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Montana palaeontologist Jack Horner has served as scientific adviser on the Jurassic Park films from the start. With the latest, Jurassic World, soon to be released, he talks about a sharkdevouring Mosasaurus, breeding chickens back into dinosaurs and the influence of the film franchise on his own field.
How did you get involved in the series?
In the early 1990s, a colleague called me and said, "You're in a book about cloning dinosaurs" - Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990). I said, "I hope my character doesn't get eaten." I never bothered to pick it up; I am dyslexic and have trouble enough keeping up with my own science. Then director Steven Spielberg called and asked whether I wanted to work on the film. I thought growing a dinosaur was an intriguing idea, and I still do. It is a little far-fetched now, but I think one day we will be able to do it, not using amber-trapped DNA, but through genetic modification of dinosaurs' closest living relatives, birds.
What did work on Jurassic Park (1993) entail?
My job was to find things that were obviously wrong. In one scene, the puppeteers were having trouble getting an animatronic Tyrannosaurus rex leg to move properly. So I stepped in to control the joystick, making...