Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From wherever you are around the world. Welcome and thank
you for joining us. This is the Circle of Insight
show about everything and human behavior and this time dinosaurs.
I'm doctor Carlos and with me today is doctor Horner.
He's the Regent's Professor of Paleontology at Montana State University
and probably the best known paleontologist in the world. He
(00:20):
also wrote a fabulous book called How to Build a Dinosaur,
which explains it enlightens an awesome new science. So let's
welcome to the Circle, doctor Horner. Welcome, sir, Thank you.
So this is a really fascinating especially now with the
new movie The Jurassic World out and about. First, let
me find out what got you interested in dinosaurs?
Speaker 2 (00:40):
What got me interested? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (00:42):
What got you excited about dinosaurs?
Speaker 2 (00:45):
I think I was born this way. Dinosaurs of paleontology
my entire life.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Really, Now, did you watch you obviously saw Jurassic Park,
the original movie?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Yeah, well I was a technical advisor for all of those.
I was on set and saw how they made him. Yeah,
thats a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
I'm gonna take you back a little bit in time,
Land of the Lost. How'd you like that? Show?
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Well that was it was great back in the day
when I watched it.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Well, I know a lot of people are gonna they
started getting curious. I know, there was a lot of
articles that came out at the Jurassic Park. Can we
do this? Can we really create dinosaurs? And technology has
moved really fast since then. It's been about twenty years
or more since that movie came out. What's going on
out there in regards to creating dinosaurs and what is
(01:41):
true or not true about these movies?
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Well, first off, in ninety three when the movie came out,
there was you know, Michael Crichton had his notion that
he put in the book was you know, was not
even tested yet. So there were still people trying to
figure out how to get DNA out of a dinosaur, or,
(02:05):
in the case of Jurassic Bark, how to get dinosaur
DNA out of a mosquito that might have bitten a dinosaur.
And you know, they they tried to get biomolecules out
of insects and amber, and unfortunately discovered that amber breathes,
in other words, it interacts with the atmosphere, and so
(02:30):
that didn't work. And so in nineteen ninety three, I
had a student of mine and I got a grant
from the National Science Foundation to an attempt to extract
DNA from a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton that was very well preserved,
and we did a number of tests and the test
(02:55):
came out positive, suggesting that there was DNA in it,
but we were ever able to find it. We were
never able to actually locate it. And it's we think,
because DNA breaks down too quickly. It's a huge, huge molecule,
and it basically hangs together in a cell where lots
of other chemical machinery is in in there that keeps
(03:18):
it sort of together. But after an animal dies and
the cells die, then everything that helps to keep the
DNA molecule together starts falling apart, and so we end
up with tiny, tiny, tiny pieces, none of which we've
been able to find yet.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Let me ask you this question, So, do they have
the same kind of bone marrow that humans do, where
red blood cells are made in the bone marrow?
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Yep, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, I mean it.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
So they's somewhat similar to us in a sense, so
that at least that aspect of it.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Well, red blood cells and us actually don't even don't
have a nucleus, but in reptiles and birds they do.
So I actually can get the NA out of riplin
cells of a modern bird, whereas you can't out of
a mammal.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Well, now you're triggered a thought in my head. I
know a lot of scientists or something. I don't know
if the majority or not, but a lot of them
say that everything started with the bird. In regards to dinosaurs,
is that true?
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Well, the birds are dinosaurs. Birds are the direct descendants
of dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs. I mean, there was
one group of dinosaurs called solorosaurs that gave rise to birds,
and then all the other dinosaurs went extinct. Birds, birds actually,
(04:53):
you know, technically are dinosaurs. That's how we classify them.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Now we are really divide.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Them into too. So there's non avian dinosaurs, which are
the ones that I think, and avian dinosaurs are birds.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Interesting, So let me ask you a couple of questions
in regards to to dinosaurs themselves. I know a lot
of people that I've asked or have had questions of
emailed to me about this show. How do you determine
what kind of skin, what kind of look they have?
