Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

This guide to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History starts on a Montana float trip in 1988, when rancher Kathy Wankel, working with only a garden trowel and a pocketknife, noticed bone poking out of a hillside. It follows paleontologist Jack Horner and a team from the Museum of the Rockies, who spent two summers excavating the rest of the skeleton. The bones, the guide notes, stayed in Montana for twenty-five years before the Army Corps of Engineers agreed to loan them out.