News of mythology: Lust, greed and dinosaurs
Greedy T-rex dinosaurs myth put right
Jack Horner, an eminent, radical paleontologist was interviewed on NPR’s This American Life in a show titled “Virtual Realities.”
An excerpt from the full transcript now here: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/38/transcript
Online audio version: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/38/simulated-worlds/act-two-0
Jack Hitt: Not long ago, I attended a lecture by dinosaur revisionist Jack Horner. He’s a notorious troublemaker, a hippie without a formal degree, who turns dinosaur thinking upside-down. He’s a tall, skinny thing in jeans and boots, tangled gray hair and a generous beard. Horner’s speech was entitled, “Would Tyrannosaurus Rex Eat a Lawyer?” The reference, of course, is to the scene in Jurassic Park when the lawyer gets yanked right off the john by an enraged T. Rex. Naturally, we all thought the answer to his semi-rhetorical question was, sure. Of course. T. Rex could eat a lawyer anytime, anyplace.
Horner was present to prove T. Rex could only have eaten the lawyer if the lawyer were already dead. T. Rex, he said, was not a mighty, roaring predator, not king of the dinosaurs, not Godzilla, but a slow, putzy scavenger who wandered from carcass to carcass half-blind, snacking on rotting carrion.
