Paisano Pete

Paisano Pete is a roadrunner 11 feet tall and 22 feet long standing at the corner of North Main Street and East Dickinson Boulevard in Fort Stockton, Texas, where the business route of Interstate 10 runs through town carrying US 285 and US 385 with it. He went up at the end of the 1970s, in 1979 or 1980 depending on the account, and the town named him by public competition, paying out 50 dollars for the winning entry. Paisano is the Spanish name for the bird in this part of Texas. He is fiberglass, he is reported to have cost 6,250 dollars, and the Wisconsin company said to have made him is named in no source at all. Fort Stockton has treated him as the town mascot ever since, and he was repainted along with the old fort's entrance arch in June 2025. For about fourteen years he was also the largest roadrunner anywhere. That ended in 1993, when Olin Calk built a bird 20 feet tall and 40 feet long out of landfill scrap at Las Cruces, New Mexico, which beats Pete on both measurements. There is a footnote in Pete's favour: the Las Cruces roadrunner was taken down in poor condition around 2011 and did not return until June 2014, so for those years Pete was arguably the largest one actually standing. Signs and tourist copy around Texas still call him the world's largest, and a records certification company issued a fresh proclamation to that effect in 2022, but the measurements have not changed and neither has the answer.