Word: horner
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Starting out early one recent morning in Hell Creek, Horner points to a black line in the layer cake of geologic deposits. "That's the Tertiary- Cretaceous boundary," he advises a newcomer. "There's nothing above there but a lot of old mammals. Gives dinosaur people nosebleeds to go up that high." Farther down, at the tyrannosaurus site, his crew of graduate students and preparators are already chinking and clanging into the sandstone with jackhammers, pickaxes, shovels, chisels and ice picks. The workers are at it from 7:30 to 4:30, six days a week, with a fine gray...
...latter cause, Horner heads out each day with his fossil hunter's pick in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The hillsides are pocked with deep sinkholes and covered with bentonite, a loose mudstone that gives the sensation of walking on popcorn. When Horner slips, he drives the pick in up to its haft and hangs on as it plows a neat furrow 30 feet down a hillside without catching on anything solid. If this were an Indiana Jones movie, he would smash into something wonderful at the bottom -- the skull of a Pachycephalosaurus, say. In real life...
Triceratopses can be had cheap hereabouts. Horner picks his way through the litter ("Rib city," he remarks, dismissively) with an eye for the shape of the land as it was in the Cretaceous, when rivers from the Rockies flowed through eastern Montana into a vast central seaway. At one point he kneels and works at some potentially good thing with a car mechanic's gasket scraper, then sweeps off the debris with a whisk broom. A visitor asks what he has found. "I haven't got a clue," he says, wrapping the pieces of bone in toilet paper. "That...
...while fossil hunting with his father in Montana's Two Medicine formation, Horner picked up a rock that resembled a squashed turtle. It turned out to be one of the first intact dinosaur eggs ever found in the western hemisphere, and Horner's work at Princeton thus came to focus on one of paleontology's great mysteries: the almost complete absence of juvenile dinosaurs, especially babies, from the fossil record. He went back to Montana the following summer, with the idea of spending his vacation searching for babies in some likely shales, in the company of a beer-drinking, fossil...
...duckbills. The shop owner took the two paleontologists to a ranch near Choteau where she had found the fragments, and during the next few weeks the scientists unearthed an entire nest 6 ft. in diameter, separating out the fossils with a garden hose and a window screen. To nonpaleontologists, Horner writes in his recent book, Digging Dinosaurs (Workman Publishing; $17.95), the fossils resembled "a bunch of black, sticklike rocks -- jumbled and inscrutable, the way much of modern art seems to me." But to Horner, they were the remains of 15 duckbill babies, almost ready to leave the nest. Nearby...