Science Quote by Robert T. Bakker

“In 1941 Richard Owen said that the dinosaurs were almost hot blooded” is Bakker doing something slyly strategic: laundering a controversial modern idea through the respectability of a Victorian patriarch. Owen is the man who coined “Dinosauria,” often cast as the stodgy foil to Darwin and, later, to the Dinosaur Renaissance Bakker helped lead. By reaching back to 1941 (Owen had been dead for decades), Bakker signals that the seed of “warm” dinosaurs wasn’t a 1970s fad or a countercultural provocation; it had antecedents inside the establishment.

The phrasing “almost hot blooded” is the tell. It’s a rhetorical wedge, not a measurement. “Hot-blooded” isn’t just physiology; it’s a whole personality package: active, fast, complex, ecologically dominant. “Almost” gives Bakker room to maneuver around the binary trap of ectotherm vs. endotherm, while still pushing readers toward the picture he wants: dinosaurs as vigorous animals, not swamp-bound failure modes waiting for extinction.

Contextually, this is a scientist arguing in public, not just in journals. Bakker’s era was rebranding dinosaurs for museums, textbooks, and pop culture, and physiology was the lever that moved everything else: behavior, growth rates, predator-prey dynamics, even the link to birds. Invoking Owen isn’t trivia; it’s coalition-building across time, a way to make a revolution feel like a rediscovery.