It was painful to watch. But it had to be done.

Dino the Dinosaur's head was carefully removed from the rest of his body Wednesday morning, without anesthesia. The Bayville landmark has stood through 82 years of rain, snow, heat and cold. But earlier this year an ominous crack in Dino's neck appeared and grew larger day by day.

Berkeley Township Citizens Facebook page administrator Steve Baeli, Township Councilman James J. Byrnes,Mayor Carmen F. Amato Jr. and another volunteer gathered at Dino's perch in front of a defunct paint store on Route 9 South to perform the surgery. They used an electric saw to cut through inches of cement, wire lathe and even a large piece of steel before the operation was complete. It wasn't as easy as they thought.

"I didn't know dinosaurs were this heavy," Baeli said. The 10-foot high dinosaur has stood sentinel on Route 9 South since the early 1930s. It's perched on top of a rectangle of concrete, close to the roadway, in front of the paint store.

When the crack appeared earlier this year, members of the Berkeley Township Citizens Group Facebook page began banding together to help save Dino from extinction. They were eventually joined by Amato, Byrnes, the Berkeley Township Historical Society and the Berkeley P.B.A.

It's been there since roughly 1932, when it was moved from a Freehold Sinclair service station that used the creature for its advertising logo, according to Alfred T. Stokely's Images of America: Berkeley Township.

The owner of the property - a Texas-based investment firm - wants Dino to stay where he is, but gave the coalition permission to begin repairing the dinosaur. Once Dino's head was removed, Baeli put a contractor bag over his neck and wrapped yards of black duct tape around it to keep it in place. Coalition members hope to have Dino's neck shrink-wrapped until a permanent fix can be found.