"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."
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. 17
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…"