BOZEMAN, Mont. — Jack Horner, the paleontologist who discovered the world’s first dinosaur embryos and found that dinosaurs had nests and cared for their young, is leaving the Montana museum he spent decades filling with fossils from across the globe.
Horner, 69, is one of the best known dinosaur researchers in the world. Michael Crichton based the character Alan Grant on Horner in the 1990 book “Jurassic Park,” and Steven Spielberg brought Horner on as a technical adviser on all of the “Jurassic Park” movies — and Horner did it without a college degree and with dyslexia.
From his base at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, and before that with Princeton University, Horner discovered a dozen dinosaur species, the first dinosaur eggs in the Western Hemisphere, and provided proof of the theory of their close relation to birds. He built the Museum of the Rockies from eight dinosaur specimens when he started working there 34 years ago to more than 35,000 today.
The summer of 1979 would result in one of Horner’s most important discoveries — dinosaur nests on what was later called Egg Mountain in Montana. He found the site less than a mile from where he had discovered the fossils of young dinosaurs a year earlier.
