Jack Horner: the man who digs dinosaurs

Jack Horner’s odyssey for Montana dinosaurs

By Dave Reese/Montana Living
 
The sun is setting over Montana’s Fort Peck Reservoir, casting a tangerine glow on the bluffs and sagebrush hills. Boats chug along the reservoir, getting in the last bit of fishing for the day.

Here at Hell Creek, we’re in a world of its own, far from civilization and connected only by a phone line and a dusty rutted road through breaks and draws, the kind of country you’d see in a 1950s western.

But this is home to Jack Horner, arguably one of the world’s foremost experts on dinosaurs. He is here at Hell Creek hunting for dinosaurs in 100-degree heat in the desert of central Montana. Dressed in shorts, t-shirt and an sporting an odobenous growth of facial hair, Horner looks more like a holdout from a Rainbow Family gathering than a scientist out to change the way humans view dinosaurs.

Horner and I meet up at Hell Creek Campground on the south shore of Fort Peck Reservoir. This end of the road campground is about 25 miles north of the small town of Jordan, where the infamous band of Freemen anti-government extremists were held under siege a few years ago.

With the temperatures still in the 90s and the sun just now going down, Horner, the curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, plops down in a cheap lawn chair, exhaling the cares of a long day. He cracks open a can of beer and takes notice of a seagull flying overhead.

Seeing the bird, he takes a pull off his brew and fashions a puzzled, pensive look on his face; “Dinosaurs,” he mumbles to himself, shaking his head. That’s because birds, he contends, are descendants of dinosaurs, and it’s dinosaurs he’s been digging up in the area. His evidence linking them so far is is as plentiful as the thousands of dinosaurs he’s found.

Horner is a paleontologist, and paleontologists study slices in time. In eastern Montana these slices are easily discernible, appearing in specific layers of the earth. There have only been a handful of complete Tyrannasaurus rex skeletons found in the world, and it was here, in eastern Montana, where one of the most complete T-rex fossils was found, in 1902. This was also the world’s first T-rex discovery, and it was found here in Hell Creek formation, one of those slices in the earth’s crust, that is especially near the surface in the badlands of Montana. Where sandstone spires jut out of globular fired-mud hillsides in a bizarre moonscape, the Hell Creek formation is only a few hundred feet below the surface. That’s pretty shallow, for fossil hunters, but the formation is hundreds of miles wide and reaches far north into Canada.

Out here among the sagebrush badlands and scruffy draws, the Hell Creek project is the first time Horner has assembled a crew of geologists, paleontologists, and paleobotanists in an attempt to piece together what the conditions were at the time dinosaurs went extinct.

A bevvy of volunteer students and professors from the University of California-Berkeley is helping staff from Montana State University geology department and the Museum of the Rockies to try to uncover those kinds of clues. With these thinkers, says Horner, “We’ll be able to put together an accurate representation of the dinosaurs and the environment they lived in.”

But before you can apply any theories of paleontology, you have to find dinosaurs. That can be a highly unpredictable process. “I’m wrong a lot,” Horner says, killing his beer and reaching for his backup. “Want another one?”
“I’d like to thing I’m still learning,” he says, cracking a fresh one.

In fact, last summer, the T-Rex that Horner found turned out to be a large hadrosaur, a “cow” dinosaur as he likes to call them. “That’s OK, it’s my favorite dinosaur.”

Today a crew of about 20 people took part in one of Horner’s death marches. They call them death marches because it is sheer hell getting out to the dig site. After driving 20 miles on a rutted, bumpy trail near Snow Creek bay on Fort Peck lake, we arrive at the “trailhead.” It’s more like the seventh canto from Dante’s Divine Comedy.

From there to the dig it’s down, down, down, a half-hour hike in 100-degree through gulches and steep ravines. I’ve got rattlesnakes on my mind, while some of the Japanese students from UC Berkeley have worse things, like a 100-pound pack of water they volunteered to haul out to the dig.

Coming up out of ravine we spot a a small colony of brightly colored tents on a knoll, and above it, jutting out of a sandstone cliff, lies Horner’s quarry, where they’re working on a 35-foot hadrosaur. On a ledge big enough for about 20 workers, two workers are hunkered down over the dinosaur.

Extension cords run up away from the ledge and out of site, to an unseen generator, and a pair of workers is hunched over the dinosaur skeleton like cavemen over a bone.

GETTING DIRTY FOR DINOSAURS

One of them is Bob Harmon. Harmon is Horner’s right-hand man. He is not a scientist.

