'Jurassic World' consultant Jack Horner continues to rock boat

Making your own dinosaur is turning out to be a pretty popular pastime for some researchers, including Jack Horner.

The Museum of the Rockies curator of paleontology and regents professor of paleontology and Montana State University is working on manipulating chicken embryos to express genes that will, hopefully, make them more like their dinosaur ancestors.

Turns out, Horner isn't the only one with that idea.

In a paper accepted for publication in the journal Evolution, researchers described how they altered gene expression in a bird embryo so the bird was born with less of a beak and more of a dinosaur-like snout.

The Evolution paper, authored by Yale and Harvard researchers, among others, sought to gain insight on how dinosaurs evolved into birds.

Horner's project is slightly more ambitious than the beak study. In essence, Horner says he's doing what dog breeders have done for centuries — selectively breeding for certain traits. But because he can manipulate the embryos at the cellular level, that selective breeding can happen much faster.

"We're just bringing back some ancestral characteristics. Even when we get finished with our dinochicken, it'll still be a chicken," Horner said.

It will just look different because it will have arms and hands instead of wings, and a long tail and a mouth like an alligator instead of a bird," he continued.

Horner's current research is being funded almost exclusively by George Lucas, the filmmaker and creator of "Star Wars." Private funding is good for all projects, but especially for this one. Horner doubts he'd ever be able to get federal funding for the project.

"It's just too far out for them. They want to guarantee that you'll succeed, and when you're doing cutting-edge research, it's just not possible to know," Horner said.

Dinosaur accoutrements

Horner's lecture at the Great Falls Public Library will focus on his theories about dinosaur accoutrements — or all those interesting accessories they come with like spikes, plates, feathers and horns.

The free lecture is schedule for Thursday, May 28, at 7 p.m.

That dinosaurs had feathers came to light in the last several years when paleontologists discovered fossils with imprints of feathers in the stone.

Exactly the purpose for all those cool accessories is up in the air.

Feathers, once thought to have been evolved by birds to aid in flight, now may have come about for warmth and for display, said Dr. Caroline A.E. Strömberg, curator of paleobotany at the Burke Museum in Seattle, Wash.

(For everyone thinking, 'What about pterodactyls?', Strömberg says they weren't actually dinosaurs, evolved from a separate lineage and likely had fur.)

Horner says the spikes and plates may not be for self-defense, as has been suggested.

"A lot of my recent research suggests that all of that is wrong and that they actually have a much different purpose and that purpose, and that everything is really for one purpose," Horner said. "And that's what I'm going to talk about."

Not wanting to give everything away, he remained tight-lipped on the rest.

The renegade

The Shelby-born Horner has always been something of a renegade. Dyslexic, he struggled in school and college at the University of Montana.

His difficulty reading may have made it difficult in school, but Horner was at home in the plains and rock formations around Shelby.

He remembers his mother driving him 23 miles west to Cut Bank on the weekends and dropping him off at the coulee on the edge of town where he'd comb through the layers of towering rocks looking for fossils.

"The very first dinosaur skeleton I ever found was very near the train trestle," he said, referring to the tall train trestle west of Cut Bank that crosses the chasm of Cut Bank Creek.

Fast forward to adulthood, and Horner is arguing that dinosaurs actually cared for their young. Eggs found in prehistoric nests are carefully arranged, indicating mothers laid the eggs and stuck around instead of just ditching out.

Fossils of baby dinosaurs that are bigger in size than what they would have been upon hatching indicates babies stayed in the nests for a while.

"The only way they can stay in the nest is if someone brings food to them," Horner said.

At first, that theory was controversial. Now, it's become accepted.

In a 2011 TED Talk, Horner even single-handedly annihilated several species of dinosaur, explaining that what are thought to be separate species are actually dinosaurs of the same species in different growth stages.

Maybe he's the proverbial bull in the China shop among paleontologists, but Horner also can be credited for bolstering interest in dinosaurs.

Two words — "Jurassic Park."

The 1993 film had a quick and noticeable impact at Museum of the Rockies and in Horner's own classrooms.

Horner served as inspiration for the film and also as an adviser. He was the Indiana Jones of dinosaurs.

"I had a lot of new students and what was interesting is, before the movie all my graduate students were guys, and afterward it's been about 50-50," he said.

Speaking of students, when asked what his proudest achievement has been, he humbly responds that it's all about the students.

"I'm proud of my graduate students who are smarter than me," he said.

Life imitates art

Playing with rocks is a lifelong interest for Horner. Genetics came later, with the movie, actually.

"I never really thought about making a dinosaur until we made 'Jurassic Park.' When we started delving into getting DNA out of dinosaurs and failing at that, and then I got to thinking that there was a way to do it, you just had to use their descendants, the birds," he said.

Ultimately, Horner says the research can help humans.

The research may have medical implications for humans. Horner also hopes that it will get kids, most of whom are already fascinated by dinosaurs, interested in genetics.

Another installment in the "Jurassic Park" series, "Jurassic World," is slated for release this summer.

New technology and methods have made it an exciting time to be in paleontology, with new discoveries elucidating the modern world too, Strömberg said.

Strömberg's work focuses on the silica in plant fossils, and she's even worked with other researchers on extracting plant material from fossilized dinosaur feces. That work led to the discovery that sauropods were eating the early species of grass but that they mostly had a mixed diet.

"People are increasingly coming up with new methods and new things to look at and to tackle biological questions," Strömberg said.

Those new methods have allowed Strömberg and her graduate students to theorize about the environment where prehistoric plants grew.

A "Jurassic World" may not be so far off, after all.