An artist’s rendition of Brontomerus mcintoshi delivering a powerful kick to a UtahraptorFRANCISCO GASCO
For high school junior Mathew Wedel, an internship at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in 1992 was a pretty sweet gig. He was one of those kids whose dinosaur phase had never worn off, and now he got to help prepare and catalog fossils and identify bones donated to the museum by local farmers. But the young Wedel had no idea then that his connection with the institution would one day help earn him and a curious new dinosaur species places in the annals of science history.
A couple years later, fragments of two partial dinosaur skeletons were recovered from an eastern Utah quarry and brought to the museum in Norman, Oklahoma. Wedel, who worked at the museum on and off while ...