A dinosaur out of context is like a character without a story. Worse than that, the character suffers from amnesia.
Once we understand just how to control genes, we have the potential for spinal cord regeneration, bone regeneration, and so on. It might also give us plumper chickens.
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 good notion that they were dinosaur bones.
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.
I think most of the dinosaur specimens we find represent subadult sizes.
I found my first dinosaur bone when I was 6, growing up in Montana. Ever since then I've been interested in dinosaurs.
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.
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 about the future, there's an opportunity to create some new life-forms.
Almost all of my graduate students say that they got interested in dinosaurs because of 'Jurassic Park.'
'Jurassic Park' has a lot of science in it - and a lot of it is wrong - but if it was all accurate, it would be a documentary.
I encourage people who don't believe in evolution to look for horses in Jurassic Solenhofen limestone.
I'm trying to figure out the biology of dinosaurs and what they were like as living creatures.
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.
Comparing science and religion isn't like comparing apples and oranges - it's more like apples and sewing machines.
A chicken grows up in a little less time than an ostrich. An ostrich takes a whole year. A chicken takes a few months.
In the future, I'd like to see paleontology as a whole get a lot more quantitative.
Most people looking for dinosaurs are looking for beautiful skeletons.
Give a talk to children and tell them dinosaurs didn't drag their tails, and you get arguments.
