Word: dinosaurs
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Over the past decade, his ideas on this subject, based on a series of extraordinary finds, have helped rescue dinosaurs from the abstract realm of monsters, enabling people to view them for the first time as real animals. These theories have earned such respect in the scientific community that Horner, who flunked out of college seven times and was driving a truck in the family gravel business only 15 years ago, now heads the largest dinosaur research team in the country. Supported in part by the National Science Foundation and a MacArthur Foundation "genius award," Horner oversees a staff...
...place of the familiar panoramas of flesh-ripping Godzillas, Horner describes the most common dinosaurs as "the cows of the Mesozoic." He has found the remnants of one dinosaur herd -- an estimated 10,000 waddling, plant-eating duckbills. Even Tyrannosaurus rex seems less terrible in his revisionist view. Horner believes it followed herds of triceratops, scavenging carcasses and occasionally preying on weak individuals, much as hyenas follow wildebeests in Africa. Artists' renderings of pitched battles in which a triceratops tries to gore a tyrannosaurus in the belly are misleading. Triceratops was more likely to use its horns as a modern...
Growing up in Shelby, Mont., Horner collected his first dinosaur fossil at the age of eight, and he set out in high school to become either a paleontologist or the next Wernher Von Braun. His schoolwork was wretched, but he excelled at science projects. One, presented to a small group of bored adults at the local airport, was an experiment to track the flight of a homemade rocket. It went up 15,000 ft. at a velocity of 800 m.p.h., and the memory of his gaping elders still gratifies Horner, who scraped through high school with a D average...
...total of seven years pursuing courses in paleontology without earning a degree. He describes himself then as "driven" and says, "I didn't want to seem like just another idiot." Horner went into the family's gravel business, but he continued to hunt for a job in the dinosaur line, finally landing one in 1975 as an assistant in paleontology at Princeton University, where his first assignment was to straighten bent nails. There, at the age of 31, he discovered that his academic problem was not stupidity but dyslexia...
...local Ford dealership, the only owls that are welcomed are those made out of ceramic, which stand on the roofline warding off swallows intent on building nests under the eaves. Cars and trucks are not selling. Too much uncertainty. Says salesman Bruce Goetsch: "We survived without the dinosaur. What's the big deal about...