If all we have is skeletons.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Well, actually, skeletons are not the only thing we have.
We actually have the imprint of their skin. Just like
you can walk in mud or walk in sand or
or other material around the lake and leave a footprint,
dinosaurs left footprints, and they also left impressions of their
(05:47):
skin texture when they were covered up with sand and mud.
So we have a very nice sort of quote mummified dinosaur.
It's not a genuine money obviously, but we have the
impression of the skin of a pretty complete dinosaur here
at the Museum of the Rockies, and you can see
(06:11):
texture of the skin. You can see that there was
a frill that ran down the back. I mean, it's
it gives you a lot of information. It doesn't tell
you what color they were, But we know that dinosaurs
were reptiles, and that birds are dinosaurs, and birds are colorful,
and most reptiles are colorful, and so we expect dinosaurs
(06:31):
to be colorful as well.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
It's a good assumption. So let's just explore a couple
of the dinosaurs before we get to the magic question
is can we really create dinosaurs? I'll leave that for
the end to tease the audience unfortunately, but it's investigated
a couple of these other dinosaurs that were in the movies.
I know veloci raptors are seem to be prevalent in
Jurassic Park and Jurassic World. What are those.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
A lot? Well, first off, in Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs
we use for velociraptor our dinosaurs called Dnonicus, and they're
very closely related to velociraptor. But you know, Stephen didn't
think that name would stick very well and people wouldn't
be able to remember how to say it, so we
(07:15):
use the name velociraptor instead of down NICUs. But like
I said, they're very closely related. They are a meat
eating dinosaur and they hunted in groups, and they would
have been extremely vicious animals.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
And how how did you guys decipher all that stuff from?
What did you decipher that they were meat eating and
hunted in groups.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Well, we know they're meat eating because they have meat
slicing tea. They have the rated peep just like you know,
like little steak knives in their mouth. We have a
specimen here at the Museum of the Rockies that shows
pat hunting. We've got a plant eating dinosaur that was
clear really taken down and killed by by at least
(08:04):
five dynaikets raptors. And we can tell that because dinosaurs
replaced their teeth throughout their life, and so anytime they
were in a struggle, they could actually afford to lose
a tooth or two because they would just be replaced.
And in the case of this particular plant eating dinosaur
(08:25):
we have we haven't. We've got like a dozen teeth,
which suggests, I mean, one animal, one one velociraptor like animals,
not going to lose a dozen of its teeth, but
a number of them could. And so we're we we
theorize that from three to five individuals we're in on
(08:47):
this kill.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
We need that DNA, to Professor Horner, would be good
DNA for us to have. We can keep regenerating our teeth.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
That's right. Well, we replaced our teeth once, and dinosaurs
and birds when they had teeth, the early birds replaced
their teeth throughout their life.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
Well, now that you mentioned the early birds, what's going
on with the pterodactyl.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Well, pterodactyls are not birds, but they're closely related to dinosaurs.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Are they not?
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Then they didn't really have feathers there. They had wings
much more like a bat. It was a skin that
stretched from their inky finger sort of to the back
end of their body.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
At least the audience knows how little I know about dinosaurs. Now,
were they meat eating or no?
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Well, we think they are fish eaters. We find them
in marine sediments. We find them in sediments where we
find fish, and the ones that have teeth have have
the kind of teeth we expect for eating fish.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
So that's interesting. Yeah, what about the tea REGs. I
remember one of those scenes in Jurassic Park. It was
say it won't notice you if you don't move. Was
that Hollywood easier?
Speaker 2 (10:05):
You know? Well, that's that's true of almost all animals.
I mean, if you're perfectly still in the woods, there
aren't very many animals that recognize you as a threat.
And quite frankly, if they haven't seen a person before,
they wouldn't be able to you know, if you think
about it, even you if someone is standing perfectly but
(10:30):
still not moving in the woods, you have a hard
time even picking them out. But we recognize humans easily
and so, but you know, animals have a hard time
recognizing what something is if they haven't ever seen it
before and so so it's sort of true. But on
the other hand, a t rex has one of the
(10:52):
best smell, has the best old factory of almost any dinosaurs,
you know, it would have them.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Oh really, now, what about the t rex? How big
were they? What be approximate on those guys?
