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hibernation chambers in which they conserve energy and water during lean times,
sometimes for months or years.
Given this burrowing norm in modern vertebrates, including the living relat-
ives of dinosaurs—birds and crocodilians—along with the incredible diversity of
dinosaurs during their 165-million-year history and the myriad complex behaviors
paleontologists hadinferred fromtheir bonesandtrace fossils, onewouldthink that
someone, somehow, had thought of dinosaurs living underground. Turns out that,
yes, a few people had thought of subterranean dinosaurs, although not in the formal
sort of way that stood a chance of acceptance in the face of fierce skepticism by the
paleontological community.
Indeed, the case for burrowing dinosaurs was not helped in that one of the first
people to publicly propose it was the bombastically flamboyant and iconoclastic
gadfly of dinosaur paleontology, Robert (“Bob”) Bakker. More P.T. Barnum than
Barnum Brown, Bakker is well known as a great populist of dinosaur lore, with
many of his views summarized in his still-intriguing and never-dull 1986 topic,
The
Dinosaur Heresies
. The popularity of this topic stemmed at least in part from his
gleefully sticking fingers, toes, and other appendages into the eyes of stodgy pale-
ontologists who viewed dinosaurs as up-scaled, dull, and cold-blooded variations
on lizards. As a result, Bakker is often credited for rebooting dinosaurs in the pub-
lic imagination as active, hot-blooded animals that acted much more like birds or
mammals.(Bakkerwasnotoriginalinthisconcept,though.Instead,paleontologists
rightfully laud his Ph.D. advisor, John Ostrom, as the person who built the found-
ation for the “birds are dinosaurs” argument in the early 1970s.) Despite the hit-
and-missnatureofBakker'sassertions andconjectures aboutdinosaurs in his topic,
it nonetheless ensured him a near-permanent presence on dinosaur documentaries
from then on, in which he disagreed with nearly every other paleontologist. After
all, conflict sells.
Anyway, Bakker speculated that
Othnielia
and
Drinker
—both of which were
small hypsilophodont dinosaurs that lived during the Late Jurassic Period—must
