T. Rex May Have Been A Pussycat Dinosaur Expert Says Everyone’s Favorite Predator May Have Only Been A Scavenger
There’s a crisis in the Egg Mountain display at the Museum of the Rockies. Baby Orodromeus dinosaurs are shown crawling out of what turns out to be Troodon dinosaur eggs.
Jack Horner, paleontologist and chief scientific adviser for the display, looks downright pleased over the mix-up. To hear him tell it, being proved wrong is the greatest thing to which a scientist can aspire.
“The goal of a scientist is to falsify beliefs,” Horner said. “We try to find evidence that the thing we believe isn’t true. One of the characteristics of a scientist should be a desire to know what is right, rather than wanting to be right.”
Upstairs from Horner’s basement office, another popular belief is about to hit a scientific crisis. The world’s largest prepared Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton has been put on trial for murder. We the jury must decide if T. rex really was a killer, or just a scavenger that fed on already dead victims.
“It’s everyone’s favorite dinosaur, and they all know what T. rex did for a living, and they don’t want to change their ideas,” Horner said. “But there’s lots of information to suggest it was a scavenger and very little to suggest it was a predator. I had to change my mind.”
For a man who looks like a 6-foot-4 hippie ditch digger, Horner’s voice is surprisingly soft. When he speaks, you can almost see a mental selection process testing words before letting them out of his mouth. Horner may not want to be right, but he doesn’t like to be wrong.
The forensic evidence may be tough to beat. A triceratops skeleton has been found with tooth marks in its butt that match the 7-inch fangs T. rex always carried.
But there is the suspect, on the stand, with a pair of ridiculously small forearms. T. rex was supposed to be a killing machine and it couldn’t even scratch its own head?
And what about that body? Sure, it’s huge and scary looking. But it’s also slow and clumsy, in a world where lots of other predators are quick and light. Sort of like a big truck on the Indianapolis 500 track.
To the disappointment of predator fans everywhere, Horner thinks T. rex wasn’t up to the job. The new exhibit lays out the evidence he and other paleontologists have dug out of the ground and lets visitors draw their own conclusions.
Scattered through the rest of the museum hall are other menacing skeletons, including Big Al, the allosaurus discovered five years ago in Wyoming. Its body was preserved so perfectly intact, diggers could have drawn a chalk outline around the site like a murder crime scene.
The exhibit marks the first time these discoveries have been on public display. Despite the popularity of showing dinosaurs, Horner said he had misgivings about putting the show together.
“The problem is, skeletons never did this,” Horner said of the bony monsters frozen in mid-rampage. “But if we have to stand a dinosaur up to teach science, then that’s fine.”
“This is a way to give people what they want to see and be true to Jack’s desire to tell a story,” said museum marketing director Shelly McKamey. “It’s a way to present the data on the predator/ scavenger controversy.”
While the exhibit preparation involves dozens of laborers and days of effort, Horner’s part has been mostly finished for some time. That’s good because his plate is full of other projects.
“T. rex On Trial” opens May 24. The movie “The Lost World,” for which Horner was an adviser as he was in an earlier Steven Spielberg production, “Jurassic Park,” is due in theaters the same day.
In addition, Horner’s latest book, “Dinosaur Lives,” is being published. He has a date in London to help open a new dinosaur exhibit at the National History Museum. There are plans to dig in Montana through July and August. And he has to sort out a pile of geological evidence, collected on a recent trip to Africa, that may reveal dinosaur sites similar to Montana’s
“Finally, Celeste (his wife) and I are going to see if we can find some fun stuff in Mongolia,” Horner said.