A dinosaur was spotted near Yellowstone National Park this week for the first time in 68 million years.
A 12-foot-long Sinclair dinosaur that usually stands outside Gardiner Sinclair & Yellowstone Dino Lube and Repair north of Gardiner, Montana, was stolen, taken and anchored down 10 miles away on a cliff overlooking the Yellowstone River in Yankee Jim Canyon.
Drivers traveling along U.S. Highway 89 on Sunday could clearly see the majestic beast looming over its prehistoric stomping grounds.
The dinosaur couldn’t bolt away because it was literally bolted to the rock on which it was standing.
That made it more difficult to retrieve, said Derek Johnston, who works for the Sinclair station.
“I’m the guy who had to retrieve it,” said Johnston, adding that he likes to call the 6-foot-high and 12-foot-long, 150-pound fiberglass dinosaur “Dino.”
“It could’ve been worse,” he told Cowboy State Daily on Friday. “Whoever took him obviously planned this, because they brought all the proper tools to remove it from our location, then drill into the granite and anchor it to the cliff face.”
Throughout Dino’s excellent adventure, the dinosaur wasn’t damaged at all, Johnston said.
“They did a pretty good job, and I was absolutely impressed,” he said. “They didn’t even damage it — and definitely put some thought into it.”
That the pranksters didn’t damage Dino is a bonus, he said, because it costs about $8,000.
There isn’t a camera covering where the dinosaur sat on a concrete pad outside the Sinclair station, he said, but there is on a second dinosaur on the property.
“It might be a smart thing to put a tracker on it in the future,” Johnston added.
Nobody’s stepped up to take credit for taking Dino, but Johnston has a theory.
“The jury’s still out on who actually took it,” he said. “We suspect it was locals because there’s no damage.”
Unbolted And Rebolted
The stolen dinosaur statue is usually bolted to a concrete pad in front of the station along U.S. 89. Whoever stole and relocated it must have been aware and prepared.
"I found it funny," Sinclair employee Jacque Sims told KBZK Bozeman. "To think that our dinosaur was sitting up in the canyon up there, it was funny. We were laughing all day."
According to Sims, the still-unknown thieves managed to steal the dinosaur during the night from a spot where they wouldn’t be caught on camera. They also had the means to secure transport.
When Sims and other Sinclair employees went to recover their dinosaur, they found it bolted to the hard rock in Yankee Jim Canyon, Johnston said. They ensured the dinosaur they stole wouldn’t be stolen by anyone else.
"They literally had to unbolt it from a cement pad out here, and they re-bolted it up on a cliff," Sims told KBZK.
Plenty of people spotted the bright green dinosaur as they drove past.
Bozeman resident Justice Bartlett said these types of “shenanigans” were “the crimes we deserve.”
The most difficult part was making sure Dino didn’t tip over and fall 100 feet into the Yellowstone River below, Johnston said. That, and carrying it, because it doesn’t have handles and is hard to get a grip on.
Now, Dino is back and safely inside the shop at the station until they figure out how to bolt it down again in a way it can’t be dino-napped again, Johnston said.
“We brought it back and tucked it inside our shop,” he said. “It’s in a safe place right now until we figure out how to anchor it so that doesn’t happen again.”
Targets Of Theft
Stealing Sinclair dinosaurs has become a common Western prank.
In November 2025, “DINO,” a 300-pound dinosaur standing outside Sloanes General Store in Alcova, was stolen overnight. For Brian Black, it wasn’t a victimless crime.
"We don’t know what happened to it, but he’s a pretty big guy, so he just doesn’t walk off,” he told Cowboy State Daily at the time. “We sure would like to have him back. I would do ‘no questions asked,’ personally.”
That was an important caveat, because the dinosaur statue cost more than $8,000. That would make the theft a felony charge.
A smaller Sinclair dinosaur was stolen from a front yard in Cheyenne in July 2022. The Flynn family was distraught to find their 150-pound green dinosaur had gone missing overnight.
“I’ve always had a dream of owning a Sinclair dinosaur, and it was going to happen someday,” Flynn told Cowboy State Daily. “Last year, we were traveling through Minnesota, and I saw a Bob’s Big Boy for sale at this statue place. When we got there, I saw they had a Sinclair dinosaur.”
In this case, the Flynns used social media to spread the word on their stolen Sinclair dinosaur. A few days later, it mysteriously returned to their home overnight.
“I think he ended up in a garage for a couple days and (the thieves) realized, ‘We have got to get this thing out of here,’ so they brought him back,” Flynn said. “I was thinking he’d show up in a park somewhere, but instead, they brought him back to the house and pushed him out. I was just so excited that morning.”
Montanans have their own penchant for stealing Sinclair dinosaurs.
In November 2025, a dinosaur statue was stolen from the Sinclair Gas Station off Bridger Drive in Bozeman, Montana. It appeared at the top of the M Trail, overlooking the valley, right above the giant white “M” on the mountainside.
Yellowstone’s Real Dinosaurs
Yellowstone is renowned for its modern-day wildlife, but it’s been a haven for plenty of prehistoric animals.
During the last Ice Age, the park was filled with giant mammals such as mammoths, dire wolves, American cheetahs and lions.
In October 2023, a team of paleontologists published a paper on a juvenile Tyrannosaurus tooth found within the boundaries of the park.
Matt Carrano, curator of dinosaurs at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., said it was “the first identifiable dinosaur fossil from Yellowstone that we are aware of.”
“T.rex is very typical of the end of the Cretaceous,” he said. “This is just a tooth, but it does have all the features of a tyrannosaur tooth.
“Because there’s only one tyrannosaur around at the end of the Cretaceous, we felt pretty comfortable referring this to Tyrannosaurus.”
The tooth was from the Harebell Formation, which is roughly 68 million years old. That makes it much younger than the Sinclair sauropod, which is modeled after the massive long-necked sauropods that roamed Wyoming around 150 to 146 million years ago.
The Sinclair Oil Corp. adopted “Dino,” a green Brontosaurus, as its corporate mascot in 1930.
The company claimed its lubricants had been "mellowing in the ground during the Mesozoic era when dinosaurs populated the earth."
Sinclair also funded paleontological research undertaken by the American Museum of Natural History in Wyoming and other states in the 1930s.
The company famously sponsored “Dinoland,” an exhibit featuring several life-size dinosaur replicas, for the New York World’s Fair of 1964-1965.
No sauropod fossils have been found in or near Yellowstone, but anything’s possible.
While northwest Wyoming would have been different during the Late Jurassic, Brontosaurus, Diplodocus, and other sauropods likely roamed across Yellowstone during that time.
“You don’t think of fossils when you think of Yellowstone, but it has incredible geology, not just the geysers,” Carrano said. “It’s nice to remind visitors and even scientists that this is a place where we can make these discoveries. There are rocks of all ages in the park.”
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
