Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Feathers predate birds.
The median isn't the message.
No one-liner can ever be optimal.
We pass through this world but once.
I want to be the Bob DeNiro of the Jurassic.
Historical science is being left in the dust.
Nature is what she is - amoral and persistent.
... a local, indigenous, American bizarre-ity.
So much of science proceeds by telling stories.
Birds evolved from a small raptor like theropod.
I hardly recognize what I do well. I just do it.
Children have a great urge to learn about dinosaurs.
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview.
The world is full of signals that we don't perceive.
Stegosaurus was common only on well drained, dry soil.
The evidence is overwhelming that birds are dinosaurs.
I also discovered the only complete Brontosaurus skull.
The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.
Evolution - evolutionary change - does not happen quickly.
At Harvard I was in charge of the comparative anatomy labs.
Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.
... each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell.
As an undergraduate I held many small jobs as an illustrator.
Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident.
Current utility and historical origin are different subjects.
History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
Also, while I was at Yale, I had a job teaching kids at the museum.
In 1941 Richard Owen said that the dinosaurs were almost hot blooded.
... no compelling data to support its anachronistic social Darwinism.
Theory-free science makes about as much sense as value-free politics.
Most people looking for dinosaurs are looking for beautiful skeletons.
I think most of the dinosaur specimens we find represent subadult sizes.
It was not an asteroid or comet, because it would have killed everything.
We were not designed rationally, but are products of a convoluted history.
Facts do not 'speak for themselves'; they are read in the light of theory.
Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.
The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning.
A lot of Montanans are teed off that local finds usually end up in New York.
I want to find a voracious, small-minded predator and name it after the IRS.
Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.
The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change.
Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail.
Great theories are expansive; failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision.
Life histories tell you just about everything you need to know about an animal.
People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons.
Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning.
In the future, I'd like to see paleontology as a whole get a lot more quantitative.
Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.
If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.
Triceratops is very common: they are the cows of the Cretaceous; they are everywhere.