Bakker, Robert T

US palaeontologist who in 1975 published the theory that dinosaurs were warm-blooded. He also views them as fast, agile, and colourful. He has popularized his work on television and in books such as The Dinosaur Heresies 1986.

Bakker was born in New Jersey, educated at Yale and Harvard, and taught at Johns Hopkins University 1976–84 before becoming a freelance lecturer. He believes that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by disease carried across the new land bridges that appeared at the end of the Cretaceous period.