Steve Brusatte > Quotes

“Bats look and behave a whole lot differently than mice or foxes or elephants, but nobody would argue that they're not mammals. No, bats are just a weird type of mammal that evolved wings and developed the ability to fly. Birds are just a weird group of dinosaurs that did the same thing.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“There is a dinosaur outside my window. I'm watching it as I write this.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“The triceratops was safe. It was across the river, separated by impassable rapids from the danger brewing on the opposite bank. But it could see what was about to happen and was powerless to stop it.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“a new species of dinosaur is currently being found, on average, once a week. Let that sink in: a new dinosaur every . . . single . . . week.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World: The Definitive Dinosaur Encyclopedia with Stunning Illustrations, Embark on a Prehistoric Quest!

“Birds are dinosaurs.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Age of Dinosaurs: The Rise and Fall of the World's Most Remarkable Animals

“Elegant in its simplicity, so far-reaching in its implications, today we regard Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection as one of fundamental rules underpinning the world as we know it.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“As the world was going to hell, dinosaurs were thriving, somehow taking advantage of the chaos around them.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World: The Definitive Dinosaur Encyclopedia with Stunning Illustrations, Embark on a Prehistoric Quest!

“Classification is a human exercise. Nature doesn't put labels on things.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us

“The holes in front of us were fossilized tracks, huge ones. Dinosaur tracks, no doubt. As we looked closer, we could see that there were both handprints and footprints, and some of them had finger and toe marks. They had the telltale shape of tracks left by sauropods. We had found a 170-million-year-old dinosaur dance floor, records left by colossal sauropods that were about fifty feet long and weighed as much as three elephants.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“During the final 20 million years of the Cretaceous, tyrannosaurs flourished, ruling the river valleys, lakeshores, floodplains, forests, and deserts of North America and Asia. There is no mistaking their signature look: huge head, athletic body, sad arms, muscular legs, long tail. They bit so hard that they crunched through the bones of their prey; they grew so fast that they put on about five pounds every day during their teenage years; and they lived so hard that we have yet to find an individual that was more than thirty years old when it died. And they were impressively diverse: we have found nearly twenty species of these big-boned tyrannosaurs from the latest Cretaceous, and there are surely many more out there waiting to be discovered. The Pinocchio-nosed Qianzhousaurus, so fortuitously discovered by that still-anonymous backhoe operator at the Chinese construction site, is one of the latest examples. Just as Brown and Osborn grasped over a hundred years ago, when they were the first humans to set eyes on a tyrannosaur, T. rex and its brethren really were the kings of the dinosaur world.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“Bats look and behave a whole lot differently than mice or foxes or elephants, but nobody would argue that they're not mammals. No, bats are just a weird type of mammal that evolved wings and developed the ability to fly. Birds are just a weird group of dinosaurs that did the same thing.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

“It comes down to this: if our human species had not spread around the world, then a lot of the megafauna would still be here. Maybe not all of them, but probably most. Dinosaurs like T. rex and Triceratops were felled by an asteroid. For mammoths and saber-tooths, we were the asteroid.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us

“THE JURASSIC PERIOD marks the beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs proper. Yes, the first true dinosaurs entered the scene at least 30 million years before the Jurassic began. But as we’ve seen, these earlier Triassic dinosaurs had not even a remote claim to being dominant. Then Pangea began to split, and the dinosaurs emerged from the ashes and found themselves with a new, much emptier world, which they proceeded to conquer. Over the first few tens of millions of years of the Jurassic, dinosaurs diversified into a dizzying array of new species. Entirely new subgroups originated, some of which would persist for another 130-plus million years. They got larger and spread around the globe, colonizing humid areas, deserts, and everything in between. By the middle part of the Jurassic, the major types of dinosaurs could be found all over the world. That quintessential image, so often repeated in museum exhibits and kids’ books, was real life: dinosaurs thundering across the land, at the top of the food chain, ferocious meat-eaters comingling with long-necked giants and armored and plated plant-eaters, the little mammals and lizards and frogs and other non-dinosaurs cowering in fear.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“The Great Hall of Dinosaurs at Yale's Peabody Museum may not bill itself as a place of spiritual pilgrimage, but that's sure what it feels like to me.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

“Then, about 34 million years ago, as the Eocene transitioned to the Oligocene, the world turned. The hothouse flipped to a coolhouse, which would eventually become an icehouse. The”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us

“The initial eruptions in Morocco released clouds of carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas, which rapidly warmed the planet. It got so hot that strange ice formations buried within the seafloor, called clathrates, melted in unison all throughout the world’s oceans. Clathrates are unlike the solid blocks of ice we’re used to, the ones we put in our drinks or carve into fancy sculptures at parties. They are a more porous substance, a latticework of frozen water molecules that can trap other substances inside it. One of those substances is methane, a gas that seeps up constantly from the deep Earth and infiltrates the oceans but is caged in the clathrates before it can leak into the atmosphere. Methane is nasty: it’s an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, packing an earth-warming punch over thirty-five times as great. So when that first torrent of volcanic carbon dioxide increased global temperatures and melted the clathrates, all of that once-trapped methane was suddenly released. This initiated a runaway train of global warming. The amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere approximately tripled within a few tens of thousands of years, and temperatures increased by 3 or 4 degrees Celsius.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“...let's not forget about those birds--they are dinosaurs, they survived, they are still with us. The dinosaur empire may be over, but the dinosaurs remain.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