Speaker 2 (11:07):
How big is the t reck?
Speaker 1 (11:09):
How tall do they normally get?
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah, well, we got one mounted in our museum that's
forty feet long about twelve feet high.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Twelve that's a pretty big one. Now they're man eating
as well, or flesh eating or carnavan.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Yeah, yeah, they have bone crushing teeth. They they were,
They were definitely meat eaters.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
Now, due to the fact that you can kind of
see the shape of their legs and the way that
their legs are designed, can you determine their velocity when
they run?
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Well, people have worked on t recks, and basically most
of the people that have spent any time looking at
them don't think t recks run very fast. Usually consider them,
you know, doing a high walk and not walking right,
just you know, walking past. Basically, I think they ever scaps,
so I don't think they needed to run at all.
(12:03):
I think that's why they have bone crushing teeth. An
animal does the killing, it doesn't need bone crushing teeth,
it needs flush eating teeth. I don't think it has
bone crushing teeth. So I think it's just this is
eating dead things for sick things or bildings or you
know something.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Difference that's different. Let me ask you this question. I
know one of the dinosaurs in the movie a Jurassic Park,
keep going back to that one, but there was one
that had a a I think it's a dinosaur, Ma's
sure what it was. It spread out its wings or
some sort or some kind of looking like almost like
a peacock, and then it spit out something.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
Where that's a kind of a fictional dinosaur. Okay, it's
called Lophosaurus that we know that it sort of had
a double crust on its head, but we have no
idea if it had a thrill around it, and we
don't know if any animal let spit anything that was
that was a fictionalized dinosaur just for just for the.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Movie, just for the movie. So what were any any
big surprises that you can remember over your career that
you saw something or you found it or discovered something
and you said, wow, I can't believe this.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
You know, I found the person dinosaur embryos in the world.
That was pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Oh really for which kind of dinosaur?
Speaker 2 (13:25):
I don't know. It was a little meat eating dinosaur,
little movie. Yeah, but I found it because I had
a hammer. And this is a good lesson for people.
For years and years, people were thought dinosaur eggs were
very precious and and and they never bother opening it
(13:47):
to look inside to see if there was any embryos inside.
And so when I found my first dinosaur egg, I
just took a hammer to it because I figured blue
was cheap. If there wasn't anything inside of it, you
could just well it back together again. And I have
to take a few of them, but I finally found
one that had an embryo.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
They probably gave a University of a heart attack too
whether at it.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
Yeah, but you know it doesn't matter. I mean, you know,
the the whole point is discovery. And if you if
you're reluctant to open things up and look at mine,
you know, it's sort of like your toaster. If you know,
open it up and see what makes it work, then
you'll never know how it works.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
That's a good point. Well, we have a couple more
questions before we let you go. The Komodo dragon. Is
there any correlation there with dinosaurs?
Speaker 2 (14:34):
No, Kammodo dragon is a lizard. It's a meat eating lizard.
You want to stay at wipe partment if you're around one.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
But oh, actually it was, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
They're not dinosaurs.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
What about our pal over in the over in the UK,
the Luckness Monster. Any any theories on that guy.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Well, if you've ever been the Luckness you'll know why
they need a monster. There's nobody's going to go there
on purpose.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
All right, here's our last question of the day. I
think everybody's waiting for it. Can we create dinosaurs? Are
we close at all?
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Well, we're working. We have a project here at Montana
State where we're not trying to make a specific kind
of dinosaur, but we are trying to figure out a
way to bring back some of the characteristics. So we
know that birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, and we
know that birds have lost some of the characteristics that
(15:42):
we would think of as being you know, real dinosaur,
like a long tail and arms and hands. Birds have
wings instead, and they have lost their tail, and they
also have lost their teeth and their head has been
modified a beak like stretcher. And just recently a group
(16:04):
at Harvard and Yale actually figured out a way to
back up another where it's retro engineer the head of
a bird back to an animal to a shape that
looks more like a dinosaur. There's also a group that
has figured out how to get peeped back in a bird.
