The metal artwork of Great Bend resident Bob Mix can be found throughout the Great Bend Brit Spaugh Zoo. Visitors enter the zoo through the Raptor Center, a multipurpose building that features a flathead fish skeleton sculpture created by Mix. At the southeast end of the zoo, a metal vulture — also by Mix — guides visitors to the new home of the zoo’s real-life turkey vulture, Tina. Zookeeper Ashley Burdick said Tina came to the zoo about two years ago with a broken wing and was unable to return to the wild. She was moved to that exhibit area, where she has more room than before. It is the same exhibit that once housed Spidey, a spider monkey that lived to be more than 50 years old. Between the flathead and the vulture sculptures, zoo visitors can find two more of Mix’s creations. There’s a large-mouth fish near the herpetology building and the skeleton of a 70-million-year-old flightless Cretaceous bird, Hesperonis Regalis, near the alligator pond. Mix has been an artist since 1983 and his works can be found throughout Kansas and beyond. He is a featured artist at the Grassroots Art Center in Lucas. Mix says he uses the skills developed as a conventional metal fabricator to create whimsical machines and creatures, but the pieces at the zoo are more true to life. Mix said he consulted Alan Dietrich, an amateur paleontologist formerly from Great Bend, before creating the accurate representation of a hesperonis fossil. The book Kansas Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities and other Offbeat Stuff by Pam Grout, says the spine for hesperonis was made from a drilling rig gear chain. “We did it in eleven days,” Mix said. That’s how his art usually evolves; Mix says if he understands the structure behind something, he creates his pieces using God’s talent and his time. “You see what you want to do and you just keep building it.”