The worse the country, the more tortured it is by water and wind, the more broken and carved, the more it attracts fossil hunters, who depend on the planet to open itself to us. We can only scratch away at what natural forces have brought to the surf...
Scientists who play by someone else's rules don't have much chance of making discoveries.
Evolution - evolutionary change - does not happen quickly.
Children have a great urge to learn about dinosaurs.
My father had owned a ranch when he was younger, in Montana, and he remembered riding his horse across the prairie and seeing some large bones sticking out of the ground. He was enough of a geologist, being a sand and gravel man, to have a pretty goo...
I just cannot imagine why anyone would want to be really famous. You go to a restaurant and people are pointing at you and they talk about you and they whisper and it is very disconcerting; it is a very odd feeling.
In the future, I'd like to see paleontology as a whole get a lot more quantitative.
Right now people are interested in genetic engineering to help the human race. That's a noble cause, and that's where we should be heading. But once we get past that - once we understand what genetic diseases we can deal with - when we start thinking...
Life histories tell you just about everything you need to know about an animal.
Dinosaurs replace their teeth throughout their life. And T. rex replaced all of their teeth every year.
Triceratops is very common: they are the cows of the Cretaceous; they are everywhere.
Dinosaurs are built just like birds - they can squat down, they can get up. Mammals, when we lay down, we throw our legs out to the sides - birds cannot do that. Dinosaurs could not do that either.
There's an incomparable rush that comes from finding dinosaur bones. You know you're the first person to lay hands on a critter that lived 80 or 90 million years ago.
The fossil record is incredible when it preserves things, but it's not a complete record.
Keratin can be very colorful, as we see in birds. We'd expect dinosaurs to be very colorful because they basically invented the characteristics we see in birds.
Unfortunately, with dinosaurs, we haven't had enough specimens to determine how much variation there is within a species.
I found my first dinosaur bone when I was 6, growing up in Montana. Ever since then I've been interested in dinosaurs.
Almost all of my graduate students say that they got interested in dinosaurs because of 'Jurassic Park.'
I'm trying to figure out the biology of dinosaurs and what they were like as living creatures.
I encourage people who don't believe in evolution to look for horses in Jurassic Solenhofen limestone.
