The Nature of Dinosaurs
Year of Discovery: 1976
What Is It? How dinosaurs really acted, moved, and lived.
Who Discovered It? Robert Bakker
Why Is This One of the 100 Greatest?
Dinosaurs were plodding, cold-blooded monsters. They were sluggish, dull-gray, and
so dumb they weren’t capable of decent parenting. That was the classical view of dinosaurs
through the first half of the twentieth century. That was how dinosaurs were depicted in illustrations. That was what expert paleontologists believed. Robert Bakker shattered those
beliefs.
Robert Bakker was the first to claim that dinosaurs were warm blooded, colorful, and
quick, intelligent, and agile. He also first proposed that birds were descended from dinosaurs. The images we see of dinosaurs—from Jurassic Park to science museum displays—all owe their dinosaur concepts to Robert Bakker’s discoveries. Robert Bakker
completely rewrote the book on dinosaurs.
How Was It Discovered?
A great revelation swept over Robert Bakker one night during his sophomore year at
Yale University. As he walked through the darkened museum, faint bits of light caught the
dinosaur skeletons and made them appear to move through the shadowed stillness. It occurred to Robert as he studied the familiar bones that these creatures had ruled the earth for
165 million years. They couldn’t have been stupid, cold-blooded and sluggish. Intelligent
mammals were around. They would have taken over unless the dinosaurs kept winning because they were fundamentally better.
Robert Bakker set out—all alone—to prove that the prevailing view of dinosaurs was
completely wrong. Bakker turned to four sources of information to develop his case: comparative anatomy (comparing the size and shape of similar parts of different species), latitudinal
zonation (where the animals live), the cumulative fossil record (all previously collected dinosaur bones and skeletons), and ecology (relationship of a species to its environment).
For three years Bakker exhaustively studied the bones of mammals and found that
they, as were dinosaur bones, were rich in blood vessels and lacked growth rings—just the
opposite of cold-blooded reptiles. He found that Cretaceous dinosaurs thrived in northern
Canada where cold-blooded reptiles could not have survived. Finally he studied African
and North American ecosystems and found that warm-blooded predators eat six to eight
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