He’s just really good at finding dinosaur bones. Harmon is a lithe, muscular man with sharp features who chain smokes Marlboros, and wearing his white straw cowboy he looks the part of the Marlboro man.

His athletic build allows him to climb up onto precarious perches where he might see what looks like a bone sticking out of the dirt. A native of Cut Bank, Harmon signed on with Horner about 15 years ago when he learned of Horner’s exploits.

A ranch hand with a knack for finding bones, Harmon figured he could help this guy out. “I just know where to look for them, I guess,” he says in a deep drawl. “You do it long enough, you get really good at it.” The dig we’re on today was found by an Asian exchange student, who noticed a bone poking out of a hillside some 30 feet up a clay bank.

The actual digging of the dinosaur involves little science, really. It takes brute strength, finesse, patience and the tools of a gardener. The generator powers the larger tools like jackhammers and drills, but there are rakes, picks, shovels, toothbrushes and tiny ice picks that are used to slowly, inch by inch, uncover the fossilized dinosaur.

What’s amazing is how real this dinosaur looks. You’d expect to see bits of jumbled bone sticking out of the earth, but at this dig you can actually see how dinosaur might have died; perhaps she was killed in a mudslide, or perpaps died and was then washed down the slope. The dinosaur lies in a position almost as if it were sleeping on its belly, with its tail wrapped underneath it and its head pulled back.

Slowly, centimeter by centimeter, the skeleton comes to life. When parts of the dinosaur are exposed they are covered with a plaster cast. When the whole body is encased in the white plaster cast it can be hauled out, usually by helicopter from a nearby National Guard unit, sometimes by tractor or even horses.  

With a crew leader like Harmon, Horner doesn’t have to do much of actual digging anymore; he does the looking for the dinosaurs. “I’m very particular about where we excavate. There’s not enough museums in the world to put all the stuff we find.” Rather than excavate a dinosaur, Horner will uncover it, photograph it, cover it back up and record its location by GPS for possible later excavation. What they do find, stays in Montana, mostly in boxes back at the Museum of the Rockies lab where his wife, Celeste, works along side him at the as a 3D imaging expert.

Horner has been a dinosaur hunter for most of his 55 years, having picked up his first dinosaur bones when he was eight years old.
In 1978, he and Bob Makela stumbled onto a quite a find. Passing through Bynum at a roadside gift shop owned by Marion Brandvold, Makela and Horner were given a coffee can full of bones to check out. Turns out they were baby dinosaur bones.

Having just finished a research paper at Princeton University on the world’s only baby dinosaur bones found in Mongolia, Horner was intrigued, and going on a tip from Brandvold, Makela and Horner found their first dinosaur nest in an upland cretaceous formation far from the heavily quarried coastal deposits. Three years later, Horner's crews had excavated seven more Maiasaura nests, which he believes were all occupied in the same year.

The nests that they found were spaced at 27-feet apart, to allow a 23-foot-long adult Maiasaurus to tend their nest at the same time. This led Horner to believe that dinosaurs — at least the Maiasaurs — nested in social colonies like birds, not like the reptiles that dinosaurs have been out to be.

Up until Horner came along and made his mark on the dinosaur/paleontology world by unearthing hundreds of baby dinosaurs, this was a area of dinosaur study relatively unexplored. There were very few baby fossils. “We had adults and some juveniles,” he says, “ but nothing to show the whole life process.
“And that’s how we learn about a species.”

The area where Horner and his mostly volunteer crews discovered the thousands of hadrosaur eggs became known as Egg Mountain, and it was the El Dorado of dinosaur fossils. All told, nearly 1,000 complete dinosaur skeletons were found there in the sage and scrub pine foothills of the Continental Divide. Poking out of the rich, rolling terrain lay a repository of scientific discovery, all right at Horner’s fingertips for the taking.

EGG MOUNTAIN DISCOVERY

The discovery of Egg Mountain in Montana hellped put Horner on the map, so to speak, and the digs there over the next 10 years led him to become: 1. the first person in the Western Hemisphere to find fossilized dinosaur embryos and 2., evidence that showed dinosaurs were territorial, social nesters and cared for their young — like a bird.

The idea of using researchers from several different fields of study was adapted from what Horner learned at Choteau and Egg Mountain. At Egg Mountain they took the same approach of assembling scientists from different disciplines, but the process happened over a longer period. They kind of made it up as they went. “We had no idea we could end up with the most complete paleo-ecosystem in one place,” says Horner, the light over Fort Peck now fading and the hum of RV generators replacing the cries of gulls. “in the end, you put it all together and see you have something wonderful. Now we know we actually can do it.”

