quotations about dinosaurs
Barney is a dinosaur from our imagination
And when he's tall
He's what you call a dinosaur sensation
BARNEY
"Barney Theme Song"
It is bad news to science museums when four in ten Americans believe humans lived with dinosaurs, and fewer than two in ten understand the terms "molecule" and "DNA."
LARRY WITHAM
Where Darwin Meets the Bible
The brontosaurus had thirty-ton body and a two-ounce brain. The anatosaurus had two thousand teeth. Triceratops had a helmet of filled bone seven feet long. Tyrannosaurus rex had tiny arms and teeth like six-inch razors and it was elected President. It ate everything--dead meat, living meat, old bones.
JOHN UPDIKE
The Centaur
The classical view of dinosaurs presents a perplexing problem. The group of vertebrates which dominated the land before the rise of the dinosaurs were the synapsids, the mammal-like reptiles... Most paleontologists have believed that the locomotion and physiology of these mammal-like synapsids were more similar to those of active, warm-blooded mammals than to sluggish modern lizards or alligators. Surprisingly, though, when the first dinosaurs and their near relatives appeared in the Triassic period, the synapsids began to decline and soon became extinct. The dinosaurs then ruled the land unchallenged for over 100 million years while the early mammals, the surviving descendants of the synapsids, remained very small in size and number. Only after the dinosaurs suddenly disappeared about 70 million years ago did the mammals develop into the great variety of dominant land vertebrates we have today. The problem is this: if the later synapsids were such splendidly advanced animals with the improved physiology of mammals, and if dinosaurs were slow and sluggish, why were the mammal-like synapsids exterminated in competition with the first dinosaurs? And why didn't the mammals achieve a more significant diversification during the dinosaurs' reign?
ROBERT T. BAKKER
The Superiority of Dinosaurs
You're not allowed to call them dinosaurs any more.... It's speciesist. You have to call them pre-petroleum persons.
TERRY PRATCHETT
Johnny and the Bomb
It was a night like this forty million years ago
I lit a cigarette, picked up a monkey skull to go
The sun was spitting fire, the sky was blue as ice
I felt a little tired, so I watched Miami Vice
And walked the dinosaur, I walked the dinosaur
WAS (NOT WAS)
"Walk the Dinosaur", What Up, Dog?
The great extinction that wiped out all of the dinosaurs, large and small, in all parts of the world, and at the same time brought to an end various lines of reptilian evolution, was one of the outstanding events in the history of life and in the history of the earth.... It was an event that has defied all attempts at a satisfactory explanation.
EDWIN H. COLBERT
The Age of Reptiles
From nesting, brooding and sex, to metabolism, development and even the diseases that afflicted them, many of the traits found in birds today were inherited from the dinosaurs. The boundary between dinosaurs and birds has become utterly blurred.
JOHN PICKRELL
Flying Dinosaurs: How Fearsome Reptiles Became Birds
The dinosaur's eloquent lesson is that if some bigness is good, an overabundance of bigness is not necessarily better.
ERIC JOHNSTON
Today's Realtor, Jan. 1998
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 big-brained carnivores with the highest grade of intelligence yet present on land.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
"Dinosaur Renaissance", Scientific American, April 1975
Summers longer
Deltas gashed
Ancient trees
Uprooted, smashed
Time is generous more, take more
I must outrun the dinosaur
PETE TOWNSHEND
"Outlive the Dinosaur", Psychoderelict
It has been argued that dinosaurs did not die out, but just evolved wings and flew away. At a certain level, this reasoning is sound.... Birds, as a group, did descend from dinosaurs and ... all 8,600 species of birds living today carry some inheritance from their reptilian ancestors.
DAVID RAUP
Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck
She fought off a T-rex with just a pepper spray and bad language. You couldn't be in better hands.
JODI TAYLOR
A Symphony of Echoes
Everybody thinks it's going to be different for them.... The dinosaurs thought so too.
KATHRYN DAVIS
Duplex
We're facing our end, like the dinosaurs millions of years before us. The only difference is we've got journalists on hand to document every blow and setback, cataloguing our rapid, painful downfall in vibrant, vicious detail. Personally, I think the dinosaurs had the better deal. When it comes to impending, unavoidable extinction, ignorance is bliss.
DARREN SHAN
Demon Apocalypse
Imagine, if you will, a world filled with billions of dinosaurs. A world where they can be found in thousands of shapes, sizes, colours and classes in every habitable pocket of the planet. Imagine them from the desert dunes of the Sahara to the frozen rim of the Antarctic Circle -- and from the balmy islands of the South Pacific to the high flanks of the Himalayas. The thing is, you don't have to imagine very hard. In fact, wherever you live, you can probably step outside and look up into the trees and skies to find them. For the dinosaurs are the birds and they are all around you. Dinosaurs didn't die out when an asteroid hit the earth 66 million years ago. Everything you were told as a child was wrong.
JOHN PICKRELL
Flying Dinosaurs: How Fearsome Reptiles Became Birds
Standing in the sun, idiot savant
Something like a monument
I'm a dinosaur, somebody is digging my bones
KING CRIMSON
"Dinosaur", THRAK
The biggest living terrestrial predator, the Siberian tiger, at about a third of a metric ton (300 kg) pales in comparison to the biggest of the meat-eating dinosaurs, which reached 5 to perhaps 20 metric tons -- the size of elephants and bigger. But while elephants cannot run, the biggest predatory dinosaurs probably ran as fast as horses, and they hunted herbivores that themselves were as big as or bigger than elephants.
GREGORY S. PAUL
Predatory Dinosaurs of the World
One day when the planet was idly
pressing stegosaurs in her scrapbook,
she threw out a whole plateau
of souvenirs from the Ordivician, on impulse.
She'd long since run out of places to put things.
SARAH LINDSAY
"Mount Clutter", Mount Clutter
I hated humans.
They were such a disappointment.
And to think, god switched dinosaurs for man.
He must be raging.
CHLOE WALSH
Binding 13