In the wake of the Great Depression, you would think that dinosaurs would be of no concern to the American government. Who had time to care about prehistoric monsters when the nation had been thrown into crippling economic turmoil? Yet the fossil-rich expanses of the Western states offered unique opportunities for unemployed Americans to get back to work, and at least one project indirectly resulted in the discovery of one of the most formidable predators ever to stalk the coastal swamps of the Late Cretaceous.

Big Bend National Park sits in a little nub of western Texas along the Mexico border. Back in the 1930s, before the land became a national park, the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps put