Science Quote by Robert T. Bakker

Stegosaurus, in Bakker's hands, stops being a museum mascot and becomes an ecological data point. The sentence is almost aggressively unpoetic: "common", "only", "well drained", "dry soil". That bluntness is the point. Bakker is signaling a shift from dinosaurs as isolated curiosities to dinosaurs as animals with habitats, limits, and preferences you could map like deer or bison. The intent is explanatory, but it also carries a quiet provocation: if you want to understand an extinct creature, stop staring at the bones and start reconstructing the landscape.

The subtext is methodological. "Common only" reads like a constraint derived from field patterns, not a romantic story about prehistory. It implies a comparison class: Stegosaurus is scarce somewhere else (floodplains, wetlands, soft sediments), and that absence matters as much as any dramatic fossil find. In paleontology, where preservation biases can fool you, claiming habitat specificity is a wager that the distribution isn't just taphonomy (what fossilizes) but behavior and physiology (where the animal actually lived). Bakker is inviting you to treat fossil geography as evidence of lifestyle: feeding height, locomotion on firm ground, perhaps nesting or predator avoidance tied to terrain.

Contextually, Bakker helped popularize a more dynamic view of dinosaurs in the late 20th century, pushing against the old swamp-bound stereotype. "Dry soil" is doing cultural cleanup. It's an anti-myth sentence: no thunderous battles, just drainage, sediment, and the reminder that even the weirdest animals are, first, products of place.