of millions. Jack Horner was advisor to that film, as well as the sequels, and his persona served as the model for the main character played by Sam Neill. (Perhaps the reader will remember an early scene in Jurassic Park III, in which the paleontologist drives up to the dig site in a Museum of the Rockies pickup.)
In 1996, Arizona State University at Tempe hosted a month-long extravaganza concerning dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts. The thousands who attended viewed entire skeletons on display, as well as a many other fossils. (Since then, there have been numerous other such Dinofest events at other sites around the country.) Included was a four-day symposium that featured dozens of researchers. The paleontologist Peter Ward describes the atmosphere of the event: “All the big name dinosaur guys were there, and the two biggest of all, Jack Horner and Bob Bakker, could easily be found simply by looking for the biggest crowd. As each passed through a room or hall, a retinue of attendees, groupies, and curious onlookers followed.”
Publicity in this era knew little bounds. Horner appeared on the cover of US News and World Report with the banner, “What Dinosaur Detective Jack Horner Does in the Real Jurassic Park,” i.e., Montana. In the 1990s, numerous magazines put forth cover articles, such as that by Newsweek bearing an image of T. rex: “Could Dinosaurs Return? The Science of Cloning.” Television documentaries on the subject of dinosaurs are continually in production, and newspapers report on dinosaur digs. Entire industries exist to crank out dinosaur toys and, of course, T-shirts are nearly ubiquitous.
Horner’s discoveries of dinosaur eggs (some containing embryos) and babies in nesting sites at the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Montana had made news the world over. They were the first complete such eggs ever found in North America. It was not only a discovery, however. It led to an image of entire nesting colonies of giants. In describing their environment, Horner provided a new picture of huge reptiles caring for their young, and he named the dinosaur involved Miasaura, meaning “Good Mother Lizard.” Baby dinosaurs became hugely interesting to millions. (Among the very best works to show how paleontology actually works are his Digging Dinosaurs: the Search that Unraveled the Mystery of the Baby Dinosaurs and his Dinosaur Lives: Unearthing the Evolutionary Saga. A fascinating new look at the iconic Tyrannosaurus rex is found in Horner’s The Complete T. rex. Written specifically for amateurs to aid in properly treating and identifying dinosaur fossils is his Dinosaurs under the Big Sky.)
In 2010, Horner was interviewed about dinosaurs on CBS television’s 60 Minutes. In addition to authoring numerous articles in scientific journals, he has appeared in a host of documentaries and been the subject of many magazine and newspaper articles. Thus, a case could be made for saying he is one of the most famous or recognizable living scientists of any sort in the world today. Yes, the subject of dinosaurs is fascinating.
Reasons why dinosaurs are so popular are many, and not all may be fully open to analysis. They surely do speak to the mind’s ability to conjure up scenes long past and populate them with creatures we could never see in any other way. Charles H. Sternberg, born in 1850, was one of the greatest of all fossil hunters, collecting prize specimens of dinosaurs, marine reptiles, and prehistoric mammals for several of the world’s premier museums. He wrote, “It is thus that I love creatures of other ages . . . They are never dead to me; my imagination breathes life into ‘the valley of dry bones,’ and not only do the living forms of the animals stand before me, but the countries which they inhabited rise for me through the mists of the ages.”
For children, the fascination may have something to do with the “monster” image of many of them, this combined with the fact that, being extinct, they are now safe to confront. For any and all, the puzzle of extinction also exerts an attraction; how could a group so successful for so long disappear?
For adults, interest in dinosaurs surely has much to do with new information about them that has emerged in the last twenty years. Approximately every six or eight weeks, a new dinosaur species is described and named; there are now more than a thousand. No longer is their image that of the painfully obsolescent, slow, cold-blooded, stupid, green tail-draggers in the swamp that were simply too outmoded to survive. That image is humorously portrayed in The Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson that shows a Stegosaurus standing at the podium during a dinosaur convention. Speaking gravely to his “dino” audience, he says, “The picture’s pretty bleak, gentlemen . . . The world’s climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut!” In fact, dinosaurs dominated the world scene for at least 150 million years, indicating they were masters of survival. Active and dynamic creatures they were, and many of them, particularly the meat-eating “theropods,” are likely to have been warm-blooded.
In 1964, John Ostrom and his crew from Yale University were working in the badlands of Montana when they struck paleontological gold. In the resulting scientific paper, he wrote, “Among the important discoveries made was that of the spectacular little carnivorous dinosaur described here—an animal so unusual in its adaptations that it undoubtedly will be the subject of great interest and debate for many years among students of organic evolution.” It was Deinonychus—the name means “terrible claw”—a creature similar to Velociraptor, those fierce, if rather enlarged, killers portrayed in the kitchen-scene in Jurassic Park. Ostrom was right: the specimen ignited a wide-ranging debate on several aspects of dinosaur relationships, including that of their relationship to birds.
In addition to laying eggs and having three-toed feet, some dinosaurs had hollow bird-like bones. There is evidence that they had air-sacs, which, as in birds, extended from the lungs into much of the rest of the body and into some of the bones of the skeleton. Some even had clavicles (to become wishbones). Fossils of small dinosaurs found in China clearly show feathers, which may have been brightly colored. These are just a few of numerous characteristics shared with birds.
In fact, most paleontologists now regard the system of animal classification developed by Linnaeus, which served well for more than two hundred years, to be in need of revision, and they go so far as to say that recent discoveries strongly support the idea that dinosaurs are birds. If this is true, then we can say that at least some of the dinosaurs are still with us. In biologic nomenclature, Aves is the Class occupied by birds. Not only the scientific literature but now almost every new dinosaur book talks about “avian” dinosaurs (i.e. birds) and “non-avian” (traditional) dinosaurs. As an example, the popular book, Discovering Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History, has a chapter entitled, “Why Did Non-Avian Dinosaurs Become Extinct?” Another chapter includes a photo of the world’s smallest bird perched on a penny (and about the same size). Below is this caption: “The smallest dinosaur is the bee hummingbird, Mellisuga helenae, found only on Cuba.”
Robert Bakker, as long ago as 1975, published a lengthy Scientific American article titled “Dinosaur Renaissance,” in which he detailed several aspects of the anatomy of a number of prehistoric creatures and concluded with the statement, “The dinosaurs are not extinct. The colorful and successful diversity of the living birds is a continuing expression of basic dinosaur biology.”
Therefore, when V-shaped flocks of Canadian geese are seen coursing through the skies in the month of March, some of us are prone to think, “The dinosaurs are migrating. Spring cannot be far behind.”
The bird-dinosaur connection became vivid for me over the course of a recent springtime that found me making an 800-foot ascent in the foothills of a nearby mountain range. It is a climb upward through time. There, each step may span thousands of years of strata, in this case of marine shale and limestone that was laid down in the Jurassic Period some 150 million years ago. Oyster shells are exposed in the rocks and have weathered out in profusion. This was also the time, elsewhere, of Archaeopterix, the primitive bird with a bony tail, teeth set in sockets in its jaws, and claws on its wings. Now, millions of years after those ancient oceans left behind their telltale fossils, my path leads near a large ponderosa pine tree where a pair of golden eagles has built a huge nest. My heart is beating faster from carrying the needed equipment up the steep slope but also in anticipation
