Science Quote by Robert T. Bakker

The line reads like a throwaway resume bullet, but coming from Robert T. Bakker it’s a quiet declaration of method: science as a life lived in public, not just published. “Many jobs” is deliberately unglamorous phrasing for someone who helped popularize dinosaurs as active, warm-blooded animals and turned paleontology into something closer to cultural spectacle. He’s signaling range and hustle, the unromantic labor behind the big ideas: cataloging collections, curating exhibits, fundraising, wrangling institutions that run on thin budgets and thick bureaucracy.

The geography matters. Colorado and Wyoming aren’t random stops; they’re North American fossil country, places where the bones are literally in the ground and the myths of the American West still cling to the landscape. Bakker’s career is inseparable from that terrain: fieldwork, museum back rooms, local audiences who want wonder but also want their regional heritage honored. By naming these states, he situates expertise outside coastal prestige pipelines and inside the everyday infrastructure that keeps science visible.

Then the pivot to teaching: “I have also taught summer courses” frames education as seasonal, recurring, almost migratory. Summer courses are where you catch the curious and the undecided, where enthusiasm can be converted into careers. Subtextually, Bakker is asserting a dual identity museums reward but academia often undervalues: he’s not only producing knowledge, he’s translating it, performing it, recruiting the next generation. The intent isn’t to brag; it’s to normalize a scientist’s credibility as something earned through service, place, and repetition.