[Jack] Is there anybody who cannot identify this?
[Laughter] ...[from audience]"I thought it
was a nice purse, but I know it's not now..."
[Jack Horner] You know, usually I to
children, and of course, they know a lot
more than everybody else in here, right?
You know that, right? About what I talk
about...okay...Brocke asked me to talk
about something that I don't talk about.
He asked me to talk about me. I'm not...
so just bear with me, okay? The whole
point, I guess, is how I got here. Why I am
standing up here. I come from Montana,
and ... (ahem)...I come from a town called
Shelby, Montana. Here is a picture of it .
You can see this large thing that is in the
picture here. Shelby, in 1923, obviously
before I was born....I think the whole town
was Dyslexic...[laughter]. This is a boxing
stadium. This was were they held the World
Heavyweight Boxing Championship in 1923,
in a town of 500 in the middle of Montana.
No kidding, that's it! Well, as you can
imagine, it didn't work very well, but ...
I have circled there the high school
building in the town, where 5 years after
this picture was taken, my father graduated
as a valedictorian. You can imagine just
saying that, that he and I didn't get
along well. I was born, and there is my
first house on the left there, a tent.
I've pretty much lived in tents ever since.
There are sort of 2 stories here. One is
the way my father saw it, as far as he was
concerned, life was great for me until I
was 5 years old. Like everyone else, at
the age of 5, I went to kindergarten and
flunked out, because I couldn't figure out
the blocks, with letters on them. Then,
according to my father, at the age of 8 he
tried to teach me Algebra. I still,
obviously, couldn't read, so I didn't do
well there. Then I went through....like
everyone else in this room...I'm a little
suspicious of the non-dyslexics in here...
[big laughter]....but I'll get to that
later. I'm just really curious as to why
you are here....seriously...unless you are
trying to get our secrets from us. [laughter]
Anyway, I went on and did poorly, and had
lots of report cards that said lots of
things about me, like the other report card
we were looking at. I finally graduated
from high school with a D-minus-minus-minus.
The teacher said to me, this means that you
have failed, but I never want to see you
again! [Laughter] I was happy, that was
good! Then I went to college. I went to
the University of Montana. At that time,
you could get in if you had a high school
diploma. I entered in 1964 and flunked
out in 1965. Upon flunking out, I was
drafted and I went to the United States
Marine Corp, which only drafted for one
month, in all of it's time. So, I was not
only dyslexic, but unlucky. [laughter].
That was 1966, I came back and went back
to college, and according to my father, in
1973 I had flunked out of college 7 times
in 5 years. I was 27 years old, I was
married, I was a truck driver. And as far
as my father was concerned, that was the
end of my life. He wasn't even going to
hire me to work in his gravel plant. Which
was okay...but...that's not really how I
looked at it. I sort of had a different
view of my life. When I was 8 years old,
when he was trying to teach me Algebra,
I actually found my first dinosaur bone
that year. It was a pretty big occasion
for me. I went out...my mother would take
me on drives, take me out to the sites.
I would go out and collect dinosaur bones
even though I was failing all of my
classes in school. When I was 12 years
old, I built an exhibit in our library.
It's still there. I would go to the
library and read all the books, not read
them, but look at all the pictures to
determine what I thought I had, and label
all the fossils. Then I continued to do
that through high school, and when I
graduated from high school, I won the
science fair, and that was actually how I
got to college...I was invited, so I went
in 1964, and I studied Geology, Zoology,
Anthropology, and Botany. I actually took
all the courses that were offered in all 4
departments. But when you flunk out every
quarter....So here's the key, and this is
worth telling your students. The key is,
that if you change your major after you've
been kicked out, then those people in that
department don't really know. [laughter]
So I would change majors pretty constantly.
But while I was there, I also learned how
to...don't look at my trousers..it was the
60's. So anyway, I learned how to put
skeletons together, and it was pretty cool.
I actually learned quite a bit. I also
excavated my first dinosaur skeleton, and
so from my perspective, in 1973, I had
learned an awful lot about Geology and
Zoology, I'd completed a scientific
research project, I was married, and my
outlook was pretty optimistic. I was
applying for work in museums. Two years
later, I was hired to work as a technician
at Princeton University. Now, a technician-
I didn't have a degree as you probably
could tell, I had a high school diploma.
I was hired by Princeton to clean fossils.
