Interviews: Ask What You Will of Paleontologist Jack Horner 208
John "Jack" R. Horner is the Curator of Paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies, adjunct curator at the National Museum of Natural History, and one of the most famous paleontologists in the world. Known in the scientific community for his research on dinosaur growth and whether or not some species lived in social groups, he is most famous for his work on Jurassic Park and being the inspiration for the character of Alan Grant. Horner caused quite a stir with the publication of his book, How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever, in which he proposes creating a "chickensaurus" by genetically "nudging" the DNA of a chicken. Jack has agreed to step away from the genetics lab and put down the bones in order to answer your questions. As usual, you're invited to ask as many questions as you'd like, but please divide them, one question per post.
Is it in theory possible to get dinosaur DNA? (Score:5, Interesting)
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DNA breaks down too rapidly to be intact in soft tissues that old. One of Horner's students managed to find such soft tissues a few years ago, but since DNA has a halflife of about 521 years [nature.com] (depending on the environment), there isn't going to be any DNA left in it.
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“I am very interested to see if these findings can be reproduced in very different environments such as permafrost and caves,” says Michael Knapp, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.
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I've always dreamed of something like Jurassic park (obviously without the stupid non-security... :) )
Silly child. Everybody knows that life finds a way.
Would you consider a collaboration with KFC? (Score:2, Funny)
Your dinochicken could be the perfect way for KFC to transition to serving actual chicken.
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Offtopic but funny as hell XD
comments about the movie Jurassic Park? (Score:4)
Re:comments about the movie Jurassic Park? (Score:4, Interesting)
Should the raptors have feathers?
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Accuracy wasn't an issue for them, Speilbergo doubled their size!
Until they found the Utahraptor [wikipedia.org]. Spielberg was just ahead of the paleontologists.
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There was an article in Science giving advice to scientists who consult for movies.
Their advice was, don't expect them to be accurate. (Lumiere had people walking around the moon without space helmets.) Just try to get a few useful lessons in there.
One of the things that can work well is movies is showing how scientists work. The interpersonal relationships among scientists works well. Paleontologists throwing rocks at each other at scientific meetings, things like that. (I think that's actually happened.)
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I've never found that children lack interest in dinosaurs.
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My son's really into that too. I like that they try to work some science into it. But while I have no problem with talking, time-traveling, train-riding dinosaurs, it bothers me that the female pteranodons have eyelashes.
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I have always been upset that they explain how the steam engine works, but not how the time tunnel works. Maybe they think that wormholes are to advanced of a concept for per-school.
Well, it's possible to explain how steam engines work, because you know, we actually have steam engines. Wormholes may or may not exist at all, and if they do, we certainly don't know everything about them. And even if such a thing as a "time tunnel" is possible, it may or may not have anything to do with wormholes according to our current understanding. So really, there's no comparison.
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Here’s a good rendition of the opening song:
http://www.dorktower.com/2011/03/30/dortk-tower-wednesday-march-30-2011/ [dorktower.com]
And what the heck – not XKCD, but.
http://www.dorktower.com/2013/01/03/dinosaur-train-dork-tower-03-01-13/ [dorktower.com]
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And speaking of Jurassic Park, considering your chicken modifying idea, do you think that Jurassic Park had a positive message?
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It made more people interested in Unix.
(Or IRIX fsn, at any rate)
Chickensaurus? (Score:5, Interesting)
If I were going to fund 1 program, which should I fund chickensaurus over resurrecting a Neanderthal, Woolly Mammoth, or a Tasmanian Tiger? I mean they are all valid – but please make your case on why you should go first.
Re:Chickensaurus? (Score:4, Funny)
If I were going to fund 1 program, which should I fund chickensaurus over resurrecting a Neanderthal, Woolly Mammoth, or a Tasmanian Tiger? I mean they are all valid – but please make your case on why you should go first.
Because they're delicious!
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If you can make something that passes as a dinosaur, you'll inspire a lot of public interest. Funding follows. Dinosaurs are just cool. A mammoth might work if a bit less well, but no-one would really care about the tasmanian tiger.
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When the price of cloning goes down we'll be able to do them all.
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At the same time? A Tasmanian Wooly Neandersaurus. That does sound kind of cool.
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Sounds like something out of a Dougal Dixon book. [narod.ru]
Do you envision creating marketable pets? (Score:2)
From time I spent playing with kids and miniature plastic dinosaurs, I imagine the popularity of your chickenosaurus project would be enormous. If you succeed, do you have a plan to fund future genetic research by marketing the animals as pets?
