Quotes from Jack Horner

'Jurassic Park' has a lot of science in it - and a lot of it is wrong - but if it was all accurate, it would be a documentary.

When I was growing up in Montana I had two dreams: I wanted to be a paleontologist and I wanted to have a pet dinosaur and so that's what I've been striving for all of my life.

Triceratops is very common: they are the cows of the Cretaceous; they are everywhere.

Give a talk to children and tell them dinosaurs didn't drag their tails, and you get arguments.

The fossil record is incredible when it preserves things, but it's not a complete record.

I just cannot imagine why anyone would want to be really famous. You go to a restaurant and people are pointing at you and they talk about you and they whisper and it is very disconcerting; it is a very odd feeling.

I'm trying to figure out the biology of dinosaurs and what they were like as living creatures.

In the lifetime of one person, we went from figuring out where we came from to figuring out how to get rid of ourselves.

A lot of Montanans are teed off that local finds usually end up in New York.

Dinosaurs replace their teeth throughout their life. And T. rex replaced all of their teeth every year.

In the future, I'd like to see paleontology as a whole get a lot more quantitative.

Right now people are interested in genetic engineering to help the human race. That's a noble cause, and that's where we should be heading. But once we get past that - once we understand what genetic diseases we can deal with - when we start thinking about the future, there's an opportunity to create some new life-forms.

We all have genes that come from our ancestors that aren't used - they're not turned on. So we actually carry ancient genes with us. If you could figure out how to turn those on, you could resurrect ancient characteristics from our ancestors.

Dinosaurs are built just like birds - they can squat down, they can get up. Mammals, when we lay down, we throw our legs out to the sides - birds cannot do that. Dinosaurs could not do that either.

Historical science is being left in the dust.

Life histories tell you just about everything you need to know about an animal.

A dinosaur out of context is like a character without a story. Worse than that, the character suffers from amnesia.

I was very fortunate, during my early years as a paleontologist, in that my field crews and I made some remarkable discoveries indicating dinosaurs to have been extremely social.

Most people looking for dinosaurs are looking for beautiful skeletons.

Keratin can be very colorful, as we see in birds. We'd expect dinosaurs to be very colorful because they basically invented the characteristics we see in birds.

There's an incomparable rush that comes from finding dinosaur bones. You know you're the first person to lay hands on a critter that lived 80 or 90 million years ago.

I encourage people who don't believe in evolution to look for horses in Jurassic Solenhofen limestone.

Scientists who play by someone else's rules don't have much chance of making discoveries.

I found my first dinosaur bone when I was 6, growing up in Montana. Ever since then I've been interested in dinosaurs.