By 60 MINUTES - CBSNEWS.COM
Added: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 UTC

Thanks to rod-the-farmer for the link.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/11/12/60minutes/main5629962.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentBody


(CBS) There is something about dinosaurs that captures the imagination - giant, mysterious animals that roamed the Earth for millions of years, now gone forever.

All they've left us are their fossils, the dried-out mineral remnants of the creatures they once were, with the organic material that gave them life long gone. Or so everyone always thought.

Until B. "Rex," a 68 million year old Tyrannosaurus Rex, who was dug up and named by a paleontologist from Montana State University whose unorthodox approach to dinosaurs may be changing the whole dino ballgame.

When thinking of dinosaurs, most of us think "Jurassic Park," the 1993 classic film about a dinosaur resurrection experiment gone wrong, and its embattled hero, famed paleontologist Alan Grant.

60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl met Jack Horner, the real-life Alan Grant who consulted on all of the "Jurassic Park" movies.

Fortunately for him, Horner joked, Grant didn't get eaten.

Jack Horner is one of the most prominent and controversial paleontologists in the country - a dyslexic MacArthur Foundation genius who never finished college, and who says he doesn't care why dinosaurs went extinct.

To him, the important part is how they lived. "I'm trying to figure out the biology of dinosaurs and what they were like as living creatures," he told Stahl.
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TAGGED: BIOLOGY, PALEONTOLOGY, TV