Only a small number of people can say they’ve named a new dinosaur, and now Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences student Kyle Atkins-Weltman is part of that exclusive club. Atkins-Weltman, an anatomy and vertebrate paleontology Ph.D. student in the School of Biomedical Sciences, was studying a small collection of foot and leg bone fossils of what was believed to be a juvenile Anzu wyliei, which was described as a “chicken from hell” when it was discovered in 2014. But histology tests of the bones conducted at OSU-CHS determined that it wasn’t a juvenile, but a different species in the dinosaur family caenagnathid. Atkins-Weltman named the new dinosaur Eoneophron infernalis, which translates to Pharaoh’s dawn chicken from hell. The name honors the description of the Anzu as well as his late beloved pet, a Nile monitor lizard named Pharaoh. Based on rough estimates, Eoneophron weighed around 150 to 160 pounds and stood about 3 feet tall at the hip, about the size of a human.
