Word: horner
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...Horner has demonstrated that some dinosaurs were nurturing parents, raising their young in large nesting colonies and bringing their offspring berries and green vegetation, much as do birds. He has shown that the young in such species were neotenous -- or cute, as Horner puts it more plainly; until maturity they were gawky, with such vulnerable traits as enlarged heads, big eyes and shortened snouts, which theorists of animal behavior believe elicit the nurturing response in humans and other child-rearing species...
...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...
...viewpoint is unconventional, so is the man. Horner, 44, teaches at Montana State University and is curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, but he has no knack for academic decorum (administrators at the museum wish the rubber stamp could say, I DON'T GIVE A DARN WHAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS). He disdains intellectual showboating, describing his own tyrannosaurus as a "media specimen," valuable mainly because it will bring the fang-and-claw set into the museum to see really important stuff, like duckbills tending their offspring. His manner is casual and laconic, which fits with...
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...
...rocketry frustrated him, but fossils were something he could get his hands on, and he put in a 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...