Maverick Dinosaur Expert Gets in His Digs in Montana : Fossils: Jack Horner was the inspiration for ‘Jurassic Park.’ The top paleontologist is also a dyslexic college dropout.

Between his dark glasses and the brim of his canvas hat, it’s hard to make eye contact with Jack Horner when he’s out in the field.

That doesn’t seem to be a problem for the 20 adult students who have paid $900 each to dig with him for a week at a rocky, treeless site called Egg Mountain.

“Let’s go find some good stuff,” he tells them in a soft, level voice, sending his party across the taupe landscape to search for fossils.

Horner is a college dropout, a dyslexic whose learning disability defeated his efforts toward an academic degree, a maverick scientist who enjoys bowling, cold beer and cigarettes.

Nevertheless, he has climbed to the top in the field of paleontology.

He was the inspiration for lead character Alan Grant in Michael Crichton’s novel “Jurassic Park” and scientific adviser for the hit movie that followed.

The fame from the movie has taken him around the globe and led to lucrative job offers. While in London after the film opened, he was asked to consider becoming paleontologist at Britain’s Natural History Museum.

But Horner said no, choosing to remain at Montana’s Museum of the Rockies, near “the good stuff”--particularly the good stuff at Egg Mountain, south of Glacier National Park.

Horner began digging at Egg Mountain in the 1970s and, over the course of six years, unearthed a massive dinosaur bone bed--including fossilized eggs, embryos and nests--dating back 80 million years. Now, the museum runs a paleontology field school at the site.

Horner also led a team that disinterred a spectacular Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton in far eastern Montana, after a rancher found an arm bone in 1988.

He has used sleuthing and science to give paleontology respected conclusions about dinosaurs as communal, warm-blooded animals who nurtured their young.

But Horner, 47, says he has no interest in parlaying his achievements into a seat at a more prestigious university or museum.

He lives in Bozeman, where he runs a renowned dinosaur research project out of the Museum of the Rockies and teaches at Montana State University. He grew up many miles north of there, in the quiet little town of Shelby.

“His father owned a sand and gravel outfit,” said Horner’s mother, Miriam. “Lots of rocks. That’s the first thing Jack started collecting.”

School was sometimes hard--his dyslexia wasn’t diagnosed until much later--but Horner loved science class and hunting fossils.

“Reading wasn’t easy for him, but with the lectures, he comprehended everything and he retained it,” said Ron Kologi, Horner’s science teacher at Shelby High School. “He had a good mind, and he had a lot of get up and go.”

Horner learned about the dyslexia at Princeton University, where he became a paleontology curator in 1975.

“There was a poster that asked some weird questions,” he said. “All of my answers led me down to some sentence where it said I ought to go talk to somebody.”

Although he worked in the Ivy League, Horner scored poorly as a University of Montana student and never got a bachelor’s degree.

“If I were to go to college right now, I’d still flunk out,” he said. “I can’t keep up.”

The University of Montana eventually recognized Horner’s abilities, though, awarding him an honorary doctorate in 1986, and now Dr. John R. Horner is the byline on some of his books and papers.

“I think he really liked that honorary degree,” said George Stanley, a UM geology professor who pushed for it. “But at first, he didn’t want to come to the commencement. He thought he should be at one of his field sites.”

For Horner, who received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1986, clashes with academic convention aren’t unusual.

His grantors now include the National Science Foundation, but when struggling for research money years ago, Horner shocked Princeton administrators by asking the Rainier Brewing Co. for $10,000. He figured that was reasonable, since he drank a lot of Rainier.

University officials told him the appeal was inappropriate, and came up with the money.

At MSU, he advises students to make their own curricula. “It irritates the administrators,” he said.

None of this surprises people who know him.

“He’s totally irreverent,” said Bea Taylor of Bozeman, who’s done 10 summers of field work with Horner and was president of the Museum of the Rockies board that hired him.

He has a special regard for children, though, and has written two dinosaur books just for them. At a museum reception after one was published, some adults there to hear Horner speak were left waiting while he chatted with kids.

“There were a lot of children there, and he got down on the floor at the kids’ level and he said, ‘I think dinosaurs are really neat, don’t you?’ ” Taylor said.

She said Horner likes to talk about a lot of things, among them flying, art and philosophy. But dinosaurs and fossils are foremost and, even years ago, high school buddy Michael Davis knew it would be that way.

“You could see where he was going,” Davis said. “Jack had his mind set on one thing, and that was paleontology.”

Horner is riding the crest of public intrigue with dinosaurs--he even made the cover of U.S. News & World Report--but he isn’t sure he can explain it.

“I would hope it’s because we’re learning more about them,” he said during a break in his work at Egg Mountain. “They’ve finally been moved out of the monster realm and into the animal realm.”

Even with all of the research and surging interest, much about dinosaurs is unknown and, for Horner, that’s part of the appeal.

“I like being outside, I like digging holes in the ground, I like the mystery,” he said. “When I find something, I still get just as excited as I did at first.”