And we have been working on the tail. The tails
(16:24):
the hardest part, but we're piguring it out. We're actually
figuring out what what the evolutionary process was involved in
reducing the tail, and we were hoping to reverse that
in the next couple of years.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
We think we will make a loss of raptor looking
animal in the next five years.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
What do you think is most well, here's what we
call the hot seat question. All right, are you ready?
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Yep?
Speaker 1 (16:53):
What do you think is most likely in the next
one hundred years a Jurassic park kind of an amusement park,
or a Planet of the eighth.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Uh, dinosaurs?
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Really dinosaurs?
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Yep?
Speaker 1 (17:06):
And do you think we can actually create one of
the next hundred years?
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Possibly? Oh, I think we'll have a We'll have a
dinosaur created in less than twenty years.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Really, well, there you go, everybody, less than twenty years.
That's amazing, all right.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
You know it's easier to work on chickens than it
is to work on primates.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Well, Professor Hornet, we truly appreciate your time and being
on the circle and giving us some insight about the
world of the dinosaur, that's for sure. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
You're welcome.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
So if everybody wants to get a hold of you,
where do we go?
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Well, I work at the Museum of the Rockies Mont
Tennessee University. And if you're interested in CEE and how
we're working on a dinosaur, you might check out my
pet talk. I've got a couple of pet talks them
you might find interesting. Otherwise, come see our t reps here,
our real out of t reps at the Museum of
(18:07):
the Rockies.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
There you go, everyone, Professor Jack Horner, the author of
a wonderful book how to Build a Dinosaur. According to
we're getting close. So there you go. Maybe we'll get
one of these days at Jurassic Park and real life.
Remember our model is simple. Everyone wherever their psychology involved,
even into the Jurassic world. We're going to be there
From wherever you are around the world. Welcome and thank
you for joining us. This is the Circle of Insight
show about everything and human behavior and this time dinosaurs.
I'm doctor Carlos and with me today is doctor Horner.
He's the Regent's Professor of Paleontology at Montana State University
and probably the best known paleontologist in the world. He
(00:20):
also wrote a fabulous book called How to Build a Dinosaur,
which explains it enlightens an awesome new science. So let's
welcome to the Circle, doctor Horner. Welcome, sir, Thank you.
So this is a really fascinating especially now with the
new movie The Jurassic World out and about. First, let
me find out what got you interested in dinosaurs?
Speaker 2 (00:40):
What got me interested? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (00:42):
What got you excited about dinosaurs?
Speaker 2 (00:45):
I think I was born this way. Dinosaurs of paleontology
my entire life.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Really, Now, did you watch you obviously saw Jurassic Park,
the original movie?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Yeah, well I was a technical advisor for all of those.
I was on set and saw how they made him. Yeah,
thats a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
I'm gonna take you back a little bit in time,
Land of the Lost. How'd you like that? Show?
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Well that was it was great back in the day
when I watched it.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Well, I know a lot of people are gonna they
started getting curious. I know, there was a lot of
articles that came out at the Jurassic Park. Can we
do this? Can we really create dinosaurs? And technology has
moved really fast since then. It's been about twenty years
or more since that movie came out. What's going on
out there in regards to creating dinosaurs and what is
(01:41):
true or not true about these movies?
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Well, first off, in ninety three when the movie came out,
there was you know, Michael Crichton had his notion that
he put in the book was you know, was not
even tested yet. So there were still people trying to
figure out how to get DNA out of a dinosaur, or,
(02:05):
in the case of Jurassic Bark, how to get dinosaur
DNA out of a mosquito that might have bitten a dinosaur.
