Paleontologist Jack Horner of Jurassic Park Fame Launches Dinosaur NFTs To Fund Scientific Research
Jack Horner and his team have launched a dinosaur collection to display dinosaurs as colorful bird-like creatures on the NFT marketplace OpenSea.
Jack Horner is an extraordinary paleontologist who is now trying to change the way hunting for dinosaurs is funded - by selling images of dinosaurs as NFTs.
NFTs are non-fungible tokens, which can represent anything digital and it uses blockchain technology to verify proof of ownership. Recently, Horner launched Jack Horner’s Dinosaurs - The Origin Collection, 10 different dinosaurs in 10 series for a total of 100 NFT images on OpenSea.
Horner said “I’m trying to create a paradigm shift in the way people imagine dinosaurs.”
Horner found his first dinosaur skeleton in Montana when he was 13 years old and has since lead the Hell Creek Project, which was the largest field expedition for dinosaurs in the world.
“I have never stopped thinking or challenging our perceptions of dinosaurs – from how they behaved to what they might have looked like,” Horner said.
Dinosaurs Get A Makeover
The image of scary dinosaurs was popularized by the movie Jurassic Park. Horner was the inspiration for the character Dr. Alan Grant in the movie. As scientific advisor for the movie, Horner worked closely with Steven Spielberg in the depiction of dinosaurs.
“We knew they were wrong when we made the movie, but Spielberg didn’t want to make the dinosaurs feathered or colorful because he said they wouldn’t be scary enough,” Horner explained.
The science has moved on since the making of Jurassic Park.
Horner said the inspiration to make the dinosaurs in the NFT collection colorful and more bird-like is based on evolution.
“Dinosaurs gave rise to birds. Birds got their vivid coloration, singing and mating displays from their ancestors,” Horner added.
Good Blockchain Project for Kids
If you’re interested in a parent-child project, buying a dinosaur NFT in the Jack Horner collection could be a great starting point.
The first thing you should do is browse the collection. Once you find a dinosaur you would like to purchase, you need to set up a Web3 wallet. There are a few wallets you can use. MetaMask is one option.
The purchases must be made in ethereum (ETH). Once you set up a Web3 wallet, go to OpenSea and log in using your wallet.
What can you do after you purchase the file? You own it. You could print the dinosaur image! It would expose your child to digital art, as well alternative currency such as Ethereum, and in the process directly fund scientific research.
“The files are all 4K resolution, and having done a high resolution test print myself already, I can tell you they reproduce really well on bigger canvases. They’re actually stunning,” Jeremy Kenisky said, who took the dinosaur artwork and turned the pieces into NFTs.
The Process of Minting The NFTs
After Italian paleo artist Fabio Pastori painted the dinosaurs, Kenisky said the images were scanned and underwent color correction as well as background removal. Once the images were isolated, they could be customized with different boarders and provide space for the signatures. To create the entire series, Kenisky implemented the gradient background and the color splash concept in the pieces.
“One of the gradient backgrounds was dark grey to black, which Jack and Fabio really like. The rest are pastel colors to reduce competition with the colorful and beautiful dinosaurs. The color splashes required more art direction and time, so they are a bit rarer to the overall collection,” Kenisky explained.
Some of the early sketches are available in the “sketch series.”
NFTs As a Way to Democratize Scientific Research
If NFTs can be used to fund science, it would change the way science is done. No more writing grants and waiting for the grants to be approved. No more appealing to the top donors of research.
As Andrew D. Huberman, a professor at Stanford put it on Twitter:
In the early days of the Internet, Web1 was a read only experience. Web2 is more interactive with websites such as Twitter and Facebook, which enable people to generate their own content and interact with other people and content more. But payment isn’t that integrated. Kickstarter and other other crowd-funding platforms were a good start. Professor Adrian Stencel writes more in detail on how science can be funded via Web3.
Web3 eliminates the use of a third party platform and offers a more transparent way for interested patrons to support research through the use of NFTs through the blockchain. The transaction is between “you” and the “scientist.”
You can even buy scientific papers as NFTs.
“I think NFTs for science could direct some high net worth investment from art to young scientists,” Stanford Digital Economy Lab director Erik Brynjolfsson said.
Brynjolfsson predicts that scientists will soon list their original papers online and sell it as NFTs.
“Instead of buying art, high net worth investors could try to find the next Einsteins and buy an NFT of their seminal paper before it is famous,” he explained.
Some of the art NFTs have sold for millions. Imagine if this kind of money flowed into the sciences.
Take the Bored Ape Yacht Club, for example. The first set of Apes were 10,000 computer generated images and it sold for $90 million in less than an hour. CryptoPunk 7523 sold for $11.7 million during a Sotheby’s auction. Nothing has topped Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5,000 Days - a collage of 5,000 images, which sold for $69.3 million at a Christie’s auction.
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The dinosaur collection is more affordable. As an early investor, you’ll get an image and you will also be an investor in the science. A portion of the proceeds will fund the Horner Science Group Paleontology Research and Education Foundation.
As a parent, you’ll get some bonding time to look through the images with your child to determine how to decorate their room.
So how much do the NFTs cost? You can see the collection stats here. That’s the neat thing about purchasing on the blockchain - every transaction is transparent. For example, the average price of a dinosaur image is $319.
NFTs are also a speculative asset that you own. You can see it as an investment if you think the value will increase and sell it for a profit.
So if you want to introduce your child to cryptocurrency, Web3 concepts, innovative ways of funding scientific research, and also decorate your house with a new dinosaur print, then browsing Jack Horner’s Dinosaurs on OpenSea checks all those boxes and more.