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Interviews: Ask What You Will of Paleontologist Jack Horner
John "Jack" R. Horner is the Curator of Paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies, adjunct curator at the National Museum of Natural History, and one of the most famous paleontologists in the world. Known in the scientific community for his research on dinosaur growth and whether or not some species lived in social groups, he is most famous for his work on Jurassic Park and being the inspiration for the character of Alan Grant. Horner caused quite a stir with the publication of his book, How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever, in which he proposes creating a "chickensaurus" by genetically "nudging" the DNA of a chicken. Jack has agreed to step away from the genetics lab and put down the bones in order to answer your questions. As usual, you're invited to ask as many questions as you'd like, but please divide them, one question per post.
Assuming you had some great technology that could collect it, is there any possible source of dinosaur DNA that would allow a more or less complete rebuild of a dinosaur (again assuming great futuristic technology that can accomplish this - think nanobots and strong AI)? Or is all dinosaur DNA forever gone? Or is it an undecided question?
"...I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." - Linus Torvalds
Your dinochicken could be the perfect way for KFC to transition to serving actual chicken.
The 20th anniversary enhanced version will return to theaters in a few weeks. Supposedly Crichton modeled the Sam Neill character partly after you. What positive and negative things did this movie do for dinosaur paleontology? I would have thought it got a few more children interested in the subject.
If I were going to fund 1 program, which should I fund chickensaurus over resurrecting a Neanderthal, Woolly Mammoth, or a Tasmanian Tiger? I mean they are all valid – but please make your case on why you should go first.
From time I spent playing with kids and miniature plastic dinosaurs, I imagine the popularity of your chickenosaurus project would be enormous. If you succeed, do you have a plan to fund future genetic research by marketing the animals as pets?
Did your mother ever make you sit in a corner?
Something that's always made me curious about Paleontology is how far the study has come. If we look back historically at how dinosaur bones were exhumed and treated, some of the methods were actually a little bit destructive. So I've always wondered how paleontologists today cope with the fact that 100 years in the future we will likely have technology beyond our wildest dreams that will be able to scan the ground and find fossils in their original preserved intact positions and when they are excavated the process will surely be much more refined and exact measurements will be taken to better understand dinosaurs. I'm sure preservation techniques and materials science will allow us to even better handle finds. How do you cope with this idea that hundreds of years from now your efforts might be seen as crude or arcane? Do you ever wish that some paleontologists of the past had just left the specimens lying there for a future paleontologist to properly handle? Or do you just see this as a necessary way to move forward? Building on that, is there an end-game for paleontologists where the entire Earth has been inspected/surveyed and how many years out is that (I understand that sensor technology would have to come a very long way)?
My work here is dung.
For a long time the primary source of money for scientific research has been the federal granting agencies (NIH, NSF, DOE in particular). All three of them are facing either budget cuts, budget stalls, or increases in their budgets that do not match inflation. This does not seem to fare well for new scientists or established ones who are looking to further their careers.
Where do you see research money coming from next? Alternately, are we looking ahead to a time where fewer people will be doing science because the funding just won't exist to pay even their meager wages any more?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
We discovered dinosaurs got feathers, then we even figured out colors of feathers. What is the next big thing we'll learn about dinosaurs in the nearest future?
How much have you been influenced by the attempts to breed back aurochs by the Heck brothers? The Heck cattle bear some resemblance to the extinct aurochs. The degree of success is controversial, because there are very significant differences between the aurochs and the Heck cattle. Some believe that the whole idea of breeding back is deeply flawed, because you cannot achieve a genotypical match by working from phenotypical measures..
Paleontologist Jack Horner
There's a clue there.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
So, first of all this is hands-down the best Slashdot interview ever!
On to my actual question: what do you think about the possible existence of Paleocene dinosaurs? I understand that any current fossil evidence for their existence is likely caused by reworked fossils. How likely do you believe it is that a particular dinosaur taxon survived a few million years after the extinction event, and what would be the implications of this occurring?
I wanted to be a paleontologist my entire life (and still do) but I ended up in computers because of the money. However I still daydream about it. What is the best part of your job? What's the worst?
Slightly off base from your normal work, how often is dinosaur skin, or its impression, found when fossils are located and has any type of color ever been found associated with the skin?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Could we hope to find for example Ammonite or Trilobite fossils on Mars, because there was once water there and Ammonites and Trilobites are what one might call "Standard Default Species Evolution Step" or an "Evolutionary Stable Species State" when there is water and you give things a few hundred million years ?
Domestication changes genes and presumably the epigenome. Wouldn't it be more reasonable to pick an undomesticated bird, perhaps a more "primitive" one than the highly domesticated chicken as the DNA source to "clone" a dinosaur?
Nate
You don't hear a lot about porn stars going into paleontology...
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
In science (even computer science) I have a lot of interest in what we know we don't know and what we don't know we don't know. With paleontology and it's subdomains -- specifically your specialty of dinosaur growth -- how do you deal with what must be an unbound realm of what we don't know we don't know? For example, isn't it possible that growth was regulated completely differently in dinosaurs than it is in modern day lizards and birds? Couldn't modern day hormones and endocrine system be much different than what was present in dinosaurs? When you publish research is it all based on assumptions? How do you overcome such an open system of possibilities?
My work here is dung.
