A Book for Dan

Hey Dan, remember this guy?

I know I posted on my other site about dinosaurs a while back and watching shows on dinosaurs on Netflix. On the first show that we saw (that wasn't a BBC production) I saw this old guy. The beard, the dusty looking cowboy hat, the faint New England accent, I totally recognized him. I sat up and told Corrie that both you, Dan, and I used to watch dinosaur shows as kids, and this guy was one of our favorites. Well, one of my favorites anyway, I couldn't really speak for you...

But then I started to look up information on the guy. Named Dr. Robert T. Bakker, he was born in Massachusetts, went to Yale and then Harvard, was a hippie radical, and had some outsane ideas about dinosaur orthodoxy. He even wrote one of the most important books during the revolution in thought process about dinosaurs, The Dinosaur Heresies:

I looked all this information up on my phone during the episode (modern technology, baby!), and, being fueled by some fine gin and tonic, I found the book for sale on eBay for a very modest price, and ordered it.

Bakker was one of both Michael Crighton's and later Steven Spielberg's sources during their respective Jurassic Park projects.

I've almost finished the book, and it's pretty excellent. Check out the cool drawings that Bakker himself does:

The sketches are on nearly half the pages, and they're all very cool. This one in particular shows the differences in the caloric intake needs for active, warm-blooded dinosaurs and the far more ancient, cold-blooded fin-back lizards that were the protomammals.

One thing is odd when reading this book, though. The current view of dinosaurs--their habits, their habitats, their food sources and activity levels--are all a result of this book, or at least reflect the point of view of this book. The heresy of the title was the fact that the book battled an incorrect orthodoxy that had dinosaurs as cold-blooded, lethargic, swamp living dumbasses. Now the view has dinosaurs as active hunters and actively defensive prey, running around the Mesozoic landscape with abandon.

This book makes the case emphatically, so much so that it's hard to fathom a time when the evidence Bakker presents was as ignored as it had been leading up to this revolution of sorts. The book's still easy to get and worth some time.