Robert T. Bakker Quotes

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

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

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

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.

Birds evolved from a small raptor like theropod.

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

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

I also discovered the only complete Brontosaurus skull.

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

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.

Stegosaurus was common only on well drained, dry soil.

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.

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.

Feathers predate birds.

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

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

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.

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.