Somewhere in eastern Montana, in the rolling, eroded hills known as the Hell Creek formation, paleontologist Jack Horner sips a beer and looks down at the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex ever unearthed. It lies on its left side, its neck twisted back pitiably. Horner's crew has just exposed a section of pelvic bone to its first sunset in 65 million years, and someone remarks on the redness of the bone, like smoked bacon.
"It's the comet," says Horner, with a deep nod.
"That's why it's smoked," his crew chief says.
Well, O.K., maybe not. Have a beer, sit down in the gray sandstone grit, but do not attempt to reopen the great debate over whether the dinosaurs were wiped out at the end of the Cretaceous period by a huge comet or a vast cloud of volcanic dust or any of 80-odd other proposed killers, all of which Horner spurns. He has a rubber stamp that says, WHO GIVES A S--- WHAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS? Horner cares about how they lived.
Over the past decade, his ideas on this subject, based on a series of extraordinary finds, have helped rescue dinosaurs from the abstract realm of monsters, enabling people to view them for the first time as real animals. These theories have earned such respect in the scientific community that Horner, who flunked out of college seven times and was driving a truck in the family gravel business only 15 years ago, now heads the largest dinosaur research team in the country. Supported in part by the National Science Foundation and a MacArthur Foundation "genius award," Horner oversees a staff of seven and six students. At the same time, his concepts of the social and family lives of dinosaurs have made him the bane of bloody-minded six- year-olds everywhere.
Horner has demonstrated that some dinosaurs were nurturing parents, raising their young in large nesting colonies and bringing their offspring berries and green vegetation, much as do birds. He has shown that the young in such species were neotenous -- or cute, as Horner puts it more plainly; until maturity they were gawky, with such vulnerable traits as enlarged heads, big eyes and shortened snouts, which theorists of animal behavior believe elicit the nurturing response in humans and other child-rearing species.
In place of the familiar panoramas of flesh-ripping Godzillas, Horner describes the most common dinosaurs as "the cows of the Mesozoic." He has found the remnants of one dinosaur herd -- an estimated 10,000 waddling, plant-eating duckbills. Even Tyrannosaurus rex seems less terrible in his revisionist view. Horner believes it followed herds of triceratops, scavenging carcasses and occasionally preying on weak individuals, much as hyenas follow wildebeests in Africa. Artists' renderings of pitched battles in which a triceratops tries to gore a tyrannosaurus in the belly are misleading. Triceratops was more likely to use its horns as a modern deer uses its antlers, not mainly for battle but to establish dominance in the herd and attract a mate.