Success Quote by Robert T. Bakker

Bakker isn’t talking about museums so much as infrastructure: how you turn a handful of isolated, underfunded local collections into a public-facing knowledge machine. The phrase “web” is doing the heavy lifting. It signals a scientist’s instinct for systems thinking, but it also reads like a quiet rebuke to the romantic idea that culture in the American West should stay scattered, quirky, and proudly provincial. In Bakker’s frame, fragmentation isn’t charming; it’s inefficiency.

The intent is pragmatic and political. A “major museum system” means shared storage standards, coordinated exhibits, unified branding, pooled grant-writing, and a stronger case for tourism dollars. It’s also about scientific leverage: fossils, archives, and specimens gain value when they can be compared, cataloged, and circulated. Eight small museums can each be a curiosity; networked, they become an institution with authority.

The subtext is a familiar rural dilemma: Wyoming has the raw material (land, deep time, dinosaurs, history), but not always the centralized cultural power that coastal cities take for granted. Bakker is proposing a workaround that respects geography while refusing to be limited by it. “They are all scattered” isn’t merely descriptive; it’s a diagnosis of why these places struggle to punch at their weight.

Context matters, too. Bakker is a dinosaur celebrity-scientist, the kind of figure who can translate specialized expertise into public fascination. He’s positioning museums not as dusty temples, but as a connected civic project: science as regional development, and culture as a logistics problem worth solving.