Robert T. Bakker

“At Harvard I was in charge of the comparative anatomy labs.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“The evidence is overwhelming that birds are dinosaurs.”

“Birds evolved from a small raptor like theropod.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Stegosaurus was common only on well drained, dry soil.”

“I want to be the Bob DeNiro of the Jurassic.”

“Feathers predate birds.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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