When I was growing up in Montana I had two dreams: I wanted to be a paleontologist and I wanted to have a pet dinosaur and so that's what I've been striving for all of my life.

The chicken is a dinosaur. I mean, it really is. You can't argue with it, because we're the classifiers and we've classified it that way.

I'm trying to figure out the biology of dinosaurs and what they were like as living creatures.

In the lifetime of one person, we went from figuring out where we came from to figuring out how to get rid of ourselves.

Unfortunately, with dinosaurs, we haven't had enough specimens to determine how much variation there is within a species.

The worse the country, the more tortured it is by water and wind, the more broken and carved, the more it attracts fossil hunters, who depend on the planet to open itself to us. We can only scratch away at what natural forces have brought to the surface.

Almost all of my graduate students say that they got interested in dinosaurs because of 'Jurassic Park.'