Re:Do you envision creating marketable pets? (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, dear. I just imagined playing fetch with my pet brontosaurus in the park. Here Nessie, Here Nessie. THUDUMP THUDUMP THUDUMP. Watch out for the doggie! Eeeeeoow. SPLAT. THUDUMP THUDUMP THUDUMP. Good girl!
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But that would be o.k. – because you would buy a Utahraptor and throw on a saddle and bridle – and you’ve got your transportation covered – and it’s powered by renewable energy resources.
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Little known fact: Utahraptors preferred English over Western style riders.
Some experts artue their physiology was better at digesting riding crops than spurs. But their penchant for renewable fuel makes me think they were just a bunch of socialist treehuggers who hated all things American.
When you were little (Score:4, Funny)
The Evolution of Paleontology (Score:5, Interesting)
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That's a chicken and egg problem. If the early paleontologists had never recovered their specimens, Mr. Jack Horner would never have been inspired to spend his life studying old bones. Likewise, if today's paleontologists didn't recover their specimens, then the future "perfected" paleontological methods would never come to be.
How will science be funded in the US next? (Score:5, Insightful)
Where do you see research money coming from next? Alternately, are we looking ahead to a time where fewer people will be doing science because the funding just won't exist to pay even their meager wages any more?
Which (Score:2)
Which dinosaur would taste the best on my grill this summer? Can we move that type of dinosaur to the front of the genetically-recreated line?
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Wouldn't it depend on what it ate?
Your carrion eaters are going to be nasty, and your herbivores tastier -- at least, that's how it generally works.
And then you can get more specific, like grass, corn or grain fed.
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I am filing a patent for Kobe Velociraptor. They spend their live eating Kobe Beef.
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Well, unless you live in Japan, you mean Wagyu [wikipedia.org], not Kobe.
It's like Champagne and Parma ham ... only stuff which comes from that area gets that name (despite the US tendency to let people call it that).
i like dinosaurs (Score:2)
Next big discovery? (Score:2)
paleontology (Score:2, Troll)
When you dig up an old bone, is there an easy way to distinguish the ones that the Devil planted to lure scientists to hell, vs. the ones that came from creatures that genuinely lived before creation?
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At first I was going to moderate this insightful, and hopefully un-troll the existing comments, but I figured I'd just reply.
While the question is whimsical, it's still on point.
How do you fight the ignorance around your science, and the misinformation from young-earth idiots?
heck cattle (Score:3)
How much have you been influenced by the attempts to breed back aurochs by the Heck brothers? The Heck cattle bear some resemblance to the extinct aurochs. The degree of success is controversial, because there are very significant differences between the aurochs and the Heck cattle. Some believe that the whole idea of breeding back is deeply flawed, because you cannot achieve a genotypical match by working from phenotypical measures..
Paleocene dinosaurs (Score:4, Interesting)
On to my actual question: what do you think about the possible existence of Paleocene dinosaurs? I understand that any current fossil evidence for their existence is likely caused by reworked fossils. How likely do you believe it is that a particular dinosaur taxon survived a few million years after the extinction event, and what would be the implications of this occurring?
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Last I heard, birds are a subset of dinosauria, and since I can see a couple of birds by looking over the top of my display, I'd say it was pretty much 100% certain that some dinosaurs survived that particular extinction event.
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When people talk about "Paleocene dinosaurs," they specifically mean the non-avian kinds. Specifically, there are some fossils which may indicate that some hadrosaurs survived the extinction event.
Job Elements (Score:4, Interesting)
Dinosaur skin (Score:4, Interesting)
Slightly off base from your normal work, how often is dinosaur skin, or its impression, found when fossils are located and has any type of color ever been found associated with the skin?
Which species might evolve everywhere ? (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be better to pick a wild bird as host? (Score:4, Insightful)
Domestication changes genes and presumably the epigenome. Wouldn't it be more reasonable to pick an undomesticated bird, perhaps a more "primitive" one than the highly domesticated chicken as the DNA source to "clone" a dinosaur?
How difficult was the career move? (Score:5, Funny)
You don't hear a lot about porn stars going into paleontology...
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He was a film maker--An artist. The Musem of the Rockies is not in business to support pornography.
Theropod jaw hinge (Score:2)
I understand the reason for theropods having the need to swallow big hunks of meat but that capability would much more easily come from a wide jaw.
Theropods, I would think, wouldn't need to keep a narrow jaw profile like a snake because theropods didn't have to slither into narrow openings. There doesn't seem to be any obviously good reason for theropods to have a jaw that's narrow when they're not swallowing big hunks of meat and wide when they are.
