Museum of the Rockies and Jack Horner's Dinosaurs
Near Bozeman, Montana
The Museum of the Rockies on the Montana State University campus houses one of the largest and most scientifically important collections of dinosaur fossils in the world. Its reputation rests in large part on the work of one man: John R. Horner, known universally as Jack, who served as the museum's curator of paleontology from nineteen eighty-two to twenty sixteen.
Horner grew up in Shelby, Montana, and struggled academically, later diagnosed with dyslexia. He attended the University of Montana without completing a degree. What he had instead was an uncanny eye for fossils and a willingness to spend summers crawling across the sun-baked badlands of eastern Montana. In nineteen seventy-eight, working with his colleague Bob Makela, Horner discovered a nesting site near Choteau that changed paleontology. The site, which he named Egg Mountain, contained not just dinosaur eggs but evidence of parental care, hatchlings at different growth stages, and a colonial nesting behavior that no one had previously documented in non-avian dinosaurs. The genus he named from those finds, Maiasaura, means Good Mother Lizard in Greek.
The Museum of the Rockies became the repository for these and thousands of subsequent finds. Horner went on to describe multiple new species, argue influentially for the evolutionary connection between dinosaurs and modern birds, and serve as a technical advisor on the Jurassic Park films, beginning with Steven Spielberg's original. The fictional character Alan Grant is widely reported to have been partly modeled on him.
Today the museum displays some of the world's largest Tyrannosaurus rex specimens, full skeletal mounts, and rotating exhibits on the Cretaceous ecosystems that once covered Montana. It is a Smithsonian Institution affiliate and draws visitors from across the country who come specifically for the dinosaurs.
