Fossils have richer stories to tell - about the lub-dub of dinosaur life - than we have been willing to listen to.
Robert T. Bakker
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.
Feathers predate birds.
As an undergraduate I held many small jobs as an illustrator.
It was not an asteroid or comet, because it would have killed everything.
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 evidence is overwhelming that birds are dinosaurs.
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.
I want to be the Bob DeNiro of the Jurassic.
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.
I also got a chance to go to the American Museum in New York, which helped my interest.
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.
Also, while I was at Yale, I had a job teaching kids at the museum.
At Harvard I was in charge of the comparative anatomy labs.
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.
Stegosaurus was common only on well drained, dry soil.
I also discovered the only complete Brontosaurus skull.
In 1941 Richard Owen said that the dinosaurs were almost hot blooded.
To me it seems that the warm blooded dinosaurs replaced advanced mammal ancestors that were warm blooded, also.
Land bridges were everywhere during the extinction, many species were spreading, and there were many diseases.
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.
Birds evolved from a small raptor like theropod.
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.
You could arm-wrestle with a T. rex and win, but you shouldn't because it only makes them mad.
