Jack Horner Quotes

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.

- Jack Horner

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.

- Jack Horner

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

- Jack Horner

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

- Jack Horner

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.

- Jack Horner

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.

- Jack Horner

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.

- Jack Horner

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

- Jack Horner

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

- Jack Horner

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

- Jack Horner

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

- Jack Horner

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

- Jack Horner

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

- Jack Horner

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

- Jack Horner

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

- Jack Horner

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.

- Jack Horner

T Rex could not run.

- Jack Horner

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

- Jack Horner

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.

- Jack Horner

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

- Jack Horner

'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.

- Jack Horner

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

- Jack Horner

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.

- Jack Horner

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.

- Jack Horner

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

- Jack Horner

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

- Jack Horner

Most people looking for dinosaurs are looking for beautiful skeletons.

- Jack Horner

Evolution - evolutionary change - does not happen quickly.

- Jack Horner

Children have a great urge to learn about dinosaurs.

- Jack Horner

Historical science is being left in the dust.

- Jack Horner

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

- Jack Horner

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

- Jack Horner

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

- Jack Horner