American paleontologist (1945- )
When I stop to fill in the pages of my field book with the day's observations, I like to sit on the rim of one of the biggest tracks, a footprint a yard wide. The lime mud pushed up by the thrust of the hindpaw looks fresh even though it has been frozen in stone for a million centuries. This depression in the limestone is vivid evidence of the enormous power in astro muscles and ligaments and of the great beast's feelings of duty to family and clan.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
Raptor Red
Scientists are supposed to be dispassionate, cool-headed, and unemotional when they evaluate their data. But it's hard for me to avoid a sense of awe when I'm hunting fossils.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
Raptor Red
And joining the ridge-backs were the raptors, predators whose body mechanics introduced a whole new dimension to the drama of attack and defense.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
Raptor Red
Dinosaurs have a bad public image as symbols of obsolescence and hulking inefficiency; in political cartoons they are know-nothing conservatives that plod through miasmic swamps to inevitable extinction.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
"Dinosaur Renaissance", Scientific American, April 1975
I love museums more than any other institution the human race has invented. Museum people are always overworked and underpaid, and they all deserve sainthood, every one.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
The Great Dinosaur Debate: New Theories Unlocking the Mystery of the Dinosaurs and Their Extinction
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.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
Honolulu Advertiser, Jul. 9, 2000
The iguanodon has modest powers of self awareness. She feels happy and complacent and content. She feels efficient, in a vague "I'm doing what I should be doing and I'm doing it well" sort of way.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
Raptor Red
Inveterate creationists, then or now, never allow their faith to fall victim to facts.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
The Great Dinosaur Debate: New Theories Unlocking the Mystery of the Dinosaurs and Their Extinction
Humans are proud of themselves. The guiding principle of the modern age is "Man is the measure of all things." And our bodies have excited physiologists and philosophers to a profound awe of the basic mammalian design. But the history of the dinosaurs should teach us some humility... If our fundamental mammalian mode of adaptation was superior to the dinosaurs', then history should record the meteoric rise of the mammals and the eclipse of the dinosaurs. Our own Class Mammalia did not seize the dominant position in life on land. Instead, the mammal clan was but one of many separate evolutionary families that succeeded as species only by taking refuge in small body size during the Age of Dinosaurs. As long as there were dinosaurs, a full 130 million years, remember, the warm-blooded league of furry mammals produced no species bigger than a cat.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
The Dinosaur Heresies
Ceratosaurus is and has been my favorite dino since 1958. This is a minority taste. I've met only one dino-digger who rated it #1 in desirability.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
"Dr. Robert Bakker Answers Your Questions", slashdot, March 11, 2013
Shadows like these generated her first sensation of fear when she was a chick. She didn't have to learn to hate shadows from the sky. Nearly all dinosaurs are born with the same preprogrammed response. Those that are unfortunate enough to hatch with a mutant gene that eliminates the shadow-fear don't survive longer than a week. They are snatched from the nest by jaws from above.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
Raptor Red
When the dinosaurs fell at the end of the Cretaceous, they were not a senile, moribund group that had played out its evolutionary options. Rather they were vigorous, still diversifying into new orders and producing a variety of big-brained carnivores with the highest grade of intelligence yet present on land.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
"Dinosaur Renaissance", Scientific American, April 1975
Bones and rocks are eloquent storytellers, if you know how to listen to them.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
Raptor Red
In daylight the giant meat-eaters--raptors and acros--are the lords of their universe. But dinosaur eyes don't do well in the dark. The hawk-style optics of raptors can detect a rainbow of colors in strong light--even beyond the spectrum seen by human eyes today. But in the dim light of dusk their visual acuity decays. They lose objects in the shadows. Outlines of potential prey and potential enemies become obscure. It's a penalty most dinosaurs pay for the visual richness they enjoy in sunlight.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
Raptor Red
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.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
The Dinosaur Heresies
It's a universal phenomenon--if you appear desirable, more members of the opposite sex will desire you. The appearance of popularity automatically raises your popularity. It's not a bad evolutionary system--if you see a potential mate being pursued by members of the opposite sex, it pays to check it out.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
Raptor Red
When dinosaurs want to communicate, they must use a lot of exaggerated body motions--head-bobs, torso-squats, tail-swooshes--because the range of their facial expressions is so limited. Mammals, as they will evolve in the later Cretaceous and beyond, will have far greater subtlety in body language. Dogs and monkeys and finally humans will acquire ever-greater powers of transmitting emotions through the face.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
Raptor Red
The classical view of dinosaurs presents a perplexing problem. The group of vertebrates which dominated the land before the rise of the dinosaurs were the synapsids, the mammal-like reptiles... Most paleontologists have believed that the locomotion and physiology of these mammal-like synapsids were more similar to those of active, warm-blooded mammals than to sluggish modern lizards or alligators. Surprisingly, though, when the first dinosaurs and their near relatives appeared in the Triassic period, the synapsids began to decline and soon became extinct. The dinosaurs then ruled the land unchallenged for over 100 million years while the early mammals, the surviving descendants of the synapsids, remained very small in size and number. Only after the dinosaurs suddenly disappeared about 70 million years ago did the mammals develop into the great variety of dominant land vertebrates we have today. The problem is this: if the later synapsids were such splendidly advanced animals with the improved physiology of mammals, and if dinosaurs were slow and sluggish, why were the mammal-like synapsids exterminated in competition with the first dinosaurs? And why didn't the mammals achieve a more significant diversification during the dinosaurs' reign?
ROBERT T. BAKKER
The Superiority of Dinosaurs
Giant predator lizards can't evolve in the presence of big mammal predators. So the lesson is that mammals suppress much of the evolutionary potential of modern lizards. Is the Komodo dragon a good working model of how dinosaurs succeeded? Absolutely not. Dinosaurs suppressed the evolutionary potential of mammals, not the other way around. And dinosaurs carried out this supression everywhere, on all the continents, not merely on a few tiny tropical isles. Dinosaurs succeeded where Komodo dragons fail.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
The Dinosaur Heresies
Dreaming is an advanced evolutionary exercise, a way the brain can go on an extended journey into that other reality.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
Raptor Red