Bob Bakker bends over a dissecting microscope in a makeshift laboratory at the Wyoming Dinosaur International Society, meticulously cleaning dinosaur and crocodile teeth that have not seen daylight in 147 million years. His scope sits on a counter beside dirty coffee mugs, cooking utensils, and a microwave oven crowned with a toy mastodon. All around are plastic refrigerator dishes and Quaker Oats containers filled with drill bits, dental picks, razor blades, and fossils. Listening to National Public Radio, he ignores the clutter and contentedly focuses on the task at hand. Right now he is going to work on a peanut-size piece of gray mudstone, scanning for evidence of a Jurassic-era struggle. "Who's the chewer and who's the chewee?" Bakker asks as he examines a tiny black, fossilized triangle. Compared with the giant skeletons that spin museum turnstiles, this embedded crocodile tooth is an unprepossessing fleck. Seen through Bakker's eyes, however, it becomes a remarkable bridge between past and present. Shed teeth could tell where a long-dead creature lived, what it ate, how it migrated, even what kind of company it kept. "Crocs are the ideal test, because Jurassic crocs look like modern ones. The crocs are our control," Bakker says. The pattern of their behavior suggested by the fossil record, he finds, closely matches that of today's crocodiles. If the fossil evidence can be trusted for ancient crocs, it should be valid for extinct dinosaurs as well. That tantalizing connection is what keeps Bakker glued to the microscope. Ever since he fell in love with dinosaurs as a boy in New Jersey, he has wanted to understand what those petrified remains were like when they were living, breathing, fighting, bleeding creatures. Teeth may tell him. By analyzing "dino junk"—his name for about 2,000 dino and croc teeth, plus bits of chewed-up bone and turtle shell that he has gathered from fossil beds in Como Bluff, Wyoming—Bakker has sketched a life portrait of the giant carnivorous dinosaurs that once terrorized Earth. The species he has the most evidence for is Allosaurus, a slightly smaller but equally fierce forerunner of Tyrannosaurus rex. In Bakker's view, these killing machines were surprisingly social animals with complex behaviors: When allosaurs weren't tackling plant eaters 10 times their size, they were dragging "bronto brisket" back to the lair and feeding it to their young. In the dino-eat-dino world, adult allosaurs guarded their offspring, which lived at home until fully grown. When the dry season came and food became scarce, "Mom and Dad and the kids went off and spent summer at the lake," Bakker says. With typical irreverence, he refers to his discovery as dinosaur family values. Although his language is jovial, Bakker's mood is intense as he continues to scrape away at the chunk of rock, slowly exposing the crocodile tooth. His gray bird's-nest beard dangles beside the microscope. His meaty hands rest under the lens in the sunspot of an old Tensor lamp goose-necked down toward the diminutive fossil. Only his fingers flex. When he reaches a stopping point, he looks up, happy: "This is my world. Some days I get to do it all day, most days for only an hour. An hour spent collecting specimens in the field requires up to 20 hours of cleaning. Everybody likes to collect. Not everybody has the patience to clean." Staunch self-sufficiency defines the Bakker style. The reason his room at the Wyoming Dinosaur International Society is full of kitchen implements is that it is, in fact, the kitchen of his home in suburban Boulder, Colorado. Upstairs is the main workspace, where he analyzes, draws, and writes up his findings. He has the reputation—unfair, he says—of spurning peer-reviewed journals. He does little to hide his disdain for the "pompous, priestly language" of the academic establishment. There is no mistaking Bakker's slatted stool for a university chair in paleontology, or his crowded kitchen for the granite halls of a museum. "He's brilliant, and he's willing to go out on a limb," says John McIntosh, a vertebrate paleontologist and retired professor of physics at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, who has been a close friend for more than 30 years. Many of Bakker's colleagues ask to remain anonymous when they talk about him. A specialist in dinosaur anatomy offers this assessment: "He's a wild man. He's a maverick and incredibly bright. His only failing is he'll never back down. Vertebrate paleontologists are very full of themselves. He likes to needle them, partly because they are so full of themselves." An assistant collection manager at a major museum says, "If he were more cautious and more of a team player, his reputation would be better. But he's a lone wolf." Still, this wolf isn't baying at the moon. As a Yale University undergraduate, Bakker wrote a paper challenging the prevailing view that dinosaurs were squat, stodgy lizards. He concluded from anatomical studies that the alleged sluggards were actually "fast, agile, energetic creatures." In earning his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1976, Bakker expanded the case for warm-bloodedness. A lengthy 1975 article in Scientific American helped reignite interest in the bygone behemoths and legitimize the then-radical idea that birds evolved from a branch of dinosaurs. "In terms of public awareness, that was the turning point," says Philip Currie, the dinosaur curator at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta. Bakker consolidated his thinking in a 1986 best-seller, The Dinosaur Heresies. In 1995 Bakker wrote an adventure novel, Raptor Red, starring a resourceful Utahraptor.Raptor Pack, an illustrated summary of his research aimed at young readers, will be published this month.
Bringing Home the BrontosaurAllosaurs may have been attentive parents that dropped chunks of meat into the mouths of their young, but large and small tooth marks seen together on the bones of prey also suggest that adults and juveniles ate dinner side by side.
