DINOSAUR QUOTES

quotations about dinosaurs

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The most popular exhibits in any natural history museum are, without doubt, the dinosaurs. These creatures' popularity grows each year, partly because of the recent resurgence of dinosaur movies, but also because a skeleton of a full-sized tyrannosaurus rex still has the ability, even 65 million years after its death, to chill us to the bone.

RAY HARRYHAUSEN

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If we measured success by longevity, then dinosaurs must rank as the number one success story in the history of land life.

ROBERT T. BAKKER

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Dinosaurs are the best way to teach kids, and adults, the immensity of geologic time.

ROBERT T. BAKKER

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The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers -- and thermonuclear weapons.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

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I would give ten years off the beginning of my life to see, only once, Tyrannosaurus rex come rearing up from the elms of Central Park, a Morgan police horse screaming in its jaws. We can never have enough of nature.

EDWARD ABBEY

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Dinosaurs may be extinct from the face of the planet, but they are alive and well in our imaginations.

STEVE MILLER

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So does the Bible talk about dinosaurs? Yes, there are around twenty mentions of what we would call dinosaurs today. Why isn't the word dinosaur used to describe these animals? The King James Bible was translated into English in 1611; that was more than 200 years before Sir Richard Owen coined the word dinosaur in 1841. The word "dinosaur" meant "terrible lizard." The words that we will look at that are scriptural references to dinosaurs are the words "behemoth," "leviathan," and "tannin."

KELLY LANDGRAF

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All the explanations proposed seem to be only partly satisfactory. They range from massive climatic change to mammalian predation to the extinction of a plant with apparent laxative properties, in which case the dinosaurs died of constipation.

CARL SAGAN

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Dinosaurs have a bad public image as symbols of obsolescence and hulking inefficiency; in political cartoons they are know-nothing conservatives that plod through miasmic swamps to inevitable extinction.

ROBERT T. BAKKER

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In the rare situation a megatsunami washes a T. rex into your path, you won't be carrying a weapon large enough to hurt it. If it's intent on eating you, it will eat you. However, you will be killed by the coolest dinosaur ever. Most people go their whole lives without ever seeing a T. rex in person. Do you know how lucky you are?

ANDREW SHAFFER

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If history repeats itself, I am so getting a dinosaur.

ANONYMOUS

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When I stop to fill in the pages of my field book with the day's observations, I like to sit on the rim of one of the biggest tracks, a footprint a yard wide. The lime mud pushed up by the thrust of the hindpaw looks fresh even though it has been frozen in stone for a million centuries. This depression in the limestone is vivid evidence of the enormous power in astro muscles and ligaments and of the great beast's feelings of duty to family and clan.

ROBERT T. BAKKER

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Dinosaurs are the uncontested stars of paleontology. Given their often spectacular morphology and extinction (or, rather, partial extinction--as birds are dinosaurs), when the Earth was struck by an enormous meteorite and immense volcanic eruptions shook the globe, they hog the limelight to such a degree that we often forget that before them there were other animals.

SEBASTIEN STEYER

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Great white sharks, big storms - somehow, I think we like to be put in our place by awesome things. Dinosaurs do that.

SUE HENDRICKSON

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Scientists are complaining that the new Dinosaur movie shows dinosaurs with lemurs, who didn't evolve for another million years. They're afraid the movie will give kids a mistaken impression. What about the fact that the dinosaurs are singing and dancing?

JAY LENO

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The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right.

LARRY NIVEN

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Nature was quick to pass the sponge of her deluges over these awkward sketches (dinosaurs), these first nightmares of Life.

AUGUSTE DE VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM

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The presence of feathers in tyrannosaurs and many other kinds of dinosaurs makes it very likely that the great T. rex was feathered, too. If the tyrant king was not fearsome enough already, just imagine it as an energetic, intelligent Big Bird from Hell.

STEPHEN BRUSATTE

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Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.

CHARLES KINGSLEY

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It's very simple why kids are crazy about dinosaurs -- dinosaurs are nature's Special Effects. They are the only real dragons. Kids love dragons. It's not just being weirdly shaped and being able to eat Buicks. It's that they are real.

ROBERT T. BAKKER

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