When John "Jack" Horner was eight years old, he found his first dinosaur bone near his home in Shelby, Montana. He still has it today.
Though Dr. Horner had no trouble finding and identifying ancient fossils, he often struggled with numbers and words. His teachers thought he was a slow learner or simply not interested. The opposite was true. Jack loved science and undertook amazing projects – once launching a homemade rocket at 800 miles per hour to a height of 15,000 feet!
Dr. Horner attended the University of Montana – and flunked out seven times. He had trouble keeping up with the reading, note taking, and tests that required memorization. In 1975, after his seventh try, he left school to work for his family’s gravel business. He continued to look for a job in paleontology and eventually obtained a research assistantship at Princeton University. It was there that Dr. Horner discovered that his academic problem was dyslexia. He had been unknowingly struggling with it for 31 years.
Since then, Jack Horner has received honorary doctorates from the University of Montana and Pennsylvania State University as well as the prestigious MacArthur fellowship, known as the “genius” grant. He has written over 100 professional papers, 6 popular books, and has given over 700 lectures. He was the technical advisor to Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park movies. Currently, he is curator of Paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies and teaches biology and geology at the Montana State University.
Dr. Horner has said that his brain is the “hunt, poke, and dig-around version.” No wonder – he has uncovered more dinosaur fossils than anyone else in history. Thirty-six dinosaur eggs containing embryos have been unearthed in the whole world; Jack Horner found 35. Though he sometimes struggles with letters and words, he has learned to read the bones of dinosaurs and he tells us their most secret, fascinating, 100- million-year-old stories.
EPS began as the leading publisher of materials for students with dyslexia. Over the past 50 years, we’ve developed programs that support students with a wide variety of learning disabilities. Choose a subject from the left to learn more about these resources.
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