One Hip Dino

By Jef Akst One Hip Dino An artist’s rendition of Brontomerus mcintoshi delivering a powerful kick to a Utahraptor Francisco Gascó 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 youn

Written byJef Akst

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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.

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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 studying paleontology in college and grad school, took no notice of the ...

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Meet the Author

Jef Akst
Jef (an unusual nickname for Jennifer) got her master’s degree from Indiana University in April 2009 studying the mating behavior of seahorses. After four years of diving off the Gulf Coast of Tampa and performing behavioral experiments at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, she left research to pursue a career in science writing. As The Scientist's managing editor, Jef edited features and oversaw the production of the TS Digest and quarterly print magazine. In 2022, her feature on uterus transplantation earned first place in the trade category of the Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. She is a member of the National Association of Science Writers.
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