While I was there, there were signs around
on the campus, and one of them said,
would you rather go to a movie than read a
book? ...Some other weird questions --I
went and asked about it, and they told me
I was dys--lex--ic. I assume everybody
knows here, that it doesn't matter if
somebody tells you that. Right? I mean...
You can't read any better. [laughter]
Anyway...so...I thanked them and I went
back to work. [big laughter] I started
Princeton in 1975, and then in 1978, a
friend of mine, Bob Macula, who's there in
the picture, he and I found a nest of baby
dinosaurs back in Montana, when I was back
there on vacation, looking for 'stuff'.
The baby dinosaurs...it was the first time
people had actually seen evidence that
dinosaurs cared for their young. A year
later I published my first scientific
paper in the journal, Nature.
We found a lot of stuff. We found the
largest concentration of dinosaur bones in
the world, estimated at 115,000 skeletons.
Obviously, we haven't dug them all up yet.
But I was at Princeton at that time, and
the museum in Montana, the Museum of the
Rockies, where I work now, stopped by and
said, you know, you are finding so many
dinosaurs...leave some here for us. I said,
"'llI tell you what, I'll leave them all
here if you just hire me. Princeton is very
nice, but when you are born and raised
in Montana, New Jersey just doesn't cut
it. So, they did. They hired me and in
1982 I went back to Montana as the Curator
of Paleontology. Now, I didn't have a
degree, so I couldn't do anything, and I
was the curator, I could actually curate
fossils, --basically put things away. I
was at a University where I really couldn't
do much of anything else. But a funny thing
happened. While we were working, we found
the first dinosaur eggs in the Western
Hemisphere. We went on to find quite a
few eggs. I don't know...there is something
about dinosaur eggs, maybe you can explain,
we'll have a non-dyslexic/dyslexic
conversation after this, alright? Dinosaur
eggs actually had been found in the 1800's.
They had been found in France, and then in
the 1920's, they were found in Mongolia,
and some were found in China. I started
finding these eggs in the 1980's and I
was the first person to find a dinosaur
embryo, a little skeleton of a dinosaur
inside the egg. Now, here's our dyslexic
question. "Dinosaur eggs were found in the
1800's. The first dinosaur embryo was
found in 1983. What advantage did I have
over everyone else in the world for all
those years?" ...I had a hammer! [laughter]
That's all there was! I had a hammer. For
all of those years, people had ...See,
this is the problem with reading. Reading
is really over-rated if you think about it.
People had convinced one another that
they shouldn't break eggs open because
eggs are precious. And so no one ever
broke an egg open. I even went to museums
and said, "Can I just break one of your
eggs open?" and they said, "NO, you can't
break our eggs because they are precious. "
And I said, "It's just like having a
present that you never open because it is
so pretty." Seriously, no one had ever
found a dinosaur embryo. So I have
gone back now that people saw that I
could break them open and glue is cheap,
you can glue them back together. [laughter]
There is nothing that you can see...you can
see in my picture there the thing is
actually held together with a rubber band.
After you break it, you just rubber-band it
back together again. Anyway...then I
published my first book that year and
of course sent it to my English teacher.
[laughter] We've gone on and discovered
an awful lot of dinosaurs in Montana,
a lot of new species of dinosaurs. But
it was the dinosaur embryo's that caught
people's imagination and caught, I don't
know, caught something, because the
University of Montana, the very people
that had thrown me out of college, 7 times,
gave me an honorary doctorate! [clapping]
...On my 40th birthday. And then two
weeks later, I got a MacArthur
Fellowship.[clapping] So then they made me
a professor! [laughter] I'm serious, they
made me a professor! Just because I had a
hammer! [laughter] I'm serious, I became a
professor! Then I could have graduate
students, and I could write NSF grants,
and I sent out expeditions all over
Montana. And then I sent out expeditions
all over the world, and it was 1993 and
that's when Steven Spielberg called me up
and asked me if I wanted to work on a
movie. All because I had a hammer. So,
that's what I do. We have the largest
dinosaur research program in the world.
As you can see, up in the upper right
hand corner, we still break eggs. What we
are breaking now, is into developmental
evolutionary biology, and we are
attempting in our lab to retro-engineer a
live dinosaur, from a bird. Yes, we are
trying to make the Dino-Chicken. It's the
Dino-Chicken project, which basically
takes a hammer as well. I encouage you,
if you can get to Montana, come visit
our museum, where we break open a lot
of things. Thank you.