Quotes from Robert T. Bakker

If we measured success by longevity, then dinosaurs must rank as the number one success story in the history of land life.

One researcher just determined that African and Indian elephants make each other sick. When a new animal or plant is introduced to a habitat bad things happen. The biggest danger to native wildlife is foreign wildlife.

Fossils have richer stories to tell - about the lub-dub of dinosaur life - than we have been willing to listen to.

Dinosaurs are the jumper cables to the human mind. Kids can't curb their enthusiasm when they're in a hall of dinosaurs and mammoths and mammoth hunters and trilobites and giant fish that could chomp up a shark. These natural objects in motion and context make kids want to read; you can't stop them from reading and thinking.

Often extinctions in the ocean occur at the same time as those on land. Then again, the ice age extinctions lost many big animals, but not many sea faring ones.

Dinosaurs are the best way to teach kids, and adults, the immensity of geologic time.

In 1941 Richard Owen said that the dinosaurs were almost hot blooded.

When looking at the evidence of feeding on large prey, you can see every size tooth from hatchling to adult in one spot. The babies may have been fed in the nest until they were full grown, like in eagles and hawks.

Also, while I was at Yale, I had a job teaching kids at the museum.

I also discovered the only complete Brontosaurus skull.

I want to be the Bob DeNiro of the Jurassic.

Stegosaurus was common only on well drained, dry soil.

As an undergraduate I held many small jobs as an illustrator.

Land bridges were everywhere during the extinction, many species were spreading, and there were many diseases.

Since then I have held many jobs at museums in Colorado and Wyoming. I have also taught summer courses at the University of Colorado.

The impact of the magazine was very strong. As I said, it portrayed dinosaurs as part of the geological history, part of the story of life on earth. It struck that paleontology was the career for me.

You could arm-wrestle with a T. rex and win, but you shouldn't because it only makes them mad.