A Modest Proposal (Score:2)
Neanderthal/Denisovan (Score:2)
Things That We Don't Even Know We Don't Know? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I didn't know we have such a great interest in what we don't know we don't know.
Permian-Triassic Extinction Event (Score:2)
K-T Extinction Event (Score:4, Interesting)
Necromancy (Score:2)
Want! (Score:2)
Kickstarter for pet raptors, buddy. Let's light this candle.
The Known Unknowns (Score:5, Interesting)
What has change over the past ~20 years? (Score:2)
When many of us here at Slashdot were in high school, it was more or less taken for granted that dinosaurs were cold-blooded reptiles with scales...and later, around college, books started to mention birds as the likely descendants of dinosaurs. Are big dinos like T.Rex, Stegosaurus, etc.still widely believed by researchers to have been cold-blooded reptiles, or is it more likely that dinos like T.Rex were more like a big ostrich than an alligator walking on its hind legs, and that they might have been war
No Question, Just A Note of Thanks (Score:2)
Real ages (Score:2)
We all know Paleontology has a major problem in that its techniques for dating the organisms it studies regularly, as the dates are clearly so much further back than Biblical evidence clearly points. How much research now is going into reconciling your fields farcial dates with realistic ones based on the evidence?
Thanks! (Score:2)
Dr. Horner, you have inspired me to engage in the sciences ever since I was a little kid. Although I didn't go into the field of paleontology, I did study computer science and became a software developer for an education company. In my field, we are always trying to find ways to engage kids in the STEM fields to help develop the next generation of engineers, programmers, biologists, and even paleontologists. In your opinion, how do you see the future of your field within the next generation of scientists
Jurassic Park bump (Score:2)
What effects have you noticed on the field of Paleontology from the movie Jurassic Park, and your participation (as advisor) in it? More widespread misconceptions based on movie magic? More (or fewer) students? Funding?
How many more dinosaurs to discover? (Score:5, Interesting)
This one is from my 6-year-old boy, Will. We're currently reading a book about dinosaurs (he gets three per bedtime). He wants to know, "how many dinosaurs haven't been discovered yet?" One of his favorites is one that was discovered in China fairly recently (many of the famous ones seem to come from the US midwest from the early part of last century).
While his question is impossible to answer on its own, do paleontologists have a sense of whether the types of soils likely to hold fossils have been well explored, or if we've merely scratched the surface [sic] of what's to come?
Why not start with an emu? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why start with a chicken instead of an Emu or Cassowary? Those large flightless birds already look a lot more like dinosaurs than a chicken. They even have 3 toes. With a longer tail and some teeth they would seem very dinosaur-like.
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I'm guessing commercial interest. Kentucky Fried Raptor. Roscoe's Dino and Waffles. Church's Cretaceous...
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Chickens are small and therefore more manageable than the larger birds, and they breed quickly. It's the same reason that mice are the main choice for mammalian models in biology, rather than say, pigs.
Nerd Groupies? (Score:2)
Do you find as a paleontologist that you're followed around by nerd groupies? You know, those hot young girls that read scientific journals, and want to get down to your Paleozoic?
Plum (Score:2, Funny)
How did pulling out a plum lead you to conclude that you were a good boy?
Finding dinosaurs (Score:2)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but to find dinosaurs you just start digging in mesozoic-aged sedimentary rock, correct? Do you focus on alluvial deposits?
Museum of the Rockies (Score:3)
I don't have a question, but a comment on the Museum of the Rockies. This is an excellent little museum, and well worth the visit. Anyone who goes to Yellowstone, the 1.5 hour trek to Bozeman is well worth the drive. The drive will take you past many geological formations, such as the Devil's Slide [wikipedia.org], and often takes you past quite a bit of wildlife like elk, bighorn sheep, bears and bald eagles.
The museum is very enjoyable and educational for both children and adults.
What's it like to be proved right? (Score:2)
I seem to recall that years ago when people questioning if birds evolved from dinosaurs, you met a fair bit of skepticism.
Recognizing the similarities between them has changed how we think of them as big, lumbering cold-blooded beasts.
How's it feel now that acceptance of that idea has turned around the other way and you were right all along?
Your degree (Score:2)
Your famous for not having earned your degree, yet you persevered and your reputation for your work goes far outside your field. How hard was it to be taken seriously in your field without the required degree? I ask as someone who also works in a University at a senior level without a degree.
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It worked out quite well for my father- Roy Snelling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Snelling [wikipedia.org]
Permian triassic fungal spike (Score:2)
I have seen a protracted fungal spike mentioned as an argument against the Permian Triassic extinction being due to a single event [a series of bolide impacts, etc].