So, let's pretend the K-T event never happened and dinosaurs survived into the Holocene. What do you think the world's fauna would be like now? How would dinosaur evolution have progressed? Assuming humans had still come onto the scene (because it would be so cool) would we have driven the dinosaurs to extinction by now?
What are the current big, unanswered questions in mesozoic paleontology? That is, what are the questions we have, but do not yet have more than guessed answers for?
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Dr. Horner, you have inspired me to engage in the sciences ever since I was a little kid. Although I didn't go into the field of paleontology, I did study computer science and became a software developer for an education company. In my field, we are always trying to find ways to engage kids in the STEM fields to help develop the next generation of engineers, programmers, biologists, and even paleontologists. In your opinion, how do you see the future of your field within the next generation of scientists, and what steps should we take to help kids become more interested in the sciences?
This one is from my 6-year-old boy, Will. We're currently reading a book about dinosaurs (he gets three per bedtime). He wants to know, "how many dinosaurs haven't been discovered yet?" One of his favorites is one that was discovered in China fairly recently (many of the famous ones seem to come from the US midwest from the early part of last century).
While his question is impossible to answer on its own, do paleontologists have a sense of whether the types of soils likely to hold fossils have been well explored, or if we've merely scratched the surface [sic] of what's to come?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Why start with a chicken instead of an Emu or Cassowary? Those large flightless birds already look a lot more like dinosaurs than a chicken. They even have 3 toes. With a longer tail and some teeth they would seem very dinosaur-like.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I don't have a question, but a comment on the Museum of the Rockies. This is an excellent little museum, and well worth the visit. Anyone who goes to Yellowstone, the 1.5 hour trek to Bozeman is well worth the drive. The drive will take you past many geological formations, such as the Devil's Slide, and often takes you past quite a bit of wildlife like elk, bighorn sheep, bears and bald eagles.
The museum is very enjoyable and educational for both children and adults.
For myself, I take a hard interpretation of the scientific method that it only applies to predictions about the future. Predictions that can be tested. If I run an experiment and the prediction fails, the theory is invalidated. To pick an example from physics, if I throw a coconut, I should be able to predict where and how fast it will be at different times in the future during its flight. If the coconut didn't fly (within error) of Netwon's predictions, it would invalidate Netwon's Laws.
This "hard" interpretation prevents me from making predictions about the past. When I see a coconut flying through the air at a certain time and place with a certain velocity, I cannot use the scientific method to tell where the coconut was thrown from. The "hard" interpretation of the scientific method covers any number of events in the future, but cannot be applied to the past, let alone a singular event in the past. To be clear, I _do_ think it's valid to say "Using what we know from science, we can _extrapolate_ that the coconut was thrown from someone standing a place at time in the past". But I accept that any extrapolation could be wrong. This might happen if the coconut was not thrown by a person but dropped by a migrating swallow (African or European).
I'm asking this question because a sizable portion of the United States (roughly 46% in a Gallup poll) believe the universe was created in the last 10,000 years and some of their (our?) leaders want to stop teaching the theory of evolution because they say it contradicts their divine revelations. In my opinion (because of the hard interpretation), the theory of evolution does not contradict their divine revelation. I believe that if we tested the theory - exposed some bacteria to an antibiotic - we'd see it held - the bacteria that survived would become resistant to the substance. It is just the extrapolations we get by applying what we've learned from science - the earth being 4.5 billion years old, human having a common ancestor with apes, etc. - that contradict their divine revelation. I'm okay with someone saying my extrapolations could be wrong as long as they accept the scientific theory (and as long as they don't try to teach their divine revelations in the public schools I help fund!)
As someone in a what Wikipedia calls a "historical science", how should science-lovers view the past? Must someone throw out the theory of evolution if they don't believe in dinosaurs? Obviously Paleontology has had a huge effect by inspiring theories in Biology, just as Astronomy has had in Physics. Do you think we should have a separate name for fields that "extrapolate" the past based on the knowledge gained from science, so that the theory of evolution could be taught without inciting conflict with those who get their past from their divine revelation?
NOTE: I am not a creationist. I believe in dinosaurs and human-ape ancestors. I believe Astronomy, Historical Geography, and Paleontology give us a view of the past that is most consistent with science and that that past should be the one used in the public sphere of a pluralistic society. But I don't want the kids of Kansas to not be taught the theory of evolution for a conflict that, in my mind, isn't the real conflict and the real conflict isn't something a science-lovers would fight over. Well, unless that science-lover happened to be a Paleontologist...
Dinosaurs are a monophyletic clade as long as you include birds, which descended from the Theropods.
Theropods and Sauropods are much more closely related to each other than to lizards. They're even both on the Saurischian branch. All of the above are Diapsids in the Sauria clade, but the ancestors of the lizards and snakes (Lepidosauromorpha) branched off from the ancestors of the crocoldilians and Dinosaurs (Archosauromorpha). I've spent way too much time looking at dinosaur phylogeny lately.
It's the term "Reptile" that doesn't make sense.
I am filing a patent for Kobe Velociraptor. They spend their live eating Kobe Beef.
sudo make me a sandwich
My son is a sophomore in college and is consider a career in paleontology. I don't really know how to advise him and not sure of the prospects. He has the passion, grades and ambition. What advice would you have for a young person enter the field and what undergraduate degree would you recommend.