Triceratops is very common: they are the cows of the Cretaceous; they are everywhere.
Jack Horner
Children have a great urge to learn about dinosaurs.
There's an incomparable rush that comes from finding dinosaur bones. You know you're the first person to lay hands on a critter that lived 80 or 90 million years ago.
Scientists have egos, and scientists like to name dinosaurs. They like to name anything. Everybody likes to have their own animal that they named.
My father had owned a ranch when he was younger, in Montana, and he remembered riding his horse across the prairie and seeing some large bones sticking out of the ground. He was enough of a geologist, being a sand and gravel man, to have a pretty good notion that they were dinosaur bones.
I think most of the dinosaur specimens we find represent subadult sizes.
A chicken grows up in a little less time than an ostrich. An ostrich takes a whole year. A chicken takes a few months.
I just cannot imagine why anyone would want to be really famous. You go to a restaurant and people are pointing at you and they talk about you and they whisper and it is very disconcerting; it is a very odd feeling.
Historical science is being left in the dust.
Dinosaurs replace their teeth throughout their life. And T. rex replaced all of their teeth every year.
Comparing science and religion isn't like comparing apples and oranges - it's more like apples and sewing machines.
Unfortunately, with dinosaurs, we haven't had enough specimens to determine how much variation there is within a species.
A dinosaur out of context is like a character without a story. Worse than that, the character suffers from amnesia.
Right now people are interested in genetic engineering to help the human race. That's a noble cause, and that's where we should be heading. But once we get past that - once we understand what genetic diseases we can deal with - when we start thinking about the future, there's an opportunity to create some new life-forms.
Almost all of my graduate students say that they got interested in dinosaurs because of 'Jurassic Park.'
We all have genes that come from our ancestors that aren't used - they're not turned on. So we actually carry ancient genes with us. If you could figure out how to turn those on, you could resurrect ancient characteristics from our ancestors.
'Jurassic Park' has a lot of science in it - and a lot of it is wrong - but if it was all accurate, it would be a documentary.
Dinosaurs are built just like birds - they can squat down, they can get up. Mammals, when we lay down, we throw our legs out to the sides - birds cannot do that. Dinosaurs could not do that either.
Most people looking for dinosaurs are looking for beautiful skeletons.
I found my first dinosaur bone when I was 6, growing up in Montana. Ever since then I've been interested in dinosaurs.
The fossil record is incredible when it preserves things, but it's not a complete record.
Keratin can be very colorful, as we see in birds. We'd expect dinosaurs to be very colorful because they basically invented the characteristics we see in birds.
T Rex could not run.
I encourage people who don't believe in evolution to look for horses in Jurassic Solenhofen limestone.
I was very fortunate, during my early years as a paleontologist, in that my field crews and I made some remarkable discoveries indicating dinosaurs to have been extremely social.
A lot of Montanans are teed off that local finds usually end up in New York.
Life histories tell you just about everything you need to know about an animal.
I'm trying to figure out the biology of dinosaurs and what they were like as living creatures.
Evolution - evolutionary change - does not happen quickly.
Give a talk to children and tell them dinosaurs didn't drag their tails, and you get arguments.
Scientists who play by someone else's rules don't have much chance of making discoveries.
Once we understand just how to control genes, we have the potential for spinal cord regeneration, bone regeneration, and so on. It might also give us plumper chickens.
In the future, I'd like to see paleontology as a whole get a lot more quantitative.
