Children have a great urge to learn about dinosaurs.
Triceratops is very common: they are the cows of the Cretaceous; they are everywhere.
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.
Most people looking for dinosaurs are looking for beautiful skeletons.
Almost all of my graduate students say that they got interested in dinosaurs because of 'Jurassic Park.'
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.
The fossil record is incredible when it preserves things, but it's not a complete record.
Unfortunately, with dinosaurs, we haven't had enough specimens to determine how much variation there is within a species.
'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.
We all have genes that come from our ancestors that aren't used - they're not turned on. So we actually carry ancient genes with us. If you could figure out how to turn those on, you could resurrect ancient characteristics from our ancestors.
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.
I encourage people who don't believe in evolution to look for horses in Jurassic Solenhofen limestone.
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.
I found my first dinosaur bone when I was 6, growing up in Montana. Ever since then I've been interested in dinosaurs.
I was very fortunate, during my early years as a paleontologist, in that my field crews and I made some remarkable discoveries indicating dinosaurs to have been extremely social.
Scientists have egos, and scientists like to name dinosaurs. They like to name anything. Everybody likes to have their own animal that they named.
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.