Lance, a 4.5-metre-tall amargasaurus, bends his spiked neck and leans down to let loose with a big roar.
“Oh my God. I love it,” says Stan Pottie, 63, of his new animatronic toy. “This is perfect.”
Pottie has a second dinosaur — a duckbill parasaurophus — that he hopes to collect from Langley this week.
“He breathes. His head goes up and down. It looks like he’s going to bite you,” Pottie said Monday, adding that Lance also growls and snorts but doesn’t walk.
Once Lance was installed on Pottie’s Lantzville property at 7890 Clark Dr. West, “we stayed up there half the night sitting there with him.”
Pottie said he spent more than $40,000 to buy the two beasts at Able Auctions’ online auction this month. The dinosaurs used to be part of a travelling exhibition.
Asked if there’s been any buyer’s remorse, he replied: “Oh, no way!”
“From the time we got him home here and started putting him together, you can’t even measure the amount of fun and excitement we’ve had with the dinosaur so far,” he said.
Friends sent Pottie information on the upcoming online auction, suggesting he was “the kind of guy who would get involved in this.”
After all, he already had an old fire truck, an imitation fort (with a out-of-commission U.S. civil war cannon on its way) and more displays on the property where his companies DJ Excavating and Country Buds Dispensary are located.“I’m like a kid at heart.”
On auction day, he was prepared. “You had to bid really fast and the prices were going through the roof on these things.”
Bids were starting at $10,000 for some items.
“We had a lot of fun,” he said.
His secretary was on the computer doing the bidding. “She was just spending my money like crazy,” Pottie said with a laugh.
Pottie and two of his workers took a truck and trailer to the mainland, where the auction site was ready with a forklift to transfer the 2,800-pound dinosaur in a special travelling rack. The dinosaurs were designed to come apart.
“When I pulled into the ferry terminal in Tsawwassen, it went crazy. Everybody emptied out of their vehicles and had to come over and see the dinosaur.”
When he got home, Pottie posted a notice online that whoever came up with a name would receive $50 and another $50 would be donated to the food bank. He plans to do the same thing for dino No. 2.
Pottie, a former candidate for mayor, chose the name Lance “because he lives in Lantzville.”
Locals are pouring into Pottie’s yard to view the dinosaur. “It’s going nuts here.”
Lance runs on a timer, operating for four minutes and then pausing. Pottie gets a kick out of startling visitors.
“I have a remote control in my desk in my office. And when I see people standing around and getting their picture taken, I’ll turn it on and it’ll start making noise.”
When children get up close to Lance, “their eyes just light up,” he said. “It’s priceless.”
