Jack Horner
is an American paleontologist who discovered and named Maiasaura, providing the first clear evidence that some dinosaurs cared for their young. He is one of the best-known paleontologists in the United States. In addition to his many paleontological discoveries, Horner served as the technical advisor for all of the Jurassic Park films, and even served as partial inspiration for one of the lead characters, Dr. Alan Grant.
Horner was born on June 15th 1946 in Shelby, Montana.He was only eight years old when he found his very first dinosaur bone. He attended the University of Montana for seven years, majoring in geology and zoology. He also spent two years in the U.S. Marine Corps, serving during the Vietnam War in the Special Forces. Horner did not complete his bachelor's degree, due to his inability to pass required foreign language courses (he is somewhat dyslexic and could not read adequately in German). However, he did complete a formidable senior thesis on the fauna of the Bear Gulch Limestone in Montana, which is one of the most famous Mississippian lagerstätten (or exceptionally preserved fossil site) in the world. The University of Montana awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of Science in 1986. In 1986, he was also awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. In Montana during the mid-1970s, Horner and his research partner Bob Makela discovered a colonial nesting site of a new dinosaur genus which they named Maiasaura, or "Good Mother Lizard". It contained the first dinosaur eggs in the Western hemisphere, the first dinosaur embryos, and settled questions of whether some dinosaurs were sociable, built nests and cared for their young. The discovery established his career. Horner has named several other species of dinosaur (including Orodromeus makelai in memory of his late friend Bob Makela) and has had two named after him: Achelousaurus horneri and Anasazisaurus horneri. Within the paleontological community, Horner is best known for his work on the cutting edge of dinosaur growth research. He has published numerous articles in collaboration with Berkeley paleontologist Kevin Padian, and French dinosaur histologist Armand de Ricqlès, on the growth of dinosaurs using growth series. This usually involves leg bones in graduated sizes from different individuals ranging in age from embryos to adults. He also revitalized the contested theory that Tyrannosaurus rex was an obligate scavenger, rather than a predatory killer. While this theory has been widely discussed by the popular press, it has never been a major research focus for Dr. Horner. Horner himself has claimed that he never published the scavenger hypothesis in the peer reviewed scientific literature, and that he used it mainly as a tool to teach a popular audience, particularly children, the dangers of making assumptions in science (such as assuming T. rex was a hunter) without using evidence. In 2000, Horner's crews discovered five specimens of T. rex and three more the following summer, including one even larger than the specimen nicknamed "Sue". The specimen was 10–13 tons in weight and was 10% larger than other specimens. The Museum of the Rockies, as the result of continuing fieldwork, now boasts the largest Tyrannosaurus rex collection in the world. Currently, he is working on the developmental biology of dinosaurs. |
Watch the video below to see more about what Jack Horner does and what he studies.
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Mary Schweitzer
When
paleontologist Mary Schweitzer found soft tissue in a Tyrannosaurus
rex fossil, her discovery
raised an obvious question -- how the tissue could have survived so long? The
bone was 68 million years old, and conventional wisdom about fossilization is
that all soft tissue, from blood to brains, decomposes. Only hard parts, like
bones and teeth, can become fossils. In 2000, Bob Harmon the chief preparator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies discovered a Tyrannosaurus skeleton in Hell Creek, Montana. After a two year retrieval process, Jack Horner, director of the Museum, gave the femur leg bone to Schweitzer. Schweitzer was able to retrieve proteins from this femur in 2007
Shweitzer is an American born paleontologist and now has 3 children. Schweitzer earned a B.S. in Communicative Disorders from Utah State University in 1977, and got a Certificate of Secondary Education in Broadfield Science from Montana State University in 1988. Under the direction of mentor Jack Horner, she received her Ph.D. in Biology from Montana State University in 199. Based at the North Carolina State University, Schweitzer is currently researching Molecular Paleontology, molecular diagenesis and taphonomy, evolution of physiological and reproductive strategies in dinosaurs and their bird descendants, and astrobiology. |
Luis Alvarez
By training, Luis Alvarez was a physicist, not a paleontologist--but that didn't stop him from theorizing about a meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and then (with his son, Walter) discovering evidence for the actual impact crater on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. For the first time, scientists possessed a solid explanation about why the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago--which, of course, hasn't prevented some mavericks from offering alternative theories.
