It's a lucky thing Robert Bakker became a bone digger. There's more than a dash of the fundamentalist about the portly dinosaur hunter. Imagine the havoc he might have wreaked had he found religion or plumped for a military career. Instead, he dedicated himself to demolishing the orthodox portrayal of his beloved saurians as torpid evolutionary culs-de-sac. Phew! Blame Bakker for Hollywood's cutsey-wutsey dino fixation. Jurassic Park was his fault. Michael Crichton's novel, with its svelte, quick-witted dinosaurs, reads like a Bakker manifesto. Helming the movie adaptation, Steven Spielberg appointed Bakker chief scientific consultant. -west badlands.
Bakker wasn't the first to suggest that dinosaurs were warm-blooded or the ancestors of birds. That honour belongs to his 1960s mentor John Ostrom. But Bakker was the more astute self-publicist, realising campus notoriety would only bring him so far. His books are bestsellers in America, and his lecture tours play to packed audiences.
Born in New Jersey in 1945, Bakker fell in love with dinosaurs on a school visit to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He studied at Yale and Harvard, but for years struggled to find work as a palaeontologist. A gifted artist, he scraped together a living as a commercial illustrator and taught anatomy to medical students at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University. In 1982, emboldened by healthy sales of The Dinosaur Heresies, he quit to become a full-time fossil expert.
He has since dabbled in fiction. His 1996 debut, Raptor Red, transplanted Richard Adams's Watership Down to the mid-Mesozoic period, recounting a young carnivorous dinosaur's adventures in primordial Utah. Bakker's eponymous "raptor is a cognitive killer analogous to present-day pack mammals. Speculative nonsense or cutting edge populist science?
With Bakker, it's sometimes difficult to tell the difference.