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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“IMAGINE A WORLD WITH NO BORDERS. I’m not channeling John Lennon. What I mean is”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Natural selection doesn't plan for the future, it only works in the present, to adapt organisms to their immediate circumstances.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us

“...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

“Life is resilient”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

“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

“could extend and flex in a fore-aft direction”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us

“...another trove of spectacular fossils, found in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia...provide unprecedented insight into the lifestyles of dinosaurs and early birds.”
― Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

“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

“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

“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