Jack Horner

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Jack Horner

John "Jack" Robert Horner (born June 15, 1946 in Shelby , Montana ) is an American paleontologist . He was best known for his evidence of family cohesion in some dinosaur species and for his work as a scientific advisor to the Jurassic Park films.

biography

Horner grew up in his birthplace, Shelby , Montana, where his father was involved in gravel extraction. He found his first dinosaur bone when he was eight. From 1964 he attended the University of Montana , where he mainly studied geology and zoology (with the aim of becoming a paleontologist). He was drafted during the Vietnam War in 1965 and served in the United States Marine Corps ( Special Forces ) in Vietnam until 1968 . He then returned to the University of Montana, but never graduated due to poor grades, which Horner later attributed to dyslexia diagnosed in Princeton. In 1973 he and his brother temporarily took over the gravel business from his father, digging for dinosaurs in his spare time, but also applying to museums and starting his first job as a technician at Princeton University's Museum of Natural History in 1975 (he also had offers from the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada and the Los Angeles County Museum), under the direction of Donald Baird . Two years later he was a research assistant. In 1979 he attracted attention through the discovery of a dinosaur nest with young animals and from 1982 he was curator at the Museum of the Rockies and adjunct professor in the Faculty of Geology.

In 1986 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Montana for his outstanding achievements in paleontology and the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in the same year . In 2013 he received the Romer Simpson Medal for his life's work .

Horner has published more than a hundred academic texts and articles and six books. He is now curator of the paleontology department of the Museum of the Rockies and teaches at Montana State University in Bozeman .

He has been married twice and has one son.

Jurassic Park

Jack Horner is best known outside of the professional world for his work on Steven Spielberg's dinosaur thriller Jurassic Park . He acted as a scientific advisor for the first film from 1993 as well as for the two subsequent films, who checked the scriptwriters' ideas for their realism and played a key role in determining the appearance and behavior of the movie dinosaurs. There was occasional criticism that the dinosaurs were misrepresented or that they behaved atypically; However, this was largely due to narrative liberties that the filmmakers took for reasons of drama. Horner also introduced new theories into the development of the films, such as the theory, which contradicts the general picture, that Tyrannosaurus rex was more of a scavenger than a predator . The character of Alan Grant, adopted from Michael Crichton's book, was also given some features of Horner during the course of the filming.

Theories and discoveries

Dino families

In 1978 Horner and his colleague Bob Makela discovered the fossilized nesting site of a previously unknown dinosaur species, which they named Maiasaura . Numerous fossil eggs and the first dinosaur embryo to be discovered in the world were found in the nests . The close proximity of the nests and the presence of numerous adult animals allowed Horner's theory to mature that some dinosaurs did have a distinct social and family life. With this new idea, he established himself as a scientist and was henceforth widely recognized.

Horner with a bird skeleton

He came across the nest when he came across the bones of baby dinosaurs in a minerals and fossil store in Montana in 1978 and was pointed out by the owner to the site where he found an entire nest and later colonies of nests, making the Egg place Mountain was baptized (at Choteau in Montana).

Scavenger T-Rex and finds from T-Rex

Horner is an avowed advocate of the hotly debated thesis that the Tyrannosaurus rex , which has been considered the epitome of all "killing machines" in the history of the earth for many decades in the specialist and lay world, was a scavenger. The attitude to see the T-Rex as a hunter goes back to its first find by Barnum Brown in 1902 in Hell Creek (USA). According to the state of knowledge about reptiles at the time, the T-Rex, which was very incomplete, was set up. The posture was not natural, but rather should look very cruel and effective. Horner assumes, however, that the T-Rex was in truth a slow scavenger that used its size and strength primarily to steal prey from smaller hunters. He bases this on the fact that the giant lacked the agility of actual hunters such as the Velociraptor and that instead of ripping teeth it was equipped with crushing teeth , with which it could not kill well, but could dissect an already dead prey. Horner also sees the dinosaur's brain, which is apparently specialized in smelling, as a typical scavenger characteristic. A computer tomography of a fossilized brainshell showed that the visual center was relatively poorly developed, making nocturnal hunting, as well as in the morning and twilight phase, almost impossible. The olfactory center, on the other hand, was very well developed and its proportions were comparable to those of a turkey vulture . This can still smell carrion from 40 km away through its strongly pronounced Jacobsonian organ . Horner also believes that the T-Rex was a pack animal .

