By Dan Klepal
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Jack Horner helped make a movie star out of a very unlikely character - Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Horner, a paleontologist, served as adviser on the Jurassic Park movies. His role in the box office hits was to "make the dinosaurs look as real as possible, given what we know," he said recently.

But Horner, scheduled to speak in Cincinnati Thursday, is better known for several monumental discoveries: He has found evidence of nesting and parental care among dinosaurs, including T-Rex; he advanced the controversial theories that the giant T-Rex was more scavenger than predator and that dinosaurs may have been warm-blooded animals rather than cold-blooded reptiles; he and his students have found many of the T-Rex skeletons in existence today; and he unearthed the first dinosaur eggs and embryos discovered in the Western Hemisphere.

Horner will be at the Schiff Family Conference Center in the Cintas Center at Xavier University June 3, where he will discuss "Dinosaur Behavior: T-Rex Style," as part of the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden lecture series.

Horner said he will focus on the predator/scavenger debate over T-Rex, how long it took T-Rex to grow up and how long it lived.

"I thought I'd talk about dinosaurs as living animals and their ecosystems, and how their ecosystems changed and how we can tell," Horner said. "I'm interested in how they lived. I'd rather have a hundred specimens of one species than a hundred different species, so I can ask good biological questions and answer them statistically."

A 30-year veteran dinosaur hunter, Horner used to give dozens of lectures every year. He has cut that back to a handful, and picked Cincinnati this year "because I'm interested in audiences who are interested in things like this."

Horner uses dinosaurs to teach people how science works.

"Most people have no idea," he said. "We're in the business of making hypotheses that are testable. It's important to show people what we think we know, but also important to explain how we think we know it."

Horner was born in Shelby, Montana, and found his first dinosaur fossil at age 8. An undistinguished student - he would find out after college that he had dyslexia - Horner excelled at science projects. After a stint in the Marines, Horner pursued several courses in paleontology, but failed to earn a degree. So he drove a gravel truck.

Now Curator of Paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies, and professor at the University of Montana, Horner's lab is equipped with CAT scans to understand the internal structure of dinosaurs and learn such things as their brain size and their capability of making sounds or what their ears were like. It also has a machine that extracts and analyzes DNA from fossils.

"A lot of the things I do have to do with growth rates of dinosaurs and their physiology," Horner said. "So we depend on electron microscopes to give us a cellular look. We're doing our best to extract DNA. Our questions are getting more biological, and so we use more technology."

Horner said that even after 69 million years, dinosaurs can teach humans a lesson or two.

"They can teach us to not get too big - that might have more to do with the size of our egos," Horner said.

If you go

What: "Dinosaur Behavior: T-Rex Style."

When: June 3, 7:30 p.m.

Where: Cintas Center's Schiff Family Conference Center on the Xavier University campus.

Admission: students $8; zoo members $10; non-members $12.

Tickets: may be purchased through the Cintas Center Ticket Office. E-mail requests for a ticket order form by barry@Xavier.edu or visit the zoo's Web site www.cincinnatizoo.org.

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E-mail dklepal@enquirer.com