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If the viewpoint is unconventional, so is the man. Horner, 44, teaches at Montana State University and is curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, but he has no knack for academic decorum (administrators at the museum wish the rubber stamp could say, I DON'T GIVE A DARN WHAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS). He disdains intellectual showboating, describing his own tyrannosaurus as a "media specimen," valuable mainly because it will bring the fang-and-claw set into the museum to see really important stuff, like duckbills tending their offspring. His manner is casual and laconic, which fits with the scraggly beard, the sneakers and the bush hat. But when a volunteer presents some fossils he has gathered, Horner handles them attentively. Then he peers from under his domed brow, and through a veil of smoke rising from the cigarette at the corner of his mouth, he inquires, "What else did you find out there?" There is about him something of the disguised intensity of a gold prospector. He smokes each cigarette down to the filter.
Growing up in Shelby, Mont., Horner collected his first dinosaur fossil at the age of eight, and he set out in high school to become either a paleontologist or the next Wernher Von Braun. His schoolwork was wretched, but he excelled at science projects. One, presented to a small group of bored adults at the local airport, was an experiment to track the flight of a homemade rocket. It went up 15,000 ft. at a velocity of 800 m.p.h., and the memory of his gaping elders still gratifies Horner, who scraped through high school with a D average.
By managing to worsen his academic record in college, he soon found employment doing reconnaissance for the Marines in Vietnam. Then he began a renewed assault on college. The theoretical character of rocketry frustrated him, but fossils were something he could get his hands on, and he put in a total of seven years pursuing courses in paleontology without earning a degree. He describes himself then as "driven" and says, "I didn't want to seem like just another idiot." Horner went into the family's gravel business, but he continued to hunt for a job in the dinosaur line, finally landing one in 1975 as an assistant in paleontology at Princeton University, where his first assignment was to straighten bent nails. There, at the age of 31, he discovered that his academic problem was not stupidity but dyslexia.
Starting out early one recent morning in Hell Creek, Horner points to a black line in the layer cake of geologic deposits. "That's the Tertiary- Cretaceous boundary," he advises a newcomer. "There's nothing above there but a lot of old mammals. Gives dinosaur people nosebleeds to go up that high." Farther down, at the tyrannosaurus site, his crew of graduate students and preparators are already chinking and clanging into the sandstone with jackhammers, pickaxes, shovels, chisels and ice picks. The workers are at it from 7:30 to 4:30, six days a week, with a fine gray dust accumulating in the folds of their ears and eyes. Then, after dinner, they prowl the hills for new finds. They are bivouacked 55 miles from the nearest shower stall, in Jordan. "I give 'em lots of beer," Horner explains. "And I find good things for them to dig up."