For many years, dinosaurs were portrayed as ponderous, cold-blooded, overgrown monsters that some scientists considered doomed from the start. A fundamental change in thinking about these prehistoric beasts occurred in the late 1960s, when two Yale paleontologists noted that many aspects of their anatomy and biology were much like those of warm-blooded birds and mammals. While this prompted debates, the evidence for the new theories prevailed. Dinosaurs became thought of as creatures capable of complex behavior and with a tremendous range of adaptations to different modes of life—an evolutionary success story. It was the hugely successful Jurassic Park movie franchise, which began in 1993, that introduced the public to the dinosaur renaissance.
Hans Sues, senior research geologist and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the National Museum of Natural History, witnessed the debates up close and discusses the main researchers, the arguments behind the new thinking, and their impact on both evolutionary biology and paleobiology.
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