Jack Horner Quotes

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

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

"T Rex could not run."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

"Children have a great urge to learn about dinosaurs."

"Most people looking for dinosaurs are looking for beautiful skeletons."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"'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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Evolution - evolutionary change - does not happen quickly."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"Historical science is being left in the dust."