Evolution Of A Paleontologist

Volume fiVe number two, two thousand nine

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50 Years Later: Hebgen Lake and 8 Seconds that Changed Everything The Evolution of Jack Horner James Welch and the Birth of a Montana Voice

Imprisoned for a Heinous Crime he Didn’t Commit, Jimmy Ray Bromgard Gets on with his Life Poaching a Current through Yellowstone

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Evolution of a Paleontologist Labeled everything from “lazy and dumb” to “genius,” Jack Horner uses his unique mind to push the envelope with his latest idea: hatching a chickenosaur BY SCOT T MCMILLION PHOTOGRAPHY BY THOMAS LEE

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aleontologist Jack Horner has just released his sixth book. And that means he’s written more books than he’s read, he likes to tell people. It’s not entirely a joke. Writing a book is never easy. Not if it’s a good one. But writing is a particularly difficult job for Horner, because he has dyslexia. Still, you can’t really say he suffers from the condition. Rather, he says it’s helped make him who he is, which is probably the best-known dinosaur scientist in the world, and certainly one of the most accomplished. Dyslexia is a genetic condition that makes it difficult — in some cases nearly impossible — to read and write. Horner says his case is “extreme.” Just reading the icons on his computer desktop requires concentration. “I read at a third-grade level,” he said. And yet he has won a MacArthur “genius” grant, he helped reinvent how the world understands dinosaurs, he mentors a variety of Ph.D. candidates, and he oversees the

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His research has convinced him that dinosaurs were brightly colored and a lot smarter than most people give them credit for. And many of them were feathered.

world’s largest collection of North American dinosaur fossils at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman and the nation’s largest paleontology field station. Now he’s planning to hatch a dinosaur from a chicken egg. This, too, is not a joke. He explains it all in his new book, How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn’t Have to be Forever. Like all of his books, it’s been written with a co-author. But the message, the science and the ideas are all Horner’s. Dyslexia helped make this possible, he says. “Personally, I think dyslexia and the consequences of dyslexia — learning to deal with failure — explains my own success,” Horner wrote in a 2007 essay about his condition. People who read easily tend to be linear thinkers, he said. Dyslexics tend to be spatial thinkers. Their mind travels in all sorts of directions. “I don’t have a lot of preconceived ideas about things,” he said, while the ideas of readers tend to build on other people’s thoughts. “I get to do my own thinking and figuring out.” A prime example of this came in the 1970s, with the discovery of baby dinosaurs in fossilized nests near Choteau. Most paleontology at the time held the view that dinosaurs laid 38

A model of a chicken skeleton stands behind two massive computer monitors in Jack Horner’s office in the basement of the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman.

eggs and walked away, like a turtle. If Horner had stuck to his lessons, he might not have figured out that they tended their babies. Since then, his research has convinced him that dinosaurs were brightly colored and a lot smarter than most people give them credit for. And many of them were feathered. Now, with his new book, he’s pushing the envelope a lot further, urging the field of paleontology to take a giant step forward by creating a live dinosaur, though it won’t be any bigger than a chicken. Horner says it can be done, probably within the next five years. He calls the creature a “chickenosaurus,” and his book spells out how to do it. “It’s fairly simple genetic engineering,” he said. SO WHO IS THIS GUY? For most people, there’s nothing simple about genetic

engineering. But Jack Horner isn’t most people. In his writings, public appearances and interviews, a

complicated picture emerges. Now 62, he grew up in his father’s home town of Shelby, Mont., where he describes a painful youth of introversion and extreme shyness. He was called names: lazy, dumb, maybe even retarded. All because of his dyslexia, which had not been diagnosed. While classwork proved torturous, he excelled at science projects and won regional science fairs. He found his first fossil at the age of 8, and from then on knew what he wanted to do in life: study dinosaurs, figure out how they lived. He graduated high school, but just barely, with a grade-point average of something below a D. Then he proceeded to the University of Montana, where he studied geology, but flunked out several times, though he took every course he could find that was related to paleontology. Between his academic sessions, he pulled a stint in Vietnam as an elite Recon Marine, which left him with mixed feelings. He matured in those jungles, and he learned something about the world, but the bad memories flood back sometimes in the form of “lingering symptoms of post traumatic stress syndrome.” After the Marine Corps, he pulled a few more quarters at UM. He learned all he could, but the dyslexia left him unable to complete a degree so he left Missoula and tried his hand at his father’s gravel company in Shelby. But even as he drove the trucks and heavy equipment, dinosaurs roamed his mind, and he spent weekends stalking the prairies for their bones. Finally, in 1973, he landed his first paleontology job, at Princeton University, despite his lack of a college degree and his miserable grades. In 1978, while on vacation in Montana, he found the dinosaur nests — plus eggs and babies and embryos — near Choteau. He figured out what they meant, published his findings in the prestigious academic journal Nature, and his reputation was made.