“Today, some two decades after (the initial fossil discovery in China), more than twenty such species (of feathered dinosaurs) are known, and these are represented by thousands of individual fossils (in NE China).”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

“In 1861, quarry workers in Bavaria found something peculiar. They were mining a type of fine limestone that breaks into thin sheets, which was used at the time for lithographic printing. One of the miners...split open a slab and found a 150-million-year-old skeleton of a Frankenstein creature inside. It had sharp claws and a long tail like a reptile but feathers and wings like a bird...The jurassic hybrid was named Archaeopteryx...a transitional fossil, linking reptiles and birds.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

“After some of the largest volcanic eruptions in Earth history desecrated ecosystems, dinosaurs became more diverse, more abundant, and larger. Completely new dinosaur species were evolving and spreading into new environments, while other groups of animals went extinct. As the world was going to hell, dinosaurs were thriving, somehow taking advantage of the chaos around them.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“It goes without saying, but T. rex was huge: adults were about forty-two feet (thirteen meters) long and weighed in the ballpark of seven or eight tons, based on those equations from a few chapters ago, which calculate body weight from the thickness of the thighbone. These proportions are off the charts for carnivorous dinosaurs. The rulers of the Jurassic—the Butcher Allosaurus, Torvosaurus, and their kin—got up to about thirty-three feet (ten meters) long and a few tons—monsters to be sure, but they had nothing on Rex. After temperature and sea-level changes ushered in the Cretaceous, some of the carcharodontosaurs from Africa and South America got even bigger than their Jurassic predecessors. Giganotosaurus, for example, was about as long as T. rex and may have reached about six tons. But that’s still a good ton or two lighter than Rex, so the King stands alone as the biggest purely meat-eating animal that lived on land during the time of dinosaurs, or indeed at any time in the history of our planet.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“there is no denying that by the dawn of the Campanian subinterval of the latest Cretaceous, beginning about 84 million years ago, tyrannosaurs had risen to the top of the food pyramid.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“Pangea may have been a united landmass, but its treacherous weather and extreme climates gave it a dangerous unpredictability. It wouldn’t have been a particularly safe or pleasant place to call home. But the very first dinosaurs had no choice. They entered a world still recovering from the terrible mass extinction at the end of the Permian, a land subject to the violent whims of storms and the blight of blistering temperatures. So did many other new types of plants and animals that were getting their start after the mass extinction cleared the planet. All of these newbies were thrust onto an evolutionary battlefield. It was far from certain that dinosaurs were going to emerge triumphant. After all, they were small and meek creatures, nowhere near the top of the food chain during their earliest years. They were hanging around with lots of other species of small-to-midsize reptiles, early mammals, and amphibians in the middle of the food pyramid, fearful of the crocodile-line archosaurs, who held the throne. Nothing was handed to the dinosaurs. They were going to have to earn it.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“Not so at Ashfall Fossil Beds. The Yellowstone supervolcano, in all its destruction, froze into place a snapshot of a Miocene-aged community.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us

“Feathers are nature's ultimate Swiss Army knife, multipurpose tools that can be used for display, insulation, protection for eggs and babies, and of course, flight.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

“Gargoyleosaurus”
― Steve Brusatte, The Age of Dinosaurs: The Rise and Fall of the World's Most Remarkable Animals

“Many a dinosaur was probably swept away by floodwaters or entombed by mud avalanches. But the megamonsoons also had another effect. They helped divide Pangea into environmental provinces, characterized by different amounts of precipitation, varying severity of the monsoonal winds, and different temperatures. The equatorial region was extremely hot and humid, a tropical hell that would make summer in today’s Amazon seem a trip to Santa’s workshop by comparison. Then there were vast stretches of desert, extending about 30 degrees of latitude on either side of the equator—like the Sahara, only covering a much broader swath of the planet. Temperatures here were well into the hundreds (over 35 degrees Celsius), probably all year long, and the monsoonal rains that pounded other parts of Pangea were absent here, offering little more than a trickle of precipitation. But the monsoons exerted a great impact in the midlatitudes. These areas were slightly cooler but much more wet and humid than the deserts, far more hospitable to life. Herrerasaurus, Eoraptor, and the other Ischigualasto dinosaurs lived in such a setting, smack in the middle of the midlatitude humid belt of southern Pangea.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Age of Dinosaurs: The Rise and Fall of the World’s Most Remarkable Animals

“Pterosaurs were the first group of vertebrates (animals with backbones) to evolve wings and fly. Dinosaurs - in the guise of birds - were the second. This means that diosaurs are still among us today. We're so used to saying that dinosaurs are extinct, but in reality, over ten thousand species of dinosaurs remain (as bird species).”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

“These are feathers. Not the quill-pen feathers that make up the wings of today’s birds but simpler ones that look more like strands of hair. These were the ancestral structures that bird feathers evolved from, and it is now known that many (and perhaps all) dinosaurs had them. Yutyrannus and Dilong establish beyond a doubt that tyrannosaurs were among these feathered dinosaurs. Unlike birds, tyrannosaurs certainly were not flying. Instead, they probably used their feathers for display or to keep warm. And because both a large tyrannosaur like Yutyrannus and a small tyrannosaur like Dilong have feathers, this implies that the common ancestor of all tyrannosaurs had feathers, and therefore that the great T. rex itself was most likely feathered, too.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“At the end of the Permian Period, these gases caused the Earth to get warmer by about 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit),”
― Steve Brusatte, The Age of Dinosaurs: The Rise and Fall of the World's Most Remarkable Animals