The Great Dinosaur Debate by Robert T. Bakker

(Photo: Courtesy Yale Peabody Museum)īut as Ostrom studied the thousand or so bones he excavated, representing at least four individuals, he realized Deinonychus didn’t fit the plodding stereotype. “They did not appear to merit much serious study because they did not seem to go anywhere: no modern vertebrate groups were descended from them.”ĭeinonychus. Even paleontologists had lost interest in these “symbols of obsolescence and hulking inefficiency,” Ostrom’s student Robert T. In the public imagination then, dinosaurs were plodding, thunderous monsters, cold-blooded, swamp bound, and stupid. Ostrom gave the new species the name Deinonychus because it means “terrible claw” in Greek. But from the innermost toe, a sharp claw, sickle-shaped and 4.7 inches in length, curved murderously up and out. They soon unearthed an astonishing foot: Two of the three toes had ordinary claws. John Ostrom, a paleontologist at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, was standing with an assistant on the flank of a conical hill considering sites for the following summer’s fieldwork when the answer appeared before them in the form of a large claw eroding out of the slope just below. The Deinonychus story began one afternoon in late August 1964, near Bridger, Montana. It also involves correcting a mistake I recently repeated in print.

If that sounds like too much of a mouthful, too much like science, just bear with me for a minute: This story comes with a Jurassic Park plot twist. The fossil that woke me from my ignorance is named Deinonychus. Fossils were so very then, so 66 million years ago.

I wanted to know what was happening to wildlife right now. It’s a little embarrassing to admit this, as a wildlife writer, but I didn’t used to think fossils mattered all that much.

The Great Dinosaur Debate by Robert T. Bakker