Lizard Made of Car Parts

A 30-foot lizard made of car scrap sits above a municipal garage in St. Petersburg, and the fly on its tongue is a working light. Security Lizard is the work of local sculptor Paul Eppling (1949 to 2016). The Tampa Bay Times reported in May 1995 that he had installed it with a crane at the main entrance of the city's new fleet maintenance garage and office, just east of Interstate 275 on Seventh Avenue North. The paper gave its size as 30 feet long and 8 feet high, weighing more than 4,000 pounds, supported by special pads built at the reconstructed garage, and said it was made from automotive scraps found at the site.

Eppling had won a $10,000 competition the year before to provide the public art. The Times called it the third project installed by the city's Public Arts Commission, after Beach Balls at the North Shore Pool and The Pleasures of Porpoise at the southwest sewage treatment plant. The Times said the lizard appears to have caught a firefly, and Creative Pinellas wrote in 2024 that the fly "is an imagined creature with a real purpose": its body is a light that illuminates the outside of the garage at night.