Quotes from Richard Fortey

German professors of that time were like God, only more frightening.

Elso Sterrenberg Barghoorn Jr

Ralph Waldo Emerson could write (in The Conduct of Life, 1860): 'The influence of fine scenery, the presence of mountains, appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships.' Mountains

For the scientist the analytical process does not diminish the splendour of what he or she sees. Every detail added is an extra stanza added to a great epic poem, one that is never complete, nor yet ever tedious in its particulars

Thus with a swipe of flesh on stone we carry our vertebrate pedigree back 525 million years ... A silvery sliver of a thing took us away from trilobites and snail onto our own special path: one which led to land, to Tyrannosaurus Rex, and The New York Times.

History envelops the past in uncertainty, like the mist obscuring the beech trees in the valley below me. The deeper the history, the more the outlines blur, the more inferences about the past are subject to change.

Look into a crystal of Iceland spar and you can see the secret of the trilobite's vision. For trilobites used clear calcite crystals to make lenses in their eyes; in this they were unique.

There has been a revolution in our understanding over the last forty years, and the gains in knowledge are permanent. But we will never know everything, and that is as it should be. From the obscuring mist of the past, science has ensured that some of the mountains have emerged into clear view, but as soon as that happens the misty shadows of further peaks are glimpsed in the distance, rank upon rank: so many other heights to climb, so many mysteries to investigate.

It is a sad fact that to many people the loss of a plant species is of less moment than the loss of a football match. I hate the thought that the only record of a beautiful plant might yet be the grave of the herbarium sheet.

I recall the words of Charles Darwin in his Autobiography. 'I rejoice that I have avoided controversies, and this I owe to Charles Lyell,* who…strongly advised me never to get entangled in a controversy, as it rarely did any good and caused a miserable loss of time and temper.

I doubt whether there would be many readers for a post-holocaust novel that was concerned with the hero's desperate search for a mite. But alas for the world if the mites and their diminutive allies failed to prosper!

Every new discovery about the genome is consistent with evolution having happened. Whether we find it appealing or not is another question, but personally I like being fourth cousin to a mushroom and having a bonobo as my closest living relative. It makes me feel a real part of the world.

Not that I subscribe to the utilitarian view that plants are only good for what we can get out of them—it should be enough to add another beautiful (or even plain) item to nature's inventory. We need to know what there is in the world for us to look after, regardless of its potential use.

Trilobites survived for a total of three hundred million years, almost the whole duration of the Palaeozoic era:

Tinamous are almost certainly the most primitive living birds.

The fossil bird Archaeopteryx is late Jurassic in age (146 million years old) so a thread of descent must connect the tinamou

And there is an earlier Wilson cycle, too, a billion years old, entrapped alongside the Appalachians: the Grenville, which rises to the surface in Central Park, New York, to remind us that the human and urban is no more than foam on the sea of the past.

A life accumulates a collection: of people, work and perplexities. We are all our own curators.

You must not lie about trilobites, nor yet about time.