Jack Horner Quotations

where it actually goes from land into the water.

The people in Rudyard are very, very friendly, and I think they very much enjoy having us there and we just have a generally good time there.

Life histories tell you just about everything you need to know about an animal.

Most people looking for dinosaurs are looking for beautiful skeletons.

My father had owned a ranch when he was younger, in Montana, and he remembered riding his horse across the prairie and seeing some large bones sticking out of the ground. He was enough of a geologist, being a sand and gravel man, to have a pretty good notion that they were dinosaur bones.

Give a talk to children and tell them dinosaurs didn't drag their tails, and you get arguments.

I encourage people who don't believe in evolution to look for horses in Jurassic Solenhofen limestone.

Historical science is being left in the dust.

Keratin can be very colorful, as we see in birds. We'd expect dinosaurs to be very colorful because they basically invented the characteristics we see in birds.

I think what we have to do now is re-model dinosaurs.

Right now people are interested in genetic engineering to help the human race. That's a noble cause, and that's where we should be heading. But once we get past that - once we understand what genetic diseases we can deal with - when we start thinking about the future, there's an opportunity to create some new life-forms.

Our new media center will make the Museum of the Rockies one of the premier dinosaur museums in the country. People will be able to come to our museum and watch us work in the field.

Mary, a former student of mine, and I just broke bones up, dug things out of them and just destroyed bones, and she's very good at that, ... Mary's discoveries produced what appeared to be blood tissues and red blood cells, very similar to what we see in modern day ostriches.

I was very fortunate, during my early years as a paleontologist, in that my field crews and I made some remarkable discoveries indicating dinosaurs to have been extremely social.

I think most of the dinosaur specimens we find represent subadult sizes.

'Jurassic Park' has a lot of science in it - and a lot of it is wrong - but if it was all accurate, it would be a documentary.

That worked great. The footage went out all over the world.

That's what I do -- my job is to walk, ... I just walk and walk and walk and I've walked in Romania, Mongolia, Tanzania -- all these places to find dinosaurs.

I was born and raised in Montana, so it's certainly an honor for me to be the state paleontologist. I take the honor very seriously. More than anything, it's an honor to be involved in the statewide education of kids.

Triceratops is very common: they are the cows of the Cretaceous; they are everywhere.

We gave them a specimen. Unfortunately, it was just one leg, ... Now they want more.

We all have genes that come from our ancestors that aren't used - they're not turned on. So we actually carry ancient genes with us. If you could figure out how to turn those on, you could resurrect ancient characteristics from our ancestors.

Bigger is not always better. This one has good size and grasping arms. You start getting them too big, and they get pretty clunky.

Dinosaurs are built just like birds - they can squat down, they can get up. Mammals, when we lay down, we throw our legs out to the sides - birds cannot do that. Dinosaurs could not do that either.

The whole thing is just totally a misunderstanding.

The Rudyard project is actually a satellite thing for the Museum of the Rockies. We're calling it the Rudyard field station, and we're lending them lots and lots of specimens and all kinds of things.

I usually work in Montana, that's where I was born and raised and that's where there are lots of places to look, ... Right now I'm looking for animals like Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Some years ago the Smithsonian wanted a T-rex for its new dinosaur hall,

Scientists who play by someone else's rules don't have much chance of making discoveries.

Scientists have egos, and scientists like to name dinosaurs. They like to name anything. Everybody likes to have their own animal that they named.

Once we understand just how to control genes, we have the potential for spinal cord regeneration, bone regeneration, and so on. It might also give us plumper chickens.

There's an incomparable rush that comes from finding dinosaur bones. You know you're the first person to lay hands on a critter that lived 80 or 90 million years ago.

A chicken grows up in a little less time than an ostrich. An ostrich takes a whole year. A chicken takes a few months.

It's a good thing not very many people were watching,

Evolution - evolutionary change - does not happen quickly.

I just cannot imagine why anyone would want to be really famous. You go to a restaurant and people are pointing at you and they talk about you and they whisper and it is very disconcerting; it is a very odd feeling.

I like the broken up ones, I like to saw holes in them and look inside of them, ... When it comes to science, putting up a skeleton and just looking at it just doesn't do anything for me. I want to know something about that dinosaur.

In the future, I'd like to see paleontology as a whole get a lot more quantitative.

Almost all of my graduate students say that they got interested in dinosaurs because of 'Jurassic Park.'

Children have a great urge to learn about dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs replace their teeth throughout their life. And T. rex replaced all of their teeth every year.

I found my first dinosaur bone when I was 6, growing up in Montana. Ever since then I've been interested in dinosaurs.

I'm trying to figure out the biology of dinosaurs and what they were like as living creatures.

Unfortunately, with dinosaurs, we haven't had enough specimens to determine how much variation there is within a species.

The worse the country, the more tortured it is by water and wind, the more broken and carved, the more it attracts fossil hunters, who depend on the planet to open itself to us. We can only scratch away at what natural forces have brought to the surface.

Comparing science and religion isn't like comparing apples and oranges - it's more like apples and sewing machines.

In the lifetime of one person, we went from figuring out where we came from to figuring out how to get rid of ourselves.

When I was growing up in Montana I had two dreams: I wanted to be a paleontologist and I wanted to have a pet dinosaur and so that's what I've been striving for all of my life.

The chicken is a dinosaur. I mean, it really is. You can't argue with it, because we're the classifiers and we've classified it that way.

A dinosaur out of context is like a character without a story. Worse than that, the character suffers from amnesia.

A lot of Montanans are teed off that local finds usually end up in New York.

The fossil record is incredible when it preserves things, but it's not a complete record.