The Dinosaur Heresies

"This is a book that came out in the mid-80s but in many ways it’s a seminal work because, although it has a number of idiosyncrasies, it is actually a work that kick-started some of the modern views we hold about dinosaurs today. In particular, in this work he made clear that dinosaurs were not sluggish lizard-like animals but were very active, very dynamic and actually behaved a lot more like modern birds and mammals with very complex behaviours and social lives that hadn’t been thought about previously. So, this is a book that really got me interested in dinosaurs when I was a teenager and it has some very interesting ideas in it that a lot of people have tried to run with. Some of them have fallen by the wayside but others have subsequently become almost dogma. For example, some of the ideas were to do with body temperature in dinosaurs which have been very heavily debated. Nowadays, it is thought that dinosaurs had some kind of metabolic regime intermediate between a very warm-blooded mammal or bird and that of a crocodile. So, in part Bakker seems to have been right in thinking that dinosaurs have a physiology more advanced than that which we usually associate with reptiles. He also came up with lots of behavioural ideas about how these animals would interact in terms of parenting, how they would interact in their fighting behaviour, their display behaviour when looking for mates. Again, generally he was looking at them as much more sophisticated, complex creatures than had previously been thought. This book represents the culmination of ideas that he’d been throwing around for about ten years. It’s really only from the 70s onwards that we start to get this change in view and only from the 80s that we had a crystallisation of this view that dinosaurs were very exciting animals. For most of the 20th century dinosaurs were viewed as a dead end – an evolutionary dead end that was kind of interesting because they were big and odd-looking, but that never really went anywhere. It was the recognition in the 70s that dinosaurs and birds were closely related, and that dinosaurs were more like birds than like other reptiles, that suddenly led to a new burst of interest in them and new research programmes. If you spoke to a student in the 1940s or 50s they would just view dinosaurs as curiosities, but these days they’re viewed as an integral part of a greater knowledge of how animals are related to each other and how animal behaviour has changed through time, not just as a side-show oddity."