13 quotes
The dinosaurs are not extinct. The colorful and successful diversity of the living birds is a continuing expression of basic dinosaur biology.
Dinosaur Renaissance (1985)
I do not believe birds deserve to be put in a taxonomic class separate from dinosaurs.
Dinosaur Renaissance (1985)
Our own mammalian order, the primates, prides itself on hand-eye coordination, monkeys, apes, and man are all good manipulators. But no mammal can rival the chameleon for eye-tongue coordination.
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)
The dinosaur is for most people the epitome of extinctness, the prototype of an animal so maladapted to a changing environment that it dies out, leaving fossils but no descendants.
Dinosaur Renaissance (1985)
Both birds and crocs have the identical plan to their specialized gizzard apparatus, and this type of internal food processor is absent in the other "reptiles" - lizards, snakes, and turtles.
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)
No living reptile has cheeks. But no living reptile has grinding teeth anything remotely resembling those of a duckbill. If the duckbills could have evolved such unreptilian teeth, why couldn't they have evolved unreptilian teeth?
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)
No one, either in the nineteenth century or the twentieth, has ever built a persuasive case proving that dinosaurs as a whole were more like reptilian crocodiles than warm-blooded birds. No one has done this because it can't be done.
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)
Dinosaurs have a bad public image as symbols of obsolescence and hulking in inefficiency; in political cartoons they are know-nothing conservatives that plod through miasmic swamps to inevitable extinction.
Dinosaur Renaissance (1985)
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.
Dinosaur Renaissance (1985)
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.
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)
Most experts have assumed that the allosaurs, about 35 feet long, were the worst threats to the herbivores of the Jurassic, some of which were gigantic and probably able to fend off even an allosaur. But epanterias would have spelled trouble for everyone.
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.)
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.
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)