Jack Horner: Shape-shifting dinosaurs

Shall I ask for a show of hands or a clapping of people in different generations? I'm interested in how many are three to 12 years old. (Laughter) None, huh? (Laughter) All right. I'm going to talk about dinosaurs. Do you remember dinosaurs when you were that age? (Applause) Dinosaurs are kind of funny, you know.

(Laughter) We're going to kind of go in a different direction right now. I hope you all realize that. So I'll just give you my message up front: Try not to go extinct. (Laughter) That's it. (Laughter) People ask me a lot -- in fact, one of the most asked questions I get is, why do children like dinosaurs so much?

What's the fascination? And I usually just say, "Well, dinosaurs were big, different and gone." They're all gone. Well that's not true, but we'll get to the goose in a minute. So that's sort of the theme: big, different and gone. The title of my talk: Shape-shifting Dinosaurs: The cause of a premature extinction. Now I assume that we remember dinosaurs.

And there's lots of different shapes. Lots of different kinds. A long time ago, back in the early 1900s, museums were out looking for dinosaurs. They went out and gathered them up. And this is an interesting story. Every museum wanted a little bigger or better one than anybody else had. So if the museum in Toronto went out and collected a Tyrannosaur, a big one,

then the museum in Ottawa wanted a bigger one, and a better one. And that happened for all museums. So everyone was out looking for all these bigger and better dinosaurs. And this was in the early 1900s. By about 1970, some scientists were sitting around and they thought, "What in the world -- Look at these dinosaurs, they're all big.