
On Wednesday, Mr. Fawcett gave this phone interview from inside his car, parked right next to Claire, who was sporting a blue Los Angeles Dodgers, hat and celebratory balloons. He watched as nearly a dozen people came by over half an hour to take photos with her.
Maygol Mohammadi, 22, who stopped by with her mother, said she grew up in the Pacific Palisades, seeing Claire on her walks to the store after middle school let out.
“Every day I’d walk to the country store after school, and we always see this dinosaur,” Ms. Mohammadi said. When she found out Claire had been stolen, Ms. Mohammadi said, it resurfaced an emotion that she last felt during the fires in January, that a part of her childhood had been taken from her.
Ms. Mohammadi said, “I’m just happy that she’s back.”
Mr. Fawcett echoed the sentiment. He said he still does not know who took her and he would do as requested and not press charges.
Aishvarya Kavi works in the Washington bureau of The Times, helping to cover a variety of political and national news.
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