Trivia

Curator of Paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana

Known to harbor a dislike towards Tyrannosaurus rex. Horner famously convinced the creators of the movie Jurassic Park III (2001) to have the T. rex be killed off by a larger carnivore, and throughout the following decade, he went on to publicly decry the animal, claiming in various documentaries and interviews that T. rex was in reality a slow, ugly scavenger incapable of hunting down prey. In spite of all this, he never wrote an actual scientific paper on the subject until 2011, in which he declared that T. rex was indeed both a hunter and an occasional scavenger. In essence, Horner has been trolling the scientific community and the public for years.

Has something of a minor personal feud with fellow paleontologist Robert Bakker. In the movie Le Monde perdu : Jurassic Park (1997), for which Horner acted as a scientific consultant, a parody of Bakker appears: a paleontologist called Bob Burke, who looks suspiciously similar to Bob Bakker, and gets eaten by a T. rex in an undignified way. Bakker himself claimed that he found the parody funny.

Became famous for his discovery of the "duck-billed" dinosaur Maisasaura, which were among the first dinosaurs scientists recognized had cared for their young. This discovery overturned much of what people had previously believed about dinosaurs, as it turned out that many of them were caring parents.

Horner proposes that a huge number of dinosaur species recognized by science may not have existed. Instead, he argues that many similar-looking but different sized dinosaurs were actually separate growth stages of the same species. For example, Nanotyrannus was just a juvenile Tyrannosaurus and Dracorex and Stygimoloch were younger specimens of Pachycephalosaurus. However, some of his ideas, such as the notion that Torosaurus was the adult form of Triceratops, have been met with much scrutiny and criticism.

Leader of the scientific project "Build a Dinosaur". Horner and his colleagues are working on modifying the DNA of chickens and "reverse-engineer" them into toothy, long-tailed and clawed dinosaurs. This so far fictitious creature would be nicknamed "chickenosaurus". With this project, Horner aims to show people what dinosaurs closely related to birds might have looked like in real life. George Lucas helped fund the project.

Lead scientific consultant for the Jurassic Park film series. When several other paleontologists attacked the movie Jurassic World (2015) for its outlandish and highly outdated depiction of dinosaurs and other ancient animals, Horner defended the movie, reasoning that it's just entertainment and wasn't meant to be scientific.