“But I certainly couldn’t do it without the other people agreeing it was a good idea,” Horner is quick to add, a man known as being passionate about his ideas and not afraid to let others know about them. “Egg mountain is the best-known dinosaur ecosystem on this planet. It’s something that’s really neat, but we want to make another attempt at it.”

It would be simple to generalize that by studying extinct animals we may learn about what could kill us. But Horner does think the key to the human future may lie in our past. And it doesn’t matter that this particular extinction of dinosaurs occurred some 65 million years ago. “Those are just numbers,” he says flat out. “There are lots of people studying our modern-day ecosystem, but you can’t see the one we’re workng on. It’s under rocks. Studying our current ecosystem, which goes back a couple hundred years at most, isn’t gong to tell us anything.
“The more you know about ancient ecosystems, the more you know about evaluating our own.”

Much has changed for Horner since he became well-known for his work at Egg Mountain. Dinosaurs are now cool. And when things are cool and mainstream, money will surely follow. Recognition has brought him patrons who are willing to fund his research, people like the retired Microsoft exective who wants Horner to find a T-rex for him, or the plumbing magnate who flew his helicopter out to the dig last summer to bring in supplies.

“Here we have a donor who said ‘you find it, we’ll get it.’ We have the resources,” Horner states. “If we can find it, we have the means to get it back to the museum.”

THE BUSINESS OF SCIENCE

To keep his projects going, Horner spends a good part of the year working the money-raising circuit, rubbing elbows with leaders of charitable foundations, universities and major corporations like Microsoft and Universal Studios, two of his patrons. It takes half a million dollars to keep his projects going, in addition to what the non-profit Museum of the Rockies needs for operations, but it’s all run on donations, and the only state-government money used on the projects, Horner says, is for his salary.

Science, to Horner, is an ongoing process; it’s not a large body of work at the county library, or a degree, which by the way, Horner does not have, except for an honorary doctorate from the University of Montana, where he toook a few classes in the 70s, but dropped out.

“I just wanted to be a good paleontologist, collect good data, maybe write some papers,” he offers up, finally getting into a talkative mood. “I never really had a goal, other than being a paleontologist, which everyone said I couldn’t do. They thought it was ridiculous.

"They said I couldn’t get a job because I didn’t have a degree. I went looking for some baby dionsaurs and I found some. Once I found them, the research money starting coming in, and here we are.” Horner is concerned only with making good scientific discoveries, as he feels he did at Egg Mountain, and he seems to be on to something great at Hell Creek. He tries first to falsify his own claims of scientific discovery before offering them to the scientific world, and says that “If nobody proves it wrong, no one cares. There’s an awful lot of crap out there, untestable stuff.
“It’s only good if it’s good science.”

But even without a formal degree, Horner has turned out good science. In 1986 Horner was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, known as the “genius award.” Perhaps not for his science but for his acerbic character Horner gained popular fame when he served as the technical advisor for the movies "Jurassic Park" and its sequel, "The Lost World." He was even featured on the cover of Time magazine.  

Horner has searched around the world for a place to find dinosaurs. But the native of Shelby, Mont., ended up finding them in literally in his back yard. Now, having all his dinosaur digs only a few hundred miles from his office at the Museum of the Rockies, is a tremendous advantage and cost-saver. “You get outside the United States and the logistics just get terrible,” Horner says. “We don’t have to start from scratch. We’ve got a pretty good start, and for what we want to do, this is the best place.”

Being at the top in his field makes for an easy target, and Horner does have his detractors. But, he says, “Everyone has them. Success attracts them.”

Success was a long time coming for this Montanan. At his 10^th high school reunion in Shelby, Horner didn’t have much good to report on his progress as a paleontologist.

At the time, Horner was living in a tarpaper shack in Gold Butte, Mont., making a living by panning for gold. He was so down and out that even his girlfriend’s father tried to pay her not to go out with him. “But I had a real advantage,” he says, “a real gift. No one had any expectations of me, so I was able to take risks no one else would take.

Failure was expected.

“In fact I feel sorry for people who graduate with honors. Even if I wasn’t getting paid to this, this is what I’d be doing. I know that if I keel over tomorrow, I’ve lived a terrific life, no regrets.
“I’ve done everything I’ve wanted to do.”
 
— Dave Reese is the founding editor of Montana Living. This article appeared in a 2001 issue of Montana Living