Gregory Scott Paul

"What gave archosaurs the edge as large predators at this time, and therapsids the edge as smaller ones? Frankly, I am not sure. Both seem to have had heightened metabolic rates and fur or feather insu…"

"Novelist Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park as a screenplay option for the Steven Spielberg flick. I am ambiguous about Crichton’s body of work, as it includes dubious anti-scientific elements. But …"

"Although some dinosaurs may have spent some time feeding in the water like moose or fishing cats, at most a few became strongly amphibious in the manner of hippos, much less marine as per seals and wh…"

"If not for the long tail, one might mistake a theropod for a big, toothy, marauding bird in the dark. That theropods are birdlike is logical, since birds are their closest living relatives. Remember t…"

"The dinosaur world I grew up in was classical. They were universally seen as scaley herps that inhabited the immobile continents. There was no hint that birds were their direct descendents. Being rept…"

"By the Cretaceous crocodilians of essentially modern form were the theropods main competitors. Yet crocodilians appear to be less abundant in most Mesozoic deposits than they are later in the mammal-d…"

"Dinosaurs seem strange, but that is just because we are mammals biased toward assuming the modern fauna is familiar and normal, and past forms are exotic and alien. Consider that elephants are bizarre…"

"The biggest living terrestrial predator, the Siberian tiger, at about a third of a metric ton pales in comparison to the biggest of the meat-eating dinosaurs, which reached 5 to perhaps 20 metric tons…"