Quotes About Fossils

Sooner or later the Curse of the Cult blights every group that sets out to attain the heights. They close the circle, form a tight little mutual-admiration society, deify their leader (especially after the leader is dead), despise nonmembers as uninitiated barbarians, flatter themselves that they alone hold "the keys of the kingdom," and turn into spiritual fossils while deluding themselves into thinking that they are High Initiates.

Scientists are supposed to be dispassionate, cool-headed, and unemotional when they evaluate their data. But it's hard for me to avoid a sense of awe when I'm hunting fossils.

Geology shows that fossils are of different ages. Paleontology shows a fossil sequence, the list of species represented changes through time. Taxonomy shows biological relationships among species. Evolution is the explanation that threads it all together. Creationism is the practice of squeezing one's eyes shut and wailing "Does not!"

To discover fossils, he told himself, was to reclaim answers to important questions.

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.

The ultimate issue for the evolutionist is not bones, fossils, and strata--it's GOD. Rejection of God and our accountability to Him is foundational to evolutionist thinking. The rejection of God comes first, and THEN comes the interpretation of the date.

Fossils have richer stories to tell - about the lub-dub of dinosaur life - than we have been willing to listen to.

brachiosaurus weighed about 77 tons, which is about 154 thousand pounds.

Sentiment and brutality, never one without the other, like fossils and oil.

In early times, before the floods swept across the world, there was life, albeit odd, as one can see from the fossils of mammoth bones, and there was the regime of Prince Metternich.

Dinosaurs replace their teeth throughout their life. And T. rex replaced all of their teeth every year.

In the future, I'd like to see paleontology as a whole get a lot more quantitative.

It's not bad at all, getting a Nobel and making so many old fossils explode with rage.

I grew up in Los Angeles, and I was always fascinated by the La Brea Tar Pits. Right in the middle of the city, in an area called the Miracle Mile, for crying out loud, we have these eldritch ponds of dark, bubbling goo. And down in the muck, there're all these amazing fossils: mammoth and saber tooth cat and dire wolf.

My object will be, first, to show by what connections the history of the fossil bones of land animals is linked to the theory of the earth and why they have a particular importance in this respect.

Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe.

Dinosaurs are the jumper cables to the human mind. Kids can't curb their enthusiasm when they're in a hall of dinosaurs and mammoths and mammoth hunters and trilobites and giant fish that could chomp up a shark. These natural objects in motion and context make kids want to read; you can't stop them from reading and thinking.

I would hazard a guess that we have found fossilized human remains of at least a thousand different specimens in South and East Africa, more or less complete at that. I think this is where the prelude to human history was primarily played out.

Periods in the wilderness or desert were not lost time. You might find life, wildflowers, fossils, sources of water. I wish there were shortcuts to wisdom and self-knowledge: cuter abysses or three-day spa wilderness experiences. Sadly, it doesn't work that way. I so resent this.

Periods in the wilderness or desert were not lost time. You might find life, wildflowers, fossils, sources of water.

amphibian fossils are so rare.

Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier

The teeth had roots the length of a human hand, and each one weighed nearly ten pounds.

They were presented to Louis XV, who installed them in his museum, the Cabinet du Roi. Decades later, maps of the Ohio River valley were still largely blank, except for the Endroit où on a trouvé des os d'Éléphant—the "place where the elephant bones were found." (Today the "place where the elephant bones were found" is a state park in Kentucky known as Big Bone Lick.) Longueuil's bones confounded everyone who examined them.