Jack Horner was born in 1946 in Shelby, Montana, and grew up hunting fossils in the state's badlands. Undiagnosed dyslexia made formal schooling difficult, and he never completed a college degree at the University of Montana, but his self-taught field expertise eventually earned him a MacArthur Fellowship (1986) and honorary doctorates from the University of Montana and Pennsylvania State University.[2][1]
In 1978, near Choteau, Montana, Horner and colleague Bob Makela found a colonial nesting site belonging to a previously unknown duck-billed dinosaur, which they named Maiasaura -- "good mother lizard." The site held the first dinosaur embryos and hatchlings ever found in the Western Hemisphere, and the hatchlings' underdeveloped leg bones suggested they couldn't yet walk -- meaning adults had to be feeding them in the nest. It was the strongest evidence to date that at least some dinosaurs provided sustained parental care, rather than abandoning eggs the way most modern reptiles do.[1]
Horner served as curator of paleontology at Montana's Museum of the Rockies from 1982 until his retirement in 2016, directing major excavations across the state. He was also the technical advisor for all five Jurassic Park films and is widely cited as the model for the franchise's paleontologist protagonist, Dr. Alan Grant.[1]