Alvarez was born June 13th 1911 and died on September 1st 1988. awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968. The American Journal of Physics commented, "Luis Alvarez was one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century." After receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1936, Alvarez went to work for Ernest Lawrence at the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Alvarez worked on the Manhattan Project during WWII alongside Albert Einstein. Walter Alvarez was doing geological research in central Italy during the 1970s on the walls of a gorge whose limestone layers included strata both above and below the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary, also called the K-T boundary, the boundary between those two geological periods. Exactly at the boundary is a layer of clay. Walter told his father that the layer marked where the dinosaurs and much else went extinct and that nobody knew why, or what the clay was about — it was a big mystery and he intended to solve it. |
Mary Anning
Mary Anning was an influential fossil hunter even before this phrase came into wide usage: in the early 19th century, scouring England's Dorset coast, she recovered the remains of two marine reptiles (an ichthyosaur and a plesiosaur), as well as the first pterosaur ever unearthed outside of Germany. Amazingly, by the time she died, Anning had received a lifetime annuity from the British Association for the Advancement of Science--at a time when women weren't expected to be literate, much less capable of practicing science!
Mary was born on the 21st of May 1799 and passed on March 9th 1847. She was a British fossil collector and dealer. By the late 18th century, Lyme Regis had become a popular seaside resort, especially after 1792 when the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars made travel to the European mainland dangerous for the English gentry, and increasing numbers of wealthy and middle class tourists were arriving there. Even before Mary's time locals supplemented their income by selling what were called "curios" to visitors. These were fossils with colourful local names such as "snake-stones" (ammonites), "devil's fingers" (belemnites), and "verteberries" (vertebrae), to which were sometimes attributed medicinal and mystical properties. Fossil collecting was in vogue in the late 18th and early 19th century, at first as a pastime, but gradually transforming into a science as the importance of fossils to geology and biology was understood. |
As a memoir of Marry Anning, Google created the image below to be their home screen.
Robert T. Bakker
For almost three decades, Robert T. Bakker has been the leading proponent of the theory that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, rather than cold-blooded like modern lizards. Not all scientists are convinced by Bakker's theory--which he inherited from his mentor, John H. Ostrom--but he's sparked a vigorous debate about dinosaur metabolism that will likely persist into the foreseeable future.
Bakker was born on March 24th, 1945 in Bergen County, New Jersey. He studied paleontology at Yale University and then later gained a PhD at Harvard. He began by teaching anatomy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland and Earth and Space Sciences, where future artist Gregory S. Paul worked and collaborated informally under his guidance. Most of his field work has been done in Wyoming, especially at Como Bluff, but he has ranged as far as Mongolia and South Africa in pursuit of dinosaur habitats. He also helped as an assistant at the University of Colorado. His theory that dinosaurs were all warm blooded are supported by other theories, of which, some are listed below -The hearts of warm-blooded animals can pump much more effectively than the hearts of cold-blooded animals. Therefore, the giant Brachiosaurus must have had the type of heart associated with warm-blooded animals, in order to pump blood all the way up to its head. -Dinosaurs like deinonycus led a very active lifestyle, which is more compatable with warm-blooded animals -Almost all animals that walk upright today are warm-blooded, and dinosaurs walked upright. -Some dinosaurs lived in northern latitudes where it would be impossible for cold-blooded dinosaurs to keep warm. -The predator/prey ratio of predatory dinosaurs to their prey is a signature trait of warm-blooded predators rather than cold-blooded ones. -Birds are warm-blooded. Birds evolved from dinosaurs, therefore a change to a warm-blooded metabolism must have taken place at some point; there is far more change between dinosaurs and their ancestors, the archosaurs, than between dinosaurs and birds. |
Watch this video to learn more about the argument about how all dinosaurs are warm blooded.
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Barnum Brown
Brown wasn't much of an egghead or innovator; rather, he made his name early in the 20th century as the chief fossil hunter for New York's American Museum of Natural History, for which purposes he preferred (fast) dynamite to (slow) pickaxes. Brown's exploits whetted the American public's appetite for dinosaur skeletons, especially at his own institution, now the most famous depository of prehistoric fossils in the entire world.
Barnum was born on February 12th, 1873 in Carbondale, Kansas and died February 5th, 1963. He discovered the first documented remains of Tyrannosaurus Rex during a career that made him one of the most famous fossil hunters working from the late Victorian era into the early 20th century. After working a handful of years in Wyoming for AMNH in the late 1890s, Brown led an expedition to the Hell Creek Formation of Southeastern Montana. There, in 1902, he discovered and excavated the first documented remains of Tyrannosaurus rex. Sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), Brown traversed the country bargaining and trading for fossils. His field was not limited to dinosaurs. He was known to collect or obtain anything of possible scientific value. The Hell Creek digs produced extravagant quantities of fossils, enough to fill up whole train cars. As was common practice back then Brown's crews used controlled blasts of dynamite to remove the tons of rock covering their fossil discoveries. Everything was moved with horse-drawn carriages and pure man-power. Seldom was any site data recorded. |
The video below shows a dinosaur dig at Hell Creek. This video should not only show you what the dig site is like but also show you digging and prospecting techniques.
