Quotes from Robert T. Bakker

Birds evolved from a small raptor like theropod.

To me it seems that the warm blooded dinosaurs replaced advanced mammal ancestors that were warm blooded, also.

It was not an asteroid or comet, because it would have killed everything.

One of my major goals is to develop a web of the small Wyoming museums and create a major museum system. There are about eight of these museums, and they are all scattered.

I'll bet you a six-pack of Coors that pretty soon, people will be discovering Cretaceous parasites inside Cretaceous bones. The possibility of looking into epidemiology and pathology is pretty cool.

I love museums more than any other institution the human race has invented. Museum people are always overworked and underpaid, and they all deserve sainthood, every one.

The iguanodon has modest powers of self awareness. She feels happy and complacent and content. She feels efficient, in a vague I'm doing what I should be doing and I'm doing it well sort of way.

Bones and rocks are eloquent storytellers, if you know how to listen to them.

Inveterate creationists, then or now, never allow their faith to fall victim to facts.

Traditional dinosaur theory is full of short circuits. Like the antiquated wiring in an old house, the details sputter and burn out when specific parts are tested.

Feathers predate birds.

Scientists are supposed to be dispassionate, cool-headed, and unemotional when they evaluate their data. But it's hard for me to avoid a sense of awe when I'm hunting fossils.

Dinosaurs have a bad public image as symbols of obsolescence and hulking inefficiency; in political cartoons they are know-nothing conservatives that plod through miasmic swamps to inevitable extinction.

When I stop to fill in the pages of my field book with the day's observations, I like to sit on the rim of one of the biggest tracks, a footprint a yard wide. The lime mud pushed up by the thrust of the hindpaw looks fresh even though it has been frozen in stone for a million centuries. This depression in the limestone is vivid evidence of the enormous power in astro muscles and ligaments and of the great beast's feelings of duty to family and clan.

And joining the ridge-backs were the raptors, predators whose body mechanics introduced a whole new dimension to the drama of attack and defense.

The iguanodon has modest powers of self awareness. She feels happy and complacent and content. She feels efficient, in a vague "I'm doing what I should be doing and I'm doing it well" sort of way.

Shadows like these generated her first sensation of fear when she was a chick. She didn't have to learn to hate shadows from the sky. Nearly all dinosaurs are born with the same preprogrammed response. Those that are unfortunate enough to hatch with a mutant gene that eliminates the shadow-fear don't survive longer than a week. They are snatched from the nest by jaws from above.

The public image of dinosaurs is tainted by extinction. It's hard to accept dinosaurs as a success when they are all dead. But the fact of ultimate extinction should not make us overlook the absolutely unsurpassed role dinosaurs played in the history of life.

It's very simple why kids are crazy about dinosaurs -- dinosaurs are nature's Special Effects. They are the only real dragons. Kids love dragons. It's not just being weirdly shaped and being able to eat Buicks. It's that they are real.

When the dinosaurs fell at the end of the Cretaceous, they were not a senile, moribund group that had played out its evolutionary options. Rather they were vigorous, still diversifying into new orders and producing a variety of big-brained carnivores with the highest grade of intelligence yet present on land.

Ceratosaurus is and has been my favorite dino since 1958. This is a minority taste. I've met only one dino-digger who rated it #1 in desirability.

It's a universal phenomenon--if you appear desirable, more members of the opposite sex will desire you. The appearance of popularity automatically raises your popularity. It's not a bad evolutionary system--if you see a potential mate being pursued by members of the opposite sex, it pays to check it out.

Dreaming is an advanced evolutionary exercise, a way the brain can go on an extended journey into that other reality.

When dinosaurs want to communicate, they must use a lot of exaggerated body motions--head-bobs, torso-squats, tail-swooshes--because the range of their facial expressions is so limited. Mammals, as they will evolve in the later Cretaceous and beyond, will have far greater subtlety in body language. Dogs and monkeys and finally humans will acquire ever-greater powers of transmitting emotions through the face.