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

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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.

Amber treasures

Is paleontology going extinct?

Prehistoric puzzles

Video: The discovery
of Brontomerus

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 Akst was managing editor of The Scientist, where she started as an intern in 2009 after receiving a master’s degree from Indiana University in April 2009 studying the mating behavior of seahorses.

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