However, from what I had seen, that fungal spike appears only in the African karoo, which -- between that and the Hudson -- look to me like ideal candidate locations for de-Meijer/Van Westrenen style georeactor explosions (that, based on rings of kimberlites around both, and what looks like identical-shaped and identical- oriented scars in both
Hope the guy doesn't have to read all these (Score:2)
Since I've been reading Slashdot this is the "ask" article that has drawn the most joke questions, easily. Even more than RMS' article, and Jack Horner has a reasonable haircut and hasn't been caught on video eating his own foot scabs. Now some of the jokes are quite funny, but still...I hope the editors will pre-screen the joke questions out for him.
Thick Atmosphere Theory ? (Score:2)
What is your opinion of the thick atmosphere theory which would render resurrecting an actual dinosaur impossible (i.e. it would explode due to the pressure differential) ? The theory with proof is posted at :
http://dinosaurtheory.com/index.html [dinosaurtheory.com]
How should science-lovers view the past? (Score:2)
For myself, I take a hard interpretation of the scientific method that it only applies to predictions about the future. Predictions that can be tested. If I run an experiment and the prediction fails, the theory is invalidated. To pick an example from physics, if I throw a coconut, I should be able to predict where and how fast it will be at different times in the future during its flight. If the coconut didn't fly (within error) of Netwon's predictions, it would invalidate Netwon's Laws.
This "hard" int
Is "dinosaur" a misnomer? (Score:2)
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Dinosaurs are a monophyletic clade as long as you include birds, which descended from the Theropods.
Theropods and Sauropods [wikipedia.org] are much more closely related to each other than to lizards [wikipedia.org]. They're even both on the Saurischian branch. All of the above are Diapsids [wikipedia.org] in the Sauria clade, but the ancestors of the lizards and snakes (Lepidosauromorpha) branched off from the ancestors of the crocoldilians and Dinosaurs (Archosauromorpha). I've spent way too much time looking at dinosaur phylogeny lately.
It's the term
How many species, estimated, do you think remain? (Score:2)
How many species, estimated, do you think remain undiscovered? Would you say your field is closer to the end, or the beginning? And what was the most unlikely find you'd like to share?
Obligatory T. Rex Question... (Score:2)
Lesser targets for revival? (Score:2)
Everyone's talking about re-creating famous species like the Woolly Mammoth, Tazmanian Devil, and dinosaurs. Are there any efforts that you have heard of to re-create lesser-known extinct species? Is anyone trying to recreate the Dodo (for food)? Glyptodon (as a pack animal)? The Giant Sloth (for fun)?
Paleontology as a Career (Score:5, Interesting)
My son is a sophomore in college and is consider a career in paleontology. I don't really know how to advise him and not sure of the prospects. He has the passion, grades and ambition. What advice would you have for a young person enter the field and what undergraduate degree would you recommend.
Fossil Collection Laws (Score:2)
I collect mineral specimens (primarily crystal-populated geodes) from the eastern portions of Fort Peck Lake, working my way along the shoreline. I also find, and collect, interesting invertebrate fossils such as crabs, clams and so forth. Vertebrate fossil collection is, as far as I know, illegal for the average citizen under any circumstances on public land, so I leave them where I find them.
The reason I collect at the shoreline is because the rapid erosion from the lake's waves constantly expose new spec
Soft dinosaur bone marrow (Score:2)
I remember reading several years ago about the discovery that dinosaur soft bone marrow had been found.
What are the implications of this and what changes have this discovery lead to in our understanding?
Also how has this changed the handling of fossils?
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What kind of timetable could mankind do designer creatures or is that not In the foreseeable future, or just too far distant to speculate?
I'm more concerned about the timetable for when designer creatures could do us.
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Who?
Re:Why Dinosaurs? (Score:5, Funny)
Paleontologist Jack Horner
There's a clue there.
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" It would make the commute to work much quicker."
Dude - you ain't got the pecs to power the wings, and your dense, solid bones will make sure that you stay firmly planted on the ground. Sure, wish for wings, they'll just get caught in the car doors, caught in the elevator doors, and people on subways and trains will be trampling on your wingtips forever more.
Always, be careful what you wish for.
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Really, really big wings then.
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You're wrong, nearly all animal species engage in homosexual behaviour [wikipedia.org]. Dinosaurs would not have been an exception.
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"Could" but probably won't. Too many uneducated people with machine guns.
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They're both from the post-archaic period. Geologically speaking, that's the same.
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Or do you prefer digging through rock, with just blasting caps and dynamite?