Jack Homer is an unlikely academic: his dyslexia is so bad that he
has trouble reading a book. But he can read the imprint of life in
sandstone or muddy shale across a distance of l00 years, and it is this
gift that has made him curator of palaeontology at Montana State
University’s Museum of the Rockies, the leader of a multi-million-dollar
scientific project to expose a complete slice of life 68 million years ago,
and a consultant to Steven Spielberg and other Hollywood figures.
His father had a sand and gravel quarry in Montana, and the young
Horner was a collector of stones and bones, complete with notes about when
and where he found them. “My father had owned a ranch when he was younger,
in Montana,” he says. “He was enough of a geologist, being a sand and
gravel man, to have a pretty good notion that they were dinosaur bones. So
when I was eight years old he took me back to the area that had been his
ranch, to where he had seen these big old bones. I picked up one. I am
pretty sure it was the upper arm bone of a duckbilled dinosaur: it probably
wasn’t a duckbilled dinosaur but closely related to that. I catalogued it,
and took good care of it, and then later when I was in high school;
excavated my first dinosaur skeleton. It obviously started earlier than
eight and I literally have been driven ever since. I feel like I was born
this way.”
Horner spent seven years at university, but never graduated. “I have
a learning disability, I would call it a learning difference – dyslexia,
they call it – and I just had a terrible time with English and foreign
languages and things like that. For a degree in geology or biology they
required two years of a foreign language. There was no way in the world I
could do that. In fact, I didn’t really pass English. So I couldn’t get a
degree, I just wasn’t capable of it. But I took all of the courses required
and I wrote a thesis and I did all sorts of things. So I have the
education, I just don’t have the piece of paper,” he says.
“We definitely know we are
working on a very broad coastal plain with the streams and rivers bordered
by conifers and hardwood plants, and the areas in between these rivers were
probably fern-covered. There were no grasses at all: just ferns and bushes
-an unusual landscape, kind of taking the south-eastern United States –
Georgia, Florida – and mixing it with the moors of England and flattening
it out,” he says. “Triceratops is very common: they are the cows of the
Cretaceous, they are everywhere. Duckbilled dinosaurs are relatively common
but not as common as triceratops and T-rex, for a meat-eating dinosaur, is
very common. What we would consider the predator-prey ratio seems really
off the scale. What is interesting is the little dromaeosaurs, the ones we
know for sure were good predators, are haven’t been found.”
That is why he sees T-rex not as the lion of the Cretaceous savannah
but its vulture. “Look at the wildebeest that migrate in the Serengeti of
Africa, a million individuals lose about 200,000 individuals in that annual
migration. There is a tremendous carrion base there. And so you have
hyenas, you have tremendous numbers of vultures that are scavenging, you
don’t have all that many animals that are good predators. If T-rex was a
top predator, especially considering how big it is, you’d expect it to be
extremely rare, much rarer than the little dromaeosaurs, and yet they are
everywhere, they are a dime a dozen,” he says. A 12-tonne T-rex is a lot of
vulture, but he doesn’t see the monster as clumsy. He insisted his theory
and finding, dedicated to further research upon it, of course, he would
like to re-evaluate if there is any case that additional evidence found or
explanation raised by others in the future.
He examined the leg bones of the T-rex, and compared the length of
the thigh bone (upper leg), to the shin bone (lower leg). He found that the
thigh bone was equal in length or slightly longer than the shin bone, and
much thicker and heavier, which proves that the animal was built to be a
slow walker rather than fast running. On the other hand, the fossils of
fast hunting dinosaurs always showed that the shin bone was longer than the
thigh bone. This same truth can be observed in many animals of today which
are designed to run fast: the ostrich, cheetah, etc.
He also studied the fossil teeth of the T-rex, and compared them with
the teeth of the Velociraptor, and put the nail in the coffin of the
“hunter T-rex theory”. The Velociraptor’s teeth which like stake knives:
sharp, razor-edged, and capable of tearing through flesh with ease. The
T-rex’s teeth were huge, sharp at their tip, but blunt, propelled by
enormous jaw muscles, which enabled them to only crush bones.
With the evidence presented in his documentary, Horner was able to
prove that the idea of the T-rex as being a hunting and ruthless killing
machine is probably just a myth. In light of the scientific clues he was
able to unearth, the T-rex was a slow, sluggish animal which had poor
vision, an extraordinary sense of smell, that often reached its “prey”
after the real hunters were done feeding, and sometimes it had to scare the
hunters away from a corpse. In order to do that, the T-rex had to have been
ugly, nasty-looking, and stinky. This is actually true of nearly all scavenger
animals. They are usually vile and nasty looking.
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