And you know, they they tried to get biomolecules out
of insects and amber, and unfortunately discovered that amber breathes,
in other words, it interacts with the atmosphere, and so
(02:30):
that didn't work. And so in nineteen ninety three, I
had a student of mine and I got a grant
from the National Science Foundation to an attempt to extract
DNA from a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton that was very well preserved,
and we did a number of tests and the test
(02:55):
came out positive, suggesting that there was DNA in it,
but we were ever able to find it. We were
never able to actually locate it. And it's we think,
because DNA breaks down too quickly. It's a huge, huge molecule,
and it basically hangs together in a cell where lots
of other chemical machinery is in in there that keeps
(03:18):
it sort of together. But after an animal dies and
the cells die, then everything that helps to keep the
DNA molecule together starts falling apart, and so we end
up with tiny, tiny, tiny pieces, none of which we've
been able to find yet.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Let me ask you this question, So, do they have
the same kind of bone marrow that humans do, where
red blood cells are made in the bone marrow?
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Yep, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, I mean it.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
So they's somewhat similar to us in a sense, so
that at least that aspect of it.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Well, red blood cells and us actually don't even don't
have a nucleus, but in reptiles and birds they do.
So I actually can get the NA out of riplin
cells of a modern bird, whereas you can't out of
a mammal.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Well, now you're triggered a thought in my head. I
know a lot of scientists or something. I don't know
if the majority or not, but a lot of them
say that everything started with the bird. In regards to dinosaurs,
is that true?
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Well, the birds are dinosaurs. Birds are the direct descendants
of dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs. I mean, there was
one group of dinosaurs called solorosaurs that gave rise to birds,
and then all the other dinosaurs went extinct. Birds, birds actually,
(04:53):
you know, technically are dinosaurs. That's how we classify them.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Now we are really divide.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Them into too. So there's non avian dinosaurs, which are
the ones that I think, and avian dinosaurs are birds.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Interesting, So let me ask you a couple of questions
in regards to to dinosaurs themselves. I know a lot
of people that I've asked or have had questions of
emailed to me about this show. How do you determine
what kind of skin, what kind of look they have?
If all we have is skeletons.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Well, actually, skeletons are not the only thing we have.
We actually have the imprint of their skin. Just like
you can walk in mud or walk in sand or
or other material around the lake and leave a footprint,
dinosaurs left footprints, and they also left impressions of their
(05:47):
skin texture when they were covered up with sand and mud.
So we have a very nice sort of quote mummified dinosaur.
It's not a genuine money obviously, but we have the
impression of the skin of a pretty complete dinosaur here
at the Museum of the Rockies, and you can see
(06:11):
texture of the skin. You can see that there was
a frill that ran down the back. I mean, it's
it gives you a lot of information. It doesn't tell
you what color they were, But we know that dinosaurs
were reptiles, and that birds are dinosaurs, and birds are colorful,
and most reptiles are colorful, and so we expect dinosaurs
(06:31):
to be colorful as well.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
It's a good assumption. So let's just explore a couple
of the dinosaurs before we get to the magic question
is can we really create dinosaurs? I'll leave that for
the end to tease the audience unfortunately, but it's investigated
a couple of these other dinosaurs that were in the movies.
I know veloci raptors are seem to be prevalent in
Jurassic Park and Jurassic World. What are those.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
A lot? Well, first off, in Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs
we use for velociraptor our dinosaurs called Dnonicus, and they're
very closely related to velociraptor. But you know, Stephen didn't
think that name would stick very well and people wouldn't
be able to remember how to say it, so we
(07:15):
use the name velociraptor instead of down NICUs. But like
I said, they're very closely related. They are a meat
eating dinosaur and they hunted in groups, and they would
have been extremely vicious animals.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
And how how did you guys decipher all that stuff from?
What did you decipher that they were meat eating and
hunted in groups.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Well, we know they're meat eating because they have meat
slicing tea. They have the rated peep just like you know,
like little steak knives in their mouth. We have a
specimen here at the Museum of the Rockies that shows
pat hunting. We've got a plant eating dinosaur that was
clear really taken down and killed by by at least
(08:04):
five dynaikets raptors. And we can tell that because dinosaurs
replaced their teeth throughout their life, and so anytime they
were in a struggle, they could actually afford to lose
a tooth or two because they would just be replaced.
