Meet the paleontologist who inspired main character of ‘Jurassic Park’

Making a dinosaur, a la “Jurassic Park”?

For John R. “Jack” Horner, it’s a case of been there, tried that.

Not totally successfully, actually. But if anybody could tweak a bit of DNA in cooking up a dinosaur — a nice chickenosaurus, perhaps — it’s probably Horner who, besides being a noted paleontologist and curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., served as a model for the Alan Grant character in “Jurassic Park,” served as a technical adviser to the original movie series and is serving the same role for the upcoming “Jurassic World.”

On Saturday, Horner will discuss paleontology, his work in dinosaur growth and behavior and, of course, a certain megamillion-dollar-earning cinematic series at the Las Vegas Natural History Museum, 900 Las Vegas Blvd. North. The program, with a post-talk book signing, starts at 2 p.m. and can be seen at no additional charge with paid museum admission, although registration is required. To register, visit https://drjackhornertalk.eventbrite.com.

Horner’s presentation is part of the museum’s “Summer of Dinosaurs” programming, which will culminate on July 11 with a celebration of the Las Vegas Natural History Museum’s 24th anniversary. For information, call 702-384-3466.

Horner’s pop culture baptism came, he says, after author Michael Crichton, in researching his 1990 novel “Jurassic Park,” read Horner’s 1988 book “Digging Dinosaurs” and paleontologist Robert T. Bakker’s 1986 book “The Dinosaur Heresies: New Theories Unlocking the Mystery of the Dinosaurs and Their Extinction.”

Crichton “took both of us and made a character,” says Horner, who discovered that he had a literary doppelganger only after the book had been published.

“I think (Crichton) put it in the acknowledgements,” Horner says. “But a friend of mine called me and said, ‘You’re in a book.’ I said, ‘I hope I’m a good person.’ ”

Then, when director Steven Spielberg adapted Crichton’s novel for the big screen, he “took my character — my part of the character — and (cast) Sam Neill in the movie part,” Horner says.

Spielberg also “called me and asked if I would be technical adviser. Of course, I said yes. And, he wanted me to hang out with Sam Neill for a while so Sam could see what this character was supposed to be.”

As a technical adviser on “Jurassic Park,” Horner says much of his job was “making sure the dinosaurs looked as accurate as they could (at) the time they made the movie, based on our science.”

If a proposed depiction of a dinosaur or a dinosaur’s behavior ran contrary to actual science, it was changed. And, if the science wasn’t strong one way or the other, dramatic license was permitted.

For example, Horner says, “in the kitchen scene in ‘Jurassic Park,’ he was going to have (dinosaurs) come into the kitchen and flick their forked tongues around like a snake. I told him he couldn’t do that because they didn’t have forked tongues, and we know that for sure. So we took that out.”

Horner also served as a technical adviser for subsequent films in the “Jurassic Park” series, and did the same for the upcoming “Jurassic World,” a continuation of the Jurassic saga that opens in June and stars Chris Pratt.

“I can’t say too much about it, other than the fact I was a technical adviser and worked to help make their new genetically engineered dinosaurs, and that I was very involved in the scripts,” Horner says.

Cinematic and literary undertakings aside, Horner even has attempted to re-enact the film’s central conceit: re-creating a dinosaur from ancient DNA. During the ’90s, he and paleontologist Mary Schweitzer — then a doctoral student working with Horner at Montana State University — received a grant to “attempt to get DNA out of a dinosaur,” Horner says.

In the book and movie, DNA was extracted from dinosaur blood via a mosquito preserved in amber. But, Horner says, “we knew at that point we could not get (DNA) out of amber in an insect, so we tried to get it out of a dinosaur (fossil).”

Long story short: “We actually came up with good evidence that we were not likely to get anything unless it was a really, really tiny, tiny piece,” Horner says.

Nonetheless, “I started thinking about various ways we might be able to do something like that,” Horner says, and when “Jurassic Park 4” was being developed, Horner wrote a book about how to build a dinosaur, explaining the real-life science behind the film’s premise.

The book explored genetic engineering, “what it really is and why it isn’t as scary as people think it is,” Horner says. “In fact, it basically explained that if you have a cat or a dog or a cow or a sheep or a pig, you have a GMO (genetically modified organism) of your very own, and the animal that we could create genetically wouldn’t be any different than basically the animals that are created by breeding. Breeding is a simple form of genetic engineering.”

But “Jurassic Park 4” was postponed, later to evolve into “Jurassic World,” Horner says, “and, unfortunately, the book came out without the movie.”

Other attempts have been made since then to, in effect, reverse-engineer a dinosaur genetically. “We’ve tried fossils and that didn’t work,” Horner says, “so the next best thing is, we use their closest descendant.”

That would be birds, Horner says, “and what’s the easiest bird to work with? Chickens. We’ve got a lot of them, and they lay a lot of eggs.”

However, the main thrust of Horner’s research lies in dinosaur growth and behavior. During the ’70s, he and an associate discovered a dinosaur nesting site in Montana that offered strong evidence that dinosaurs were social animals who cared for their young and traveled in gigantic herds. The dinosaurs that lived there were dubbed Maiasaura.

Although many kids go through a dinosaur phase while growing up, “I didn’t go through a phase, I was born this way,” Horner says. “I don’t remember any time when I didn’t want to be a paleontologist, and I grew up in Montana, where you could find them.”

What’s the appeal? “Just the mystery,” Horner says. “Just being able to go out and dig a hole in the ground and search the ground and pick up pieces of the past and piece it all together and form a whole ecosystem and imagine, basically, life from millions of years ago.

“I mean, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why everybody in the world doesn’t want to be a paleontologist.”

And to those who’d wonder why anyone should care? “My curt answer to that is, if you’re not interested, I feel sorry for you. If you have no curiosity for how we all got here, I feel sorry for you,” Horner says.

“But the better answer is that I guess it comes down to an education system that should make us wonder about things and obviously has left a few people out. I think that, to some degree, we’re all curious about where we came from and what the history of our planet is like and what it’s all about. Everything we discover in the ground, in the rocks, gives us a better picture of the history of our planet and an understanding of our planet that can help us plan for the future.”

Even if some choose to not buy into the science of it all. Horner says he does meet people who “come up to me after my talks and tell me I’m full of crap. But it’s not very often. And the interesting thing is, you can talk about change through time, and nobody seems to notice unless you use the E-word.”

Even today, newly discovered fossils and specimens change our view of what happened long before us, Horner says. In fact, “we’ve learned a lot since the very first ‘Jurassic Park’ movie.”

For instance, when the film was released in 1993, “we were just beginning to learn dinosaurs had feathers,” Horner says. “Now we know that probably all of the meat-eating dinosaurs should have feathers, but you can’t really change the dinosaurs because they have to be consistent through all of the different movies.”

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280 or follow @JJPrzybys on Twitter.