"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."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Novelists from the United StatesPeople from New JerseyHarvard University alumniYale University alumniPaleontologists from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 136-137
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_T._Bakker
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Robert T. Bakker
Robert Thomas Bakker (born March 24, 1945) is an American paleontologist who helped reshape modern theories about dinosaurs, particularly by adding support to the theory that some dinosaurs were endothermic (warm-blooded). Along with his mentor John Ostrom, Bakker was responsible for initiating the ongoing "dinosaur renaissance" in paleontological studies, beginning with Bakker's article "Dinosaur Renaissance" in the April 1975 issue of Scientific American. His special fiel
30 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Robert T. Bakker →
Related Quotes
"Even 'Jurassic Park III' tried to jump on the avian-dino bandwagon by making a brave attempt to adorn Velociraptor wi…"
"The rex bite is unique among better known dinosaurs. Instead of inflicting a long, shallow wound, rex jaws would thru…"
"Ceratosaurus is and has been my favorite dino since 1958. This is a minority taste. I’ve met only one dino-digger who…"
"The total turtle count - two hundred and thirty species - doesn't seem like an irresistible horde compared to the sev…"
"The classical view of dinosaurs presents a perplexing problem. The group of vertebrates which dominated the land befo…"
"The dinosaur is for most people the epitome of extinctness, the protoÂtype of an animal so maladapted to a changing e…"
"Dinosaurs have a bad public image as symbols of obsolescence and hulking in inefficiency; in political cartoons they…"
"One might expect that mammals would have taken over the land verteÂbrate communities immediately, but they did not. F…"
"When the dinosaurs fell at the end of the Cretaceous, they were not a senile, moribund group that had played out its …"
"Most experts have assumed that the allosaurs, about 35 feet long, were the worst threats to the herbivores of the Jur…"