And in the case of this particular plant eating dinosaur
(08:25):
we have we haven't. We've got like a dozen teeth,
which suggests, I mean, one animal, one one velociraptor like animals,
not going to lose a dozen of its teeth, but
a number of them could. And so we're we we
theorize that from three to five individuals we're in on
(08:47):
this kill.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
We need that DNA, to Professor Horner, would be good
DNA for us to have. We can keep regenerating our teeth.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
That's right. Well, we replaced our teeth once, and dinosaurs
and birds when they had teeth, the early birds replaced
their teeth throughout their life.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
Well, now that you mentioned the early birds, what's going
on with the pterodactyl.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Well, pterodactyls are not birds, but they're closely related to dinosaurs.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Are they not?
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Then they didn't really have feathers there. They had wings
much more like a bat. It was a skin that
stretched from their inky finger sort of to the back
end of their body.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
At least the audience knows how little I know about dinosaurs. Now,
were they meat eating or no?
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Well, we think they are fish eaters. We find them
in marine sediments. We find them in sediments where we
find fish, and the ones that have teeth have have
the kind of teeth we expect for eating fish.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
So that's interesting. Yeah, what about the tea REGs. I
remember one of those scenes in Jurassic Park. It was
say it won't notice you if you don't move. Was
that Hollywood easier?
Speaker 2 (10:05):
You know? Well, that's that's true of almost all animals.
I mean, if you're perfectly still in the woods, there
aren't very many animals that recognize you as a threat.
And quite frankly, if they haven't seen a person before,
they wouldn't be able to you know, if you think
about it, even you if someone is standing perfectly but
(10:30):
still not moving in the woods, you have a hard
time even picking them out. But we recognize humans easily
and so, but you know, animals have a hard time
recognizing what something is if they haven't ever seen it
before and so so it's sort of true. But on
the other hand, a t rex has one of the
(10:52):
best smell, has the best old factory of almost any dinosaurs,
you know, it would have them.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Oh really, now, what about the t rex? How big
were they? What be approximate on those guys?
Speaker 2 (11:07):
How big is the t reck?
Speaker 1 (11:09):
How tall do they normally get?
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah, well, we got one mounted in our museum that's
forty feet long about twelve feet high.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Twelve that's a pretty big one. Now they're man eating
as well, or flesh eating or carnavan.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Yeah, yeah, they have bone crushing teeth. They they were,
They were definitely meat eaters.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
Now, due to the fact that you can kind of
see the shape of their legs and the way that
their legs are designed, can you determine their velocity when
they run?
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Well, people have worked on t recks, and basically most
of the people that have spent any time looking at
them don't think t recks run very fast. Usually consider them,
you know, doing a high walk and not walking right,
just you know, walking past. Basically, I think they ever scaps,
so I don't think they needed to run at all.
(12:03):
I think that's why they have bone crushing teeth. An
animal does the killing, it doesn't need bone crushing teeth,
it needs flush eating teeth. I don't think it has
bone crushing teeth. So I think it's just this is
eating dead things for sick things or bildings or you
know something.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Difference that's different. Let me ask you this question. I
know one of the dinosaurs in the movie a Jurassic Park,
keep going back to that one, but there was one
that had a a I think it's a dinosaur, Ma's
sure what it was. It spread out its wings or
some sort or some kind of looking like almost like
a peacock, and then it spit out something.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
Where that's a kind of a fictional dinosaur. Okay, it's
called Lophosaurus that we know that it sort of had
a double crust on its head, but we have no
idea if it had a thrill around it, and we
don't know if any animal let spit anything that was
that was a fictionalized dinosaur just for just for the.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Movie, just for the movie. So what were any any
big surprises that you can remember over your career that
you saw something or you found it or discovered something
and you said, wow, I can't believe this.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
You know, I found the person dinosaur embryos in the world.
