Head Man In the Boneyard

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.