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The Mantis is a roughly 40-foot-tall, 30-foot-wide fire-breathing praying mantis sculpture at Downtown Container Park, 707 Fremont Street, Las Vegas. Aerospace engineer Kirk Jellum built it as a 150:1 scale replica of a female mantis; the Review-Journal dates its creation to 2010 and says it was taken to Burning Man. Tony Hsieh later brought it to downtown Las Vegas. The park's own schedule lists Mantis fire displays from sunset.
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Praying Mantis
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Site-level location · 36.1674° N, 115.1386° W
FIELD GUIDE
The story
A 40-foot praying mantis breathes fire at Downtown Container Park in Las Vegas, and, according to Vital Vegas, it was originally created for Burning Man.
The Mantis was built by aerospace engineer Kirk Jellum. The Las Vegas Review-Journal, in December 2024, dated its creation to 2010 and relayed the park's website figures of 500 hours of design and 3,000 hours of construction by a team of 20. It measures 40 feet tall and 30 feet wide. Vital Vegas, in 2015, quoted Jellum describing it as a 150:1 scale replica of a female mantis that he found in a field, built on a 1983 GMC dump truck so that it is mobile and street legal. The Review-Journal describes a truck chassis, and says the art car went to Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada.
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PRACTICAL
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WHAT TO EXPECT
Stands at the entrance to Downtown Container Park, Fremont East. Flame performances begin at sundown and run until 11 p.m. on weekdays and 1 a.m. on weekends, per the Review-Journal.
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Visible from the public street; Container Park is open to the public. It is portable and on loan, so its position could change.
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