Quotes About Fossils

We are concerned that, in a few years time, this place of discovery, with its wealth of human fossils, the like of which can be found nowhere else in the world, could be completely destroyed.

I'll bet you a six-pack of Coors that pretty soon, people will be discovering Cretaceous parasites inside Cretaceous bones. The possibility of looking into epidemiology and pathology is pretty cool.

We have fossils... We win!

In 1935, Faber & Faber published an anthology entitled 'My Best Western Story' in which the genre's leading practitioners contributed what they considered their finest. Alas, literature the stories ain't; they appear more like fossils from a spent mine.

The fossil record is incredible when it preserves things, but it's not a complete record.

Australopithecus.

Bones and rocks are eloquent storytellers, if you know how to listen to them.

We cannot take one step in geology without drawing upon the fathomless stores of by-gone time.

Geology differs as widely from cosmogony, as speculations concerning the creation of man differ from history.

Now, evolution is the substance of fossils hoped for, the evidence of links not seen.

When the first fossils began to be found in eastern Africa, in the late 1950s, I thought, what a wonderful marriage this was, biology and anthropology. I was around 16 years old when I made this particular choice of academic pursuit.

I grew up loving dinosaurs, digging up things.

I'm trying to figure out the biology of dinosaurs and what they were like as living creatures.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a palaeontologist. I wanted to dig up dinosaurs.

Teeth actually turn out to be one of a couple of good sources of ancient DNA. The teeth, actually the enamel, is quite good at preserving the DNA, so it is a bit of time capsule so to speak.

The appearance of the bones of quadrupeds, especially those of complete bodies in the strata, tells us either that the layer itself which carries them was in earlier times dry land or that dry land was at least formed in the immediate area.

Who knew that the devil had a factory where he made millions of fossils, which his minions distributed throughout the earth, in order to confuse my tiny brain?

I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of of our fossils, radioactive at that.

The fossil record quietly accounts for me...

Now, evolution is the substance of fossils hoped for, the evidence of links not seen.

No amount of study of present forms [of life] would permit us to infer [the existence of] dinosaurs

Not to take this web of dualities as a sign we are on the right track would be a bit like believing that God put fossils into the rocks in order to mislead Darwin about the evolution of life.

Feathers predate birds.

I write in two very different places: my desk in Palo Alto, California, is piled high with myriad jumbled books and papers whose stratigraphy is a challenge. Summers in Bozeman, Montana, I write in a spare space, surrounded by interesting rocks and fossils instead of books, on an old oak table with nothing but my laptop.