While chipping away one day in 2004, he exposed the skull and neck of a curious creature with razor-sharp protruding teeth and a snubby snout.
He went to his boss, Bob Sullivan.
"The teeth, the eye sockets, the snout were different than the dinosaur remains excavated from that site," said Sullivan, senior curator of paleontology at the State Museum. "We had something unique."
This much Sullivan knew: Teeth that sharp belonged to a meat-eater. It traveled on two legs and lived about 200 million years ago.
Next, Sullivan brought in the heavyweights - David Berman, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, and Hans-Dieter Sues of the Smithsonian Institution, a specialist in dinosaurs of the Triassic era - who carefully removed the chunk containing the remains for further study.
"Ninety-five percent of the fossils [found] are known, but every so often you get something odd," said Sues, who was the first to formally identify the skeleton as the remains of a new dinosaur. "It was unlike anything I had seen."
The immense front teeth, with blades serrated like knives, identified it as a "new predatory kind of dinosaur," Sues said
Unlike in the movies, one expert's opinion did not a dinosaur make. Plenty more hands-on work to fully uncover the skeleton fragment followed, which set in motion the long academic vetting process, ending only last month with the publication of a scholarly article in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
That was cause for celebration in the State Museum in Harrisburg - which in recent years, thanks to serial budget cuts and layoffs, hadn't had much to celebrate.