That was pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Oh really for which kind of dinosaur?
Speaker 2 (13:25):
I don't know. It was a little meat eating dinosaur,
little movie. Yeah, but I found it because I had
a hammer. And this is a good lesson for people.
For years and years, people were thought dinosaur eggs were
very precious and and and they never bother opening it
(13:47):
to look inside to see if there was any embryos inside.
And so when I found my first dinosaur egg, I
just took a hammer to it because I figured blue
was cheap. If there wasn't anything inside of it, you
could just well it back together again. And I have
to take a few of them, but I finally found
one that had an embryo.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
They probably gave a University of a heart attack too
whether at it.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
Yeah, but you know it doesn't matter. I mean, you know,
the the whole point is discovery. And if you if
you're reluctant to open things up and look at mine,
you know, it's sort of like your toaster. If you know,
open it up and see what makes it work, then
you'll never know how it works.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
That's a good point. Well, we have a couple more
questions before we let you go. The Komodo dragon. Is
there any correlation there with dinosaurs?
Speaker 2 (14:34):
No, Kammodo dragon is a lizard. It's a meat eating lizard.
You want to stay at wipe partment if you're around one.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
But oh, actually it was, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
They're not dinosaurs.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
What about our pal over in the over in the UK,
the Luckness Monster. Any any theories on that guy.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Well, if you've ever been the Luckness you'll know why
they need a monster. There's nobody's going to go there
on purpose.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
All right, here's our last question of the day. I
think everybody's waiting for it. Can we create dinosaurs? Are
we close at all?
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Well, we're working. We have a project here at Montana
State where we're not trying to make a specific kind
of dinosaur, but we are trying to figure out a
way to bring back some of the characteristics. So we
know that birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, and we
know that birds have lost some of the characteristics that
(15:42):
we would think of as being you know, real dinosaur,
like a long tail and arms and hands. Birds have
wings instead, and they have lost their tail, and they
also have lost their teeth and their head has been
modified a beak like stretcher. And just recently a group
(16:04):
at Harvard and Yale actually figured out a way to
back up another where it's retro engineer the head of
a bird back to an animal to a shape that
looks more like a dinosaur. There's also a group that
has figured out how to get peeped back in a bird.
And we have been working on the tail. The tails
(16:24):
the hardest part, but we're piguring it out. We're actually
figuring out what what the evolutionary process was involved in
reducing the tail, and we were hoping to reverse that
in the next couple of years.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
We think we will make a loss of raptor looking
animal in the next five years.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
What do you think is most well, here's what we
call the hot seat question. All right, are you ready?
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Yep?
Speaker 1 (16:53):
What do you think is most likely in the next
one hundred years a Jurassic park kind of an amusement park,
or a Planet of the eighth.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Uh, dinosaurs?
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Really dinosaurs?
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Yep?
Speaker 1 (17:06):
And do you think we can actually create one of
the next hundred years?
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Possibly? Oh, I think we'll have a We'll have a
dinosaur created in less than twenty years.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Really, well, there you go, everybody, less than twenty years.
That's amazing, all right.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
You know it's easier to work on chickens than it
is to work on primates.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Well, Professor Hornet, we truly appreciate your time and being
on the circle and giving us some insight about the
world of the dinosaur, that's for sure. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
You're welcome.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
So if everybody wants to get a hold of you,
where do we go?
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Well, I work at the Museum of the Rockies Mont
Tennessee University. And if you're interested in CEE and how
we're working on a dinosaur, you might check out my
pet talk. I've got a couple of pet talks them
you might find interesting. Otherwise, come see our t reps here,
our real out of t reps at the Museum of
(18:07):
the Rockies.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
There you go, everyone, Professor Jack Horner, the author of
a wonderful book how to Build a Dinosaur. According to
we're getting close. So there you go. Maybe we'll get
one of these days at Jurassic Park and real life.
Remember our model is simple. Everyone wherever their psychology involved,
even into the Jurassic world. We're going to be there
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