TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/091090/0910520.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12.5 KB | 245 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 76

Head Man In the Boneyard


No one knows more about how dinosaurs lived than JACK HORNER,
so why are so many six-year-olds mad at the paleontologist?

By RICHARD CONNIFF


    Somewhere in eastern Montana, in the rolling, eroded hills
known as the Hell Creek formation, paleontologist Jack Horner
sips a beer and looks down at the most complete Tyrannosaurus
rex ever unearthed. It lies on its left side, its neck twisted
back pitiably. Horner's crew has just exposed a section of
pelvic bone to its first sunset in 65 million years, and
someone remarks on the redness of the bone, like smoked bacon.

    "It's the comet," says Horner, with a deep nod.

    "That's why it's smoked," his crew chief says.

    Well, O.K., maybe not. Have a beer, sit down in the gray
sandstone grit, but do not attempt to reopen the great debate
over whether the dinosaurs were wiped out at the end of the
Cretaceous period by a huge comet or a vast cloud of volcanic
dust or any of 80-odd other proposed killers, all of which
Horner spurns. He has a rubber stamp that says, WHO GIVES A
S--- WHAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS? Horner cares about how they
lived.

    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 of seven and
six students. At the same time, his concepts of the social and
family lives of dinosaurs have made him the bane of
bloody-minded six-year-olds everywhere.

    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.

    In 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 deer
uses its antlers, not mainly for battle but to establish
dominance in the herd and attract a mate.

    If the 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 the scraggly beard, the sneakers and the bush
hat. But when a volunteer presents some fossils he has
gathered, Horner handles them attentively. Then he peers from
under his domed brow, and through a veil of smoke rising from
the cigarette at the corner of his mouth, he inquires, "What
else did you find out there?" There is about him something of
the disguised intensity of a gold prospector. He smokes each
cigarette down to the filter.

    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.

    By managing to worsen his academic record in college, he
soon found employment doing reconnaissance for the Marines in
Vietnam. Then he began a renewed assault on college. The
theoretical character of 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 his academic problem was not
stupidity but dyslexia.

    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 dust accumulating in the folds of their
ears and eyes. Then, after dinner, they prowl the hills for
new finds. They are bivouacked 55 miles from the nearest shower
stall, in Jordan. "I give 'em lots of beer," Horner explains.
"And I find good things for them to dig up."

    In the 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, all Horner gets is a banged-up human knee.

    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's why
I'm taking it." Elsewhere he stops at an unusual fossil spotted
the night before by a graduate student out fishing, who
excavated it part way with a daredevil spoon intended for
catching bass, not dinosaurs. "It's a metatarsal," Horner says,
completing the job. "Ornithomimid. And a darn nice one at
that."

    One day in 1977, 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-hunting pal named Bob Makela. They wound up one Sunday
morning helping the owner of a rock shop in Bynum identify some
of her fossils. Among them was a coffee can full of bones from
a recent dig, including a fragment of a thumb-size femur.
"You're not going to believe this," Horner remarked to Makela
when he picked it up.

    The femur and a collection of other bones back at the house
were from baby 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 he also found the adults that had apparently
reared their offspring to this stage. From such evidence as the
worn teeth and incompletely formed bones of the nestlings,
Horner inferred that the parents were sharing food with them
and, from their growth rate, that they were warm blooded.

    Such parenting behavior is unknown in modern reptiles and
had been unsuspected in dinosaurs, leading Horner to name this
new genus Maiasaura, or "good mother" dinosaurs. Later he found
a cluster of such nests, separated from one another by about
25 ft., the length of an adult maiasaur. He argued that they
dated from a single breeding season 80 million years ago and
that dinosaurs returned to this breeding ground yearly, like
migratory birds.

    Horner devotes much of his time to presenting dinosaurs as
they lived day by day. At the Museum of the Rockies on Sept.
15, he will open a new dinosaur hall in which, risking heresy,
there will be nothing scary. An orodromeus scratches its jaw
with a hind leg, and a maiasaur sits like a huge, impassive
camel. In a corner a pterosaur stands on the ground, looking
like an Audubon heron in a fun-house mirror. "I wanted the
exhibits to portray animals," says Horner, "not just single
events of aggression."

    Going against the custom of mounting the most spectacular
dinosaur bones on steel, which can reduce their scientific
value, he aims to put only a bronze cast of his tyrannosaurus
outside the museum. The bones will go on display much as his
crew found them. The idea is to let ordinary museumgoers see
the evidence from which paleontologists make their leaps of
reasoning and imagination. They will be able to argue, for
instance, over the only tyrannosaurus arm ever found. It is
about as long as a human arm -- too short, in Horner's view, to
be much use in predation, but far more muscular than previously
thought, having been capable of curling 400 lbs. Horner seems
to relish arguing such questions imaginatively far more than
actually proving himself right. In Horner's undogmatic
approach, the museum's fleshed-out dioramas are designed to
evolve every few years as our view of dinosaurs advances.

    His dyslexia, which still sometimes causes him to puzzle for
half an hour over a single word, has predisposed Horner against
academic overcomplication and rigidity. He isn't the type to
stake out an intellectual claim and spend his life footnoting
it and fending off critics. For Horner, what matters is getting
into the field, finding more bones and listening to what his
hands have to say about them. Early one morning on a roadside
somewhere north of Jordan, he pulls on a backpack loaded with
water bottles, tools, a can of sardines for lunch. He has about
him an air of understated excitement. "Let's go look for some
damned dinosaurs," he says. Then he heads out once again to the
bone-rich hills of Hell Creek.