Jurassic Prairie Palouse Farmer Welds Scrap Metal Into Scrappy Looking Dinosaurs

Two rusty dinosaurs stand tall in front of the white house surrounded by wheat fields near Latah.

A baby dinosaur also sits in a makeshift nest there. “DO NOT FEED,” warns a sign.

Farmer Dennis Pottratz turned his front yard into a tribute to the Jurassic age four years ago when he started turning scrap farm implements into dinosaur replicas.

He promises his junk pile will be a source for more creations.

“We don’t know what the next one will be. A predator may show up,” said Pottratz, 41, a third-generation Palouse farmer.

People from nearby Latah and Fairfield drop by his home on Marsh Road to take a look at the nearly 10-foot-tall dinosaurs. Children sometimes climb them.

The dinosaurs are no big deal to the Pottratz family.

“We all think each other is a little bit strange,” said Fred Pottratz, Dennis’ older brother.

Dennis Pottratz, who admits he’s “mentally in his 20s,” still isn’t sure what he wants to be when he grows up. He jokes that he would change professions if his creations were enough of a hit.

“I would consider changing occupations from being a poor farmer to a starving artist if I could sell them,” Pottratz said.

He chose to make dinosaurs because of their mystery and for some practical reasons too.

“The parts fit,” he said. “They looked like dinosaur parts.”

During the 1980s, Pottratz saw a dinosaur at the Spokane Interstate Fair that a farmer had made from old farm machinery. The concept stuck in his mind.

Pottratz, who grows wheat, lentils and barley, decided to use lulls in his farming to weld scrap machinery into dinosaurs.

“You don’t get any money for scrap iron, so why not turn it into something functional, something to look at?” Pottratz said.

Pottratz built his first dinosaur, Rex (for Tyrannosaurus Rex), in March 1991. Sara, Rex’s companion, was completed in May 1992. The couple’s baby - still unnamed - appeared a year later.

Fred Pottratz provided the spine, actually a trenching machine chain, for Rex.

Making the dinosaurs took about a month each. First, Pottratz tried to sketch his idea.

“When you’re not an artist and you don’t know how to sketch, it doesn’t do much good,” he said. “I have a lot of respect for artists after doing this.”

Fred, 42, makes miniature dragons from sheet metal. He built a horse from scrap farm machinery about six years ago.

“It seems like my brother has more art in him,” Dennis Pottratz said.

The horse, which stands in a field on the farm, has worried some passing motorists.

“They would come and report there was a poor lonely horse in the field,” said Willis Pottratz, who lives on the farm near his son, Dennis. “We’ve had some Jehovah’s Witnesses come by. They were so upset they didn’t give us any literature.”