Shark Reef, the aquarium at Mandalay Bay, recently acquired a Komodo dragon to celebrate its eighth anniversary. “What?” I asked myself when I read the story. “Shark Reef has been there eight years already?” I first visited the aquarium when it opened, and it doesn’t seem possible that the big half of a decade has gone by since I first flashed my driver’s license for the locals’ discount. Then again, I visited Shark Reef a year or so ago, and noticed that the fish were all a lot bigger than they had been on my first tour. “We start out with small sharks,” I remember the docent saying back in 2000. “We like to let them grow into their space.”

That started me thinking about all the other things that have been growing into their space here in the Vegas Valley since the turn of the millennium. I hardly qualify as a longtime Las Vegan, but when I began making a list, I was amazed at how many buildings, productions, businesses and projects have burst onto the scene since I arrived here at the end of 1999. Yes, there’s been some attrition, too, but the net gain is at least as impressive as an 87-pound, 7-foot-long endangered lizard with a forked tongue. Consider the following.

When I moved into my house on the south side of town in 2000, I had to drive on a dirt road to get to the nearest grocery store. Howling desert stretched on three sides of my subdivision, and a couple of coyotes roamed the streets each evening. In the past eight years, a high school, a middle school, two elementary schools and three churches have sprung up within walking distance, and the dirt track I navigated to buy groceries is now a six-lane swath of asphalt bordered by hundreds of houses, a bar, a Mexican restaurant, a self-storage business, a gas station, a donut shop, a drugstore, a pizza place, a bank and a supermarket. A mile away looms the enormous gold South Point, a “locals’ casino” that occupies another large piece of formerly howling desert. Another such property, the M Resort, is rising from the sands nearby as I write this, and more gigantic projects are on the drawing board. This is only my neighborhood I’m describing, an area of maybe 5 square miles. Similar growth is taking place all over the Valley, an area of roughly 200 square miles.

The Strip has changed dramatically over the last few years, too. In addition to new resorts—the Aladdin, the Wynn, the Palazzo—the monumental signs on most of the properties are now mega-huge digital displays rather than flashing neon. Caesars Palace built a huge Colosseum-style theater and added spectacularly to the Caesars Forum Shops. A weird big sign at the Fashion Show Mall now makes the place look like aliens have landed, and the Aladdin has shed its genies to become Planet Hollywood. Jimmy Buffett took over some frontage at the Flamingo for Margaritaville, and the Monte Carlo added Diablo’s Cantina across the street. Perhaps most awe-inspiring is the 24-hour-a-day activity on the site of what used to be the Boardwalk Casino. CityCenter is the largest building project Las Vegas has ever seen. Up the Strip on the site of the now-imploded Stardust, work is underway on Echelon, another larger-than-ever mega-resort. If there’s a recession going on, no one has bothered to tell these developers.

Changes abound in downtown Las Vegas, too. High-rise condo projects have burst skyward on lots formerly occupied by seedy motels and decaying commercial properties. An “arts district” welcomes visitors every month to “First Friday,” an increasingly popular evening of gallery openings and entertainment now in its fifth year. The “Fremont Street Experience” was upgraded with 12.5 million LED lights and a 550,000-watt sound system a couple of years ago. Sharp new government buildings, combined with continuing beautification efforts, have really begun to soften the gritty edges of downtown. The huge, multi-building World Market Center has successfully attracted furniture wholesalers to Las Vegas, and upscale factory outlet stores draw locals and tourists alike to the recently-godforsaken no man’s land between the railroad tracks and Interstate 15. There’s even a half-finished Frank Gehry building in downtown Las Vegas, the future home of the Lou Ruvo Brain Institute.

Of course, I’ve also seen things vanish in Las Vegas during my eight-year residency. Implosions brought about the instant disappearance of the Desert Inn, the Castaways, the Stardust and the New Frontier. A tiger attack removed Siegfried & Roy abruptly from the Mirage’s main showroom, and new management at Mandalay Bay decided that a casino really doesn’t need a bookstore. Perhaps most astonishing for “Sin City” is the disappearance of ashtrays in local pubs. A ban recently passed by voters has accomplished the unthinkable: no smoking in bars that serve food.

Growth has slowed a bit, but it’s still rampant. While I try to embrace it, I find myself understanding the nostalgia of old-timers more and more. Even though I’ve been here less than a decade, I sometimes think back to the dirt roads and coyotes that were part of my everyday experience so recently. I knew when I moved in that the bulldozers were only minutes away, but even so, it’s easy to be wistful for a time when the city’s official bird might have been a roadrunner and its animal a coyote. Now—and for the foreseeable future—the bird is the crane, and the animal is the CAT.

Unless it’s that Komodo dragon at Shark Reef. Like Las Vegas, he’s amazing-looking and attracts crowds. Also like Las Vegas, he’s still growing.