His discovery of five T. Rex specimens in 2000 in the Fort Peck Reservoir of the Hell Creek Formation of the Upper Cretaceous in Montana - one of which, C. rex , one of the largest specimens ever found, larger than Sue  - contributed to the collection of the Museum of the Rockies in this area to make it one of the largest in the world.

Juvenile stages of dinosaurs

Horner found and examined several skulls of young Triceratops and found that the horns were initially pointed back and only later pointed forward. The shape of the neck shield also changed significantly, with small bumps on the edge receding in the older specimens. He is of the opinion that grooves in the neck shields are an indication of a keratin coating on the shields and, based on a comparison with birds, he suspects that the shields of males were colored and that the neck shield and horns were intended to impress females in particular during mating rituals. In 2010 he published a work with John Scanella in which he holds Torosaurus and Triceratops for different stages of development of the same species, with Torosaurus corresponding to an adult Triceratops .

He assumes that other dinosaurs also show strong differences between juvenile and adult specimens, and that this will significantly reduce the number of dinosaur species. For example, with Mark Goodwin, he considers Pachycephalosaurus , Stygimoloch and Dracorex to be at different stages of development of the same species.

Terms, dedication names

Horner named a number of types of dinosaurs, including the Maiasaura . The species Achelosaurus horneri (Scott Sampson 1995, the holotype skull was discovered by Horner in 1987) and Anasazisaurus horneri are again named after him.

Re-creation of dinosaurs through genetic manipulation of birds

In a book published in 2009, Horner described the possibility of developing typical dinosaur traits through genetic manipulation of birds, initially a longer tail, teeth in the beak and three-fingered forelimbs, in a book published in 2009 (German: Evolution backwards - on the traces of the dinosaur in the chicken, Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, 2010) . All of these features have also been observed in the early stages of avian embryo development and Horner considers a realization in the near future to be realistic and is working on it (2011) in collaboration with geneticists.

Fonts

  • with Edwin Dobb Dinosaur Lives: Unearthing an Evolutionary Saga , New York City: HarperCollins 1997
  • with Don Lessem The complete T. Rex , Simon and Schuster 1993
  • with Don Lessem Digging up Tyrannosaurus Rex , New York: Crown 1992
  • with James Gorman Digging Dinosaurs , New York: Workman 1988
  • with James Gorman Hunting Dinosaurs New York: Workman Pub. 1990
  • Dinosaur reproduction and parenting , Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Science 28, 2000, 19-45
  • The nesting behavior of dinosaurs , Scientific American, Volume 250, 1984, pp. 130-137
  • with Kevin Padian , A. de Ricqles How dinosaurs grew so large and so small , Scientific American, 293, 2004, No. 4, 32-39.
  • with James Gorman How to build a dinosaur: extinction doesn't have to be forever , New York: Dutton 2009
  • Dinosaurs under the Big Sky , Missoula, Montana 2001
  • with James Gorman Maia. A Dinosaur grows up , Museum of the Rockies 1985 (children's book)
  • Edited with K. Carpenter, KF Hirsch Dinosaur eggs and babies , Cambridge University Press 1994
  • Steak knives, beady eyes, and tiny little arms (A portrait of T-rex as a scavenger) , in GD Rosenberg, DL Wolberg (editor): Dino Fest , The Paleontological Society, Special Publication No. 7, 1994, pp. 157-164
  • Article Egg Mountain , Behavior , Yale Peabody Museum in J. Currie, K. Padian (Editor) Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs , Academic Press 1997
  • Evolution backwards: On the trail of the dinosaur in the chicken, Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, 2010, with James Gorman

Web links

Commons : Jack Horner  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Horner An intellectual autobiography , The Montana Professor Spring 2004
  2. ^ Entry in American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  3. ↑ Horner, Makela Nest of juveniles provides evidence of family structure among dinosaurs , Nature, 282, 1979, 296-298
  4. ↑ BBC News Dig pulls up five T. rex specimens , October 10, 2000
  5. ^ Horner, Goodwin Major cranial changes during Triceratops ontogeny , Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 273, 2006, 2757-2761
  6. ↑ Goodwin, Horner Extrime cranial ontogeny in the Upper Cretaceous dinosaur Pachycephalosaurus , Public Library of Science (PLOS) One, v. 4, issue 10, 2009
  7. ↑ Stephanie Pappas, Interview with Horner, Dino-Chicken: Wacky But Serious Science Idea of ​​2011 , Live Science December 27, 2011
personal data
SURNAME Horner, Jack
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Horner, John R. (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH June 15, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH Shelby , Montana , USA