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Concept
Dinosaur renaissance
Summary
The dinosaur renaissance was a small-scale scientific revolution that started in the late 1960s and led to renewed academic and popular interest in dinosaurs. It was sparked by new discoveries and research indicating that dinosaurs may have been active and warm-blooded animals, rather than cold-blooded and sluggish as had been the prevailing view and description during the first half of the twentieth century.
The new view of dinosaurs was championed by John Ostrom, who argued that birds evolved from coelurosaurian dinosaurs, and particularly Robert Bakker who argued passionately that dinosaurs were warm-blooded in a way similar to modern mammals and birds. Bakker frequently portrayed his ideas as a renaissance of those popular in the late nineteenth century, referring to the period in between the Dinosaur Wars and the dinosaur renaissance as "the dinosaur doldrums".
The dinosaur renaissance led to a profound shift in thinking on nearly all aspects of dinosaur biology, including physiology, evolution, behaviour, ecology and extinction. It also led to many depictions of dinosaurs in popular culture.
In the mid and latter parts of the nineteenth century, some scientists thought there was a close relationship between birds and dinosaurs—and that dinosaurs represented an intermediate stage between "reptiles" and birds.
Shortly after the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, British biologist and evolution-defender Thomas Henry Huxley proposed that birds were descendants of dinosaurs. He cited skeletal similarities, particularly among dinosaurs, the "first bird"—Archaeopteryx—and modern birds. However, in 1926, Gerhard Heilmann wrote his influential book The Origin of Birds, in which he dismissed the dinosaur–bird link, based on the dinosaurs' supposed lack of a furcula. Thereafter, the accepted hypothesis was that birds evolved from crocodylomorph and thecodont ancestors, rather than from dinosaurs. This removed dinosaurs from a central role in debates about the origin of living species, and may have contributed to the decline of academic interest in dinosaur evolution.
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