Horner examines a slice of triceratops skull through a microscope.

In 1982, the Museum of the Rockies persuaded him to return to Montana as a resident paleontologist, where he leads excavations every summer and spends the rest of the year in his cluttered office in the museum basement, surrounded by dinosaur bones and rubber dinosaur toys, plaques and photographs and awards on the walls. He’s a regents professor at MSU, has a couple honorary doctorates, and has consulted for the Jurassic Park movies. Celebrities and politicians seek his attention. Every summer, 1,000 people apply to be his unpaid field grunts. He selects 30 of them. His shelves are filled with scientific books he consults but does not read. His computer has three terabytes of memory, and it’s full. In recent years, he spends more and more time peering through a microscope, studying cross sections of dinosaur bone not much thicker than a hair. “This is what I do,” he said. “I sit here in front of the microscope and look at these things.” And it is the work done in the lab — not in the field — that will drive the next innovations in paleontology, he says. Like

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making a chicken grow the teeth, arms and tail of a dinosaur. Molecules are fossils, too, he says in his new book. They illustrate the link between extinct dinosaurs and their modern relatives, the birds we see every day. “There must be a marriage or merger of the skills and knowledge of molecular biology and paleontology,” he wrote. That blend — the shovel work in the sun-baked fields and the sterilized laboratories of the microbiologist — are what makes it possible to grow a new dinosaur. THE CHICKEN AND THE EGG Modern birds still carry the genetics of their ancient ancestors, genes that would allow them to grow teeth in their beaks, arms instead of wings, and long tails instead of the stubs they now have, Horner says. Evidence of this can be seen in chicken embryos, where birds take the microscopic first steps toward growing teeth and tails and arms. But along the way, a biochemical signal arrives and shuts off the genes, so those body parts stop developing. To keep them growing requires neutralizing the off-switch, which can be done chemically while the embryo is still in the

egg. Horner is now working closely with scientists at Canada’s McGill University, trying to make it happen. His goal, he said, is to show that evolution is real. And trotting out a dinosaur on a leash would be a lot more effective than a slide show. “If evolution didn’t work, you couldn’t do that,” he said. That’s because, if the chicken didn’t already have dinosaur genes, it couldn’t grow dinosaur parts. No foreign genes will be implanted in the chicken embryos. If the creature somehow managed to breed, it would create baby chickens, not dinosaurs, because its genes remain unchanged. They just experienced some different on-off switches in the embryonic stage. And if it escaped, it wouldn’t tear up the world like the creatures in the Jurassic Park movies. It would have roughly the same chances of survival as any chicken on its own in the world. “I have no doubt that we can do what I’ve proposed, to bring back teeth, tail and forearms with claws,” he wrote in the new book. “It won’t be easy and the money may not be forthcoming, but it will happen.” But even if it’s possible, is creating such a beast a good idea?

Horner maintains it is. Growing a long tail on a chicken could add greatly to what we know about spinal cord development, and that could help treat human afflictions, he said. As the work continues, other breakthroughs in genetic medicine could occur. “It’s about figuring out how to deal with genetic diseases,” he said. And presenting such a creature — Horner likes the idea of bringing it to the Oprah Winfrey show — would not be a carnival sideshow. “Even more than a fossil, it would cry out for an explanation,” he wrote in the new book. A chickenosaurus is possible only through “reversing evolution,” he said. And if evolution can be reversed, that means it happened. “I’m an educator trying to show everyone that evolution is real,” he said. He acknowledges that some people are going to have problems with his proposal. “This is a project that will outrage some people as a sacrilegious attempt to interfere with life, and be scoffed at by others as impossible, and by others as more showmanship

than science,” he wrote. “But the story I have to tell is, like science itself, more about questions than answers,” and the book is meant to start a conversation about the ethics, the practicalities, and above all, the possibilities. Horner says he doesn’t have all the answers. But he’s posing the questions. They’re big and they’re complex, posed by a man dismissed in his early years as slow or lazy or stupid. Somebody is going to grow a dinosaur, he said, either in North America or maybe in Singapore, where rules are looser and university committees don’t ask as many questions. The technology exists. So does the knowledge. “It’ll get done,” he said. “It’s just a matter of time.” And that’s why he wrote the book. It’s time to talk about this stuff. “When we get to the point of hatching a dinosaur, it will be a decision that involves society as a whole, not just a few scientists in a laboratory,” Horner wrote in the introduction to his book. “Most of all, this book is an invitation to an adventure. I can say how it begins, but all of us will have a say in how it ends.”

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