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Such parenting behavior is unknown in modern reptiles and had been unsuspected in dinosaurs, leading Horner to name this new genus Maiasaura, or "good mother" dinosaurs. Later he found a cluster of such nests, separated from one another by about 25 ft., the length of an adult maiasaur. He argued that they dated from a single breeding season 80 million years ago and that dinosaurs returned to this breeding ground yearly, like migratory birds.
Horner devotes much of his time to presenting dinosaurs as they lived day by day. At the Museum of the Rockies on Sept. 15, he will open a new dinosaur / hall in which, risking heresy, there will be nothing scary. An orodromeus scratches its jaw with a hind leg, and a maiasaur sits like a huge, impassive camel. In a corner a pterosaur stands on the ground, looking like an Audubon heron in a fun-house mirror. "I wanted the exhibits to portray animals," says Horner, "not just single events of aggression."
Going against the custom of mounting the most spectacular dinosaur bones on steel, which can reduce their scientific value, he aims to put only a bronze cast of his tyrannosaurus outside the museum. The bones will go on display much as his crew found them. The idea is to let ordinary museumgoers see the evidence from which paleontologists make their leaps of reasoning and imagination. They will be able to argue, for instance, over the only tyrannosaurus arm ever found. It is about as long as a human arm -- too short, in Horner's view, to be much use in predation, but far more muscular than previously thought, having been capable of curling 400 lbs. Horner seems to relish arguing such questions imaginatively far more than actually proving himself right. In Horner's undogmatic approach, the museum's fleshed-out dioramas are designed to evolve every few years as our view of dinosaurs advances.
His dyslexia, which still sometimes causes him to puzzle for half an hour over a single word, has predisposed Horner against academic overcomplication and rigidity. He isn't the type to stake out an intellectual claim and spend his life footnoting it and fending off critics. For Horner, what matters is getting into the field, finding more bones and listening to what his hands have to say about them. Early one morning on a roadside somewhere north of Jordan, he pulls on a backpack loaded with water bottles, tools, a can of sardines for lunch. He has about him an air of understated excitement. "Let's go look for some damned dinosaurs," he says. Then he heads out once again to the bone-rich hills of Hell Creek.