Robert T. Bakker quotes
Twentieth-century paleontologists have fallen into the bad habit of reconstructing the dinosaurs' life functions by using crocodiles as a living model. But the earliest researchers of the nineteenth century proved beyond a doubt that the dinosaurs' powerful hind limbs must have operated like the limbs of gigantic birds.
Robert T. Bakker
There may be some ground for believing that brontosaurs ate... soft foods. If the possibility of gizzard stones is ignored, the brontosaurs' dentition does seem little equipped to deal with meals of tougher plants. But there are no ground whatsoever for believing it of duckbills. The mouth of a duckbill dinosaur contained one of the efficient cranial Cusinarts in land-vertebrate history. Duckbill teeth and jaws were incomparable grinders, designed to cope with foods right inside the duckbill's oral compartment.
Robert T. Bakker
Zoos mislead their visitors by the way the species are housed. Birds are in the Bird House, of course, and crocodiles are always segregated to the Reptile House with the other naked-skinned, scale-covered brutes. So the average visitor leaves the zoo firmly persuaded that crocodilians are reptiles while birds are an entirely different group defined by "unreptilian" characteristics - feathers and flight. But a turkey's body and a croc's body laid out on a lab bench would present startling evidence of how wrong the zoos are once the two stomachs were cut into. The anatomy of their gizzards is strong evidence that crocodilians and birds are closely related and should be housed together in zoological classification, if not in zoo buildings.
Robert T. Bakker
By themselves, brontosaur gizzards don't indicate how much or what these dinosaurs ate each day; other lines of evidence must be employed to explore these questions. But brontosaur gizzards and teeth together indicate what brontosaurs did not eat. They didn't eat soft, mushy vegetation. Birds that subsist entirely on soft fruits don't possess muscular gizzards and don't use hard pebbles for their gizzard linings. Soft, watery food requires only a short, simply constructed gut - with just enough contractile force to squeeze out all the juices.
Brontosaur teeth, moreover, confirm the heretical idea that they ate a tough vegetable diet. If the brontosaurs dined only on soft water plants, then very little wear would be found on their teeth. But in fact the teeth of Camarasaurus, Brachiosaurus, and their kin manifest very severe wear, which could only have been produced by tough or gritty food.
Robert T. Bakker
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
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 bigbrained carnivores with the highest grade of intelligence yet present on land.
Robert T. Bakker
Dinosaurs are not lizards, and vice versa. Lizards are scaley reptiles of an ancient bloodline. The oldest lizards antedate the earliest dinosaurs by a full thirty million years. A few large lizards, such as the man-eating Komodo dragon, have been called "relicts of the dinosaur age", but this phrase is historically incorrect. No lizard ever evolved the birdlike characteristics peculiar to each and every dinosaur. A big lizard never resembled a small dinosaur except for a few inconsequential details of the teeth. Lizards never walk with the erect, long-striding gait that distinguishes the dinosaurlike ground birds today or the birdlike dinosaurs of the Mesozoic.
Robert T. Bakker
If we measured success by longevity, then dinosaurs must rank as the number one success story in the history of land life. Not only did dinosaurs exercise an airtight monopoly as large land animals, they kept their commanding position for an extraordinary span of time - 130 million years. Our own human species is no more than a hundred thousand years old. And our own zoological class, the Mammalia, the clan of of warm-blooded furry creatures, has ruled the land ecosystem for only seventy million years. True, the dinosaurs are extinct, but we ought to be careful in judging them inferior to our own kind. Who can say that the human system will last another thousand years, let alone a hundred million? Who can predict that our Class Mammalia will rule for another hundred thousand millennia?
Robert T. Bakker
The sum of evolutionary evidence is thoroughly damning. In nearly every modification of the evolutionary process made in the duckbills as they developed from their dryosaur ancestors, the duckbills suffered a diminution of their swimming potential. Their fore- and hind paws became shorter and more compact, not longer and more widely spread. Their tails got weaker and stiffer. Far from being the best, the duckbills must have been the clumsiest and slowest swimmers in all the Dinosauria. If pressed, they probably could paddle slowly from one riverbanck to another. The central theme of their bodily evolution was indeed specialized - orthodox theory was right on that point - but the direction of specialization was landward. These dinosaurs were specialized for a totally terrestrial existence.
Robert T. Bakker
Even 'Jurassic Park III' tried to jump on the avian-dino bandwagon by making a brave attempt to adorn Velociraptor with a feathery hair-piece. (The result looked like a roadrunner's toupee- don't blame the effects-artists; it's notoriously difficult to render feathers in computer graphics animation, so we'll have to wait for 'JP IV' for a more thoroughly rendered avian pelage.)
Robert T. Bakker
One might expect that mammals would have taken over the land vertebrate communities immediately, but they did not. From their appearance in the Triassic until the end of the Cretaceous, a span of 140 million years, mammals remained smal and inconspicuous while all the ecological roles of large terrestrial herbivores and carnivores were monopolized by dinosaurs; mammals did not begin to radiate and produce large species until after the dinosaurs had already become extinct at the end of the Cretaceous. One is forced to conclude that dinosaurs were competitively superior to mammals as large land vertebrates. And that would be baffling if dinosaurs were "cold-blooded."
Robert T. Bakker