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The image below shows the South Dakota Hell Creek Rock Formation, were the first documented Tyrannosaurus Rex was found by Barnum Brown
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Edwin H. Colbert
Edwin H. Colbert or "Ned" had already made his mark as a working paleontologist (discovering the early dinosaurs Coelophysis and Staurikosaurus, among others) when he made his most influential discovery, in Antarctica: a skeleton of the mammal-like reptile Lystrosaurus, which proved that Africa and this giant southern continent used to be joined in one gigantic land mass. Since then, the theory of continental drift has done much to advance our understanding of dinosaur evolution.
Ned was born on September 28th, 1905 in Clarinda, Iowa and died on the 15th of November, 2001 (age 96). He was a distinguished American vertebrate paleontologist and prolific researcher and author. He received his A.B. from the University of Nebraska, then his Masters and Ph.D. from Columbia University, finishing in 1935. He married Margaret Matthew, daughter of the eminent paleontologist William Diller Matthew, in 1933. She became a noted artist, illustrator, and sculptor who specialized in visualizing extinct species. The couple had five sons together. The young family moved to Leonia, New Jersey, in 1937 and lived there for decades. His fieldwork in Antarctica in 1969 helped solidify the acceptance of continental drift, by finding a 220-million-year-old fossil of a Lystrosaurus. His popularity and his text books on dinosaurs, paleontology, and stratigraphy (with Marshall Kay) introduced a new generation of scientists and amateur enthusiasts to the subject. He was the recipient of numerous prizes and awards commemorating his many achievements in the field of science. He became curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, Arizona in 1970. He died at his home in Flagstaff in 2001. |
Edward Drinker Cope
No one in history has named more prehistoric creatures than the 19th-century paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope, who wrote over 600 papers over his long career and bestowed names on nearly 1,000 fossil vertebrates (including Camarasaurus and Dimetrodon). Today, though, Cope is best known for his part in the Bone Wars, his merciless feud with his archrival Othniel C. Marsh who was no slouch himself when it came to hunting down fossils.
Cope was born on July 28th, 1840 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and died April 12th, 1897. was an American paleontologist and comparative anatomist, as well as a noted herpetologist and ichthyologist. He was a founder of the Neo-Lamarckism school of thought. Born to a wealthy Quaker family, Cope distinguished himself as a child prodigy interested in science; he published his first scientific paper at the age of 19. Though his father tried to raise Cope as a gentleman farmer, he eventually acquiesced to his son's scientific aspirations. Cope married his cousin and had one child; the family moved from Philadelphia to Haddonfield, New Jersey, although Cope would maintain a residence and museum in Philadelphia in his later years. |
Dong Zhiming
An inspiration to an entire generation of Chinese paleontologists, Zhiming has spearheaded numerous expeditions to China's northwest Dashanpu formation, where he unearthed the remains of various hadrosaur, pachycephalosaurs and sauropods (discovering over 20 separate genera). In a way, Dong's impact has been most deeply felt in China's northeast, where paleontologists emulating his example have unearthed numerous dino-bird fossils at the Liaoning formation.
Dong was born in January of 1937. One of the most prolific fossil hunters of modern times, Dong Zhiming has led numerous expeditions inside China from his post at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology in Beijing. One of his main accomplishments has been to spearhead paleontological research in China's northwest and the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. To date, Dong's most enduring legacy is his discovery of the Dashanpu Formation in China's Sichuan province, which has yielded a huge number of remains dating to the middle Jurassic period, about 170 to 160 million years ago. This is not a well-known stretch of geologic history, and the discovery of sauropods like Shunosaurus has helped to fill in this ten-million-year stretch of |
Othniel C. Marsh
Working in the late 19th century, Othniel C. Marsh secured his place in history by naming more popular dinosaurs than any other paleontologist--including Allosaurus, Stegosaurus and Triceratops. Today, however, he's best remembered for his role in the Bone Wars, his enduring feud with Edward Drinker Cope. Thanks to this rivalry, Marsh and Cope dug up and named many, many more dinosaurs than if they'd managed to coexist peacefully, greatly advancing our knowledge of this extinct breed.
Othniel was Born October 29th, 1831 in New York and died on March 18th, 1899. was an American paleontologist. Marsh was one of the preeminent scientists in the field; the discovery or description of dozens of new species and theories on the origins of birds are among his legacies. Born into a modest family, Marsh was able to afford higher education thanks to the generosity of his wealthy uncle George Peabody. After graduating from Yale College in 1860 he traveled the world, studying anatomy, mineralogy and geology. He obtained a teaching position at Yale upon his return. |
Watch the Videos to learn more about The Bone Wars
Other Famous Paleontologists and Achievements
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