"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." Perhaps they were not."
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Novelists from the United StatesPeople from New JerseyHarvard University alumniYale University alumniPaleontologists from the United States
Original Language: English
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Sources
"Dinosaur Renaissance", Scientific American 232, no. 4 (April 1975), 58—78
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_T._Bakker
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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
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