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Also on hand was Jack Horner, curator of paleontology at Montana State University's Museum of the Rockies and Crichton's model for the book's hero -- though Horner wryly notes that Alan Grant is "better funded." He advised on every creature feature, from head (they often lost teeth) to foot (when they walked, the heel, not the toe, hit the ground first.) "They have detail inside the T. rex's mouth that no one has ever seen. It's a guess -- a best guess. And a lot of adults will be surprised that dinosaurs don't drag their tails...
Despite all the fossils unearthed since then, scientists are still working with spotty information. "We probably don't even know 1% of all the species," admits Jack Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. Yet they have made tremendous progress in understanding how dinosaurs evolved, how they came to dominate the world for an incomprehensibly long 165 million years (humans, by contrast, have been around fewer than 4 million), how they lived and behaved, and how they finally passed into history...
...when Jack Horner happened upon 14 rocky nests in an eastern Montana excavation that was later dubbed Egg Mountain, another dinosaur myth bit the dust. The egg-filled nests belonged to hadrosaurs -- duck-billed dinosaurs -- which had apparently built vast rookeries much the way social birds like penguins do. Though dinosaurs were never thought to be especially cuddly or caring, these creatures clearly nurtured their young, probably feeding them by mouth like baby birds until they were strong enough to leave the nest. Horner and his colleagues named the species Maiasaura -- Greek for "Good Mother Lizard...
...nests were spaced an average of 23 ft. apart -- about the size of an adult maiasaur. Birds often do the same thing, laying their eggs close enough together for maximum mutual protection, yet far enough apart so that they can move easily past their neighbors. Inside the nests, Horner found lots of tiny eggshell fragments. If the baby maiasaurs had simply hatched and wandered off to fend for themselves, he reasoned, the shells would simply be broken; the fact that they were thoroughly smashed convinced him that the babies stayed around to be cared for and fed. He also believes...
...PORTRAITS OF ELIZABETH AGASSIZ AND MATINA HORNER...