“La maggior parte delle persone considerano gli pterosauri come "dinosauri volanti". Da piccolo, mi ricordo di come gli altri ragazzi li chiamavano "uccelli-dinosauri", sebbene non fossero né dinosauri né uccelli. Il primo problema è che la conoscenza sulla vita preistorica tenuta da molte persone si limita a ciò che hanno visto in pochi pezzi di plastica in un gioco di bambini preistorico. Tipicamente, non solo ritengono che tutti questi siano dinosauri, ma potrebbero persino pensare che rappresentino tutti gli animali fossili conosciuti. Non hanno idea di quanto siano ricchi i reperti fossili.
Most people think of pterosaurs as "flying dinosaurs."”

The dinosaurs are not extinct. The colorful and successful diversity of the living birds is a continuing expression of basic dinosaur biology.
Dinosaur Renaissance

The Dinosaur Heresies

I do not be­lieve birds deserve to be put in a taxo­nomic class separate from dinosaurs.
Dinosaur Renaissance

Entrambi avevano furcule [altrimenti note come ossa dei desideri], covavano le uova, possedevano ossa cave ed erano ricoperti di piume. Se gli animali come Velociraptor fossero vivi al giorno d'oggi, la nostra prima impressione sarebbe semplicemente quella di uccelli dall'aspetto strano.
The more that we learn about these animals the more we find that there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors like velociraptor. Both have wishbones, brooded their nests, possess hollow bones, and were covered in feathers. If animals like velociraptor were alive today our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds.
Origine: Da Velociraptor had feathers http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070920145402.htm, ScienceDaily, 20 settembre 2007.

cap. XIII
Tredici miliardi di anni

The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs

The Superiority of Dinosaurs

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 reptiles, dinosaurs were cold-blooded and rather sluggish except perhaps for the smaller more bird-like examples. They all dragged their tails. Forelimbs were often sprawling. Leg muscles were slender in the reptilian manner. Intellectual capacity was minimal, as were social activity and parenting... Hadrosaurs and especially sauropods were dinosaurian hippos, the latter perhaps too titanic to even emerge on land, and if they did so were limited by their bulk to lifting one foot of the ground at a time. Suitable only for the lush, warm and sunny tropical climate that enveloped the world from pole to pole before the Cenozoic, a cooling climate and new mountain chains did the obsolete archosaurs in, leaving only the crocodilians. Dinosaurs and the bat-winged pterosaurs were merely an evolutionary interlude, a period of geo-biological stasis before things got really interesting with the rise of the energetic and quick witted birds and especially mammals, leading with inexorable progress to the apex of natural selection: Man. It was pretty much all wrong. Deep down I sensed something was not quite right. Illustrating dinosaurs I found them to be much more reminiscent of birds and mammals than of the reptiles they were supposed to be. I was primed for a new view.
Autobiography

Origine: Dalla trasmissione televisiva Il Pianeta dei Dinosauri, episodio 1: I primi dinosauri, Rai 1, 1993.