Quotes About History

The history of life thus consists of 'long periods of boredom interrupted occasionally by panic.

might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it's not clear that he ever really did.

hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.

amphibian fossils are so rare.

useful mnemonic for remembering the geologic periods of the last half-billion years is: Camels Often Sit Down Carefully, Perhaps Their Joints Creak (Cambrian-Ordovician-Silurian-Devonian-Carboniferous-Permian-Triassic-Jurassic-Cretaceous). The mnemonic unfortunately runs out before the most recent periods: the Paleogene, the Neogene, and the current Quaternary.

Any event that has occurred just five times since the first animal with a backbone appeared, some five hundred million years ago, must qualify as exceedingly rare.

higher than at any other point in the last eight hundred thousand years.

In New England, 1816 became known as the "year without a summer" or "eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death.

This is the case even though a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.

Walter [Alvarez] dubbed the formation the "Crater of Doom." It became more widely known, after the nearest town, as the Chicxulub crater.

Chicxulub crater.

all that we consider to be the great works of man - the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories - will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.

Among the many lessons that merge from the geologic record, perhaps the most sobering is that in life, as in mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Beginnings, it's said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago.

los neandertales siguieron el destino del Megatherium, el mastodonte americano, y de tantos otros desafortunados miembros de la megafauna. En otras palabras, tal como me lo expresó un investigador, «su mala suerte fuimos nosotros».

Beginnings, it's said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago. The species does not yet have a name—nothing

No creature has ever altered life on the planet in this way before

Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they're put in their own category: the so-called Big Five.

In Cuvier's day, the most prominent proponent of transformisme was his senior colleague at the Museum of Natural History, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. According to Lamarck, there was a force—the "power of life"—that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.

This is the Mona Lisa of paleontology.

Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen. —JORGE LUIS BORGES

since the Antarctic palms of the Eocene, some fifty million years ago.

a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man -- the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories -- will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.

Its demise was part of a wave of disappearances that has come to be known as the megafauna extinction. This wave coincided with the spread of modern humans and, increasingly, is understood to have been a result of it. In this sense, the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us.