Jeremy Enlow/Fort Worth Zoo

AUSTIN, Tex. — The thing looks fearsome enough on the ground, 40 feet from teeth to tail, spikes raised and claws extended, rearing its head as though to give some lacertilian battle call. New Yorkers of a certain age, and a certain musical persuasion, may remember it well.

Blessed with eyes of devil red, a protruding dewlap and a bared rack of incisors to complete the vision, this beast of bright green cut the sky over a major Texas city last week, suspended from the undercarriage of a helicopter, dipping toward board members of the Fort Worth Zoo.

And yet no cries of terror sounded; no patrons fled. Quite the contrary.

Associated Press

“I knew it was going to be one of the finest moments of my life, and it was,” said Bob Wade, better known as Daddy-O, the artist who fashioned this outsize iguana sculpture, better known as Iggy, from polyurethane and steel 32 years ago in New York.

For Mr. Wade, a native of Texas, the installation was a homecoming. Though his works include outsize cowboy boots in San Antonio and an outsize football helmet in Austin, he has not contributed a significant public display to the North Texas metroplex since his outsize frogs were removed from the roof of a Dallas nightclub some years back, which is another story (though similar).

Iggy’s story begins at a display space near Niagara Falls, but it really got going in 1978 at the Lone Star Cafe, the much venerated and much more maligned honky-tonk at Fifth Avenue and 13th Street in Manhattan. The cafe’s proprietor bought the sculpture for $10,000, half in bar privileges, to decorate the roof.

“It had this confident, cocky, regal kind of look, derived from all that earlier stuff, dragons and dinosaurs,” Mr. Wade said. “In a place like New York, it could hold its own.”

By force of sheer monstrosity, Iggy soon became the mascot of the tequila-swillingest, cosmic country-blaringest, 10-gallon hat-wearingest joint in all of New York. Poised above the legend “Too Much Ain’t Enough,” it gave silent witness to the sort of debauchery occasioned by performances from Willie Nelson, Kinky Friedman and Albert King.

“The iguana looked like most of us felt,” Mr. Friedman once said, meaning bug-eyed and out of sorts.

Through crime, weather and the Koch administration (Hizzoner was a fan), Iggy persevered. When neighbors complained, a court of law pronounced the sculpture a work of art, not a sign subject to regulation.

But after the bar closed in 1989, Iggy appeared in public only occasionally, including a year or so at Pier 25, before being acquired by the Fort Worth oilman Lee M. Bass. Even in Texas, appropriate venues for the display of a furious giant lizard have been hard to come by in recent years, so Iggy lingered in storage.

In 2007, the Fort Worth Zoo, of which Mr. Bass’ wife is a co-chairwoman, broke ground on a new herpetarium.

While former patrons of the old Lone Star Cafe might at this point in the narrative suspect some impending connection to venereal disease, the facility actually houses reptiles and amphibians. In any event, talk soon turned to the notion of: Hey, what about that big ol’ iguana sculpture?

Which is how, after a thorough refurbishment, Iggy came to land with a 2,600-pound thud on the roof of the zoo hospital building, where he is set to remain indefinitely.

“It may be a little early to call him a mascot,” said Alexis Wilson, a spokeswoman for the zoo. “He’s sitting sentry.”

Back at his home in Austin, where he answers the phone, “Daddy-O,” Mr. Wade pronounced himself satisfied with the installation.

“It could be anywhere,” he said. “New York would’ve been fine. That was the original plan. But I think things have changed in New York such